tender is the night train

a portal powered by dreams

I wake to a Marseille sunrise, shivers of gold on the pale stone buildings and streaked across the sky towards rocky mountains. Boulangeries and fruit markets are setting out baguettes and ripe peaches: they are opening up for the early morning trade but the red roofed houses keep their green shutters closed against the rising sun. The train pulls in to the station, where a vibrant, hot pink mass of bougainvillea growing along the platform reminds me of a country I lived in long ago.

This train left Paris at the grey end of a long day, suburbs shuddering past as I pulled down the blind in the six berth couchette. I fell asleep in one city, I have woken up in another. Here, heat is latent in the landscape, thickening the crème caramel light.

Sleepy faces emerge from door after door along the corridor, blinking into the sun that flickers behind the mountain up ahead, a low, shimmering globe. We skip through stations, passing balconies, graffiti and a cemetery on the hillside

The train rushes into a tunnel and as the landscape disappears, my own pale face looks back at me from the window, tired eyes lit by the glow of my phone screen. When we fly back out under the sky I see—for the first time in decades—shining silver blue behind low olive trees, the Mediterranean.

All my boys are sleeping soundly. I want to hold them there, peaceful and still, I want to wake them up and say ‘look! look where we are!’ I feel the lure of the sea, the thrill of the new, the relief of escape.

Why do trains always make me think about time? Perhaps it’s because of my lined face, staring back at me from the window. But a night train is so much more than a mode of transport, it is a portal powered by dreams.

At the next station, I watch the young couple from the couchette next door disembark with a baby and collect their luggage on the platform. I sigh for my own babies, remembering a photograph of my eldest on his first trip to Paris at the same age: his halo of blond curls, his small white teeth, his blue eyes like cornflowers. My babies are now in their teens—so tall and so kind that they carry my bag without a thought as they guide me to the platform. They will be catching night trains alone in a year or two.

I think of the neon pink Tracey Emin artwork at St Pancras station, where we set off for our trip. Huge cursive words suspended from the station roof, bright as bougainvillea:

I want my time with you

Thank you for reading,

Laura