The similarity between his new life and his new job was so pointed that Jonathan remarks on it again and again in his diaries, half-intrigued, half-repelled by it. Choose your pin, step between the cars, set the pin in the link, cock it, signal the engineer. There’s silence for a moment. A hiss of steam. Then slowly, slowly the huge, immeasurably heavy wheels begin to turn. The cars inch together, touch, shudder – and the pin shakes into place. Often it didn’t work, though. Of course it didn’t. The slightest miscalculation and the man had to pound the pin in with his hammer; if his calculations were further off than the tolerances allowed – and all too often they were – and if he wasn’t fast enough getting out of the way, he got smashed between the cars or crushed beneath them. There were designs for universal couplers, lots of them, but they cost money. The romance of the railways (just like the romance of freedom), this will-o’-the-wisp of power all muddled up with death: this romance that College expressed so well to the delight of so many (many of whom had already died because of it and many more who would): this same romance refurbished the ranks of switchmen so fast that the railroad barons, at war with one another as we all love to be, were free to invest their huge fortunes elsewhere while wives of switchmen kept aside one special linen sheet, embroidered, clean, ironed, folded, ready at a moment’s notice to wrap up the mangled remains for burial.

At six o’clock the day’s work was over. College clapped Jonathan on the shoulder just as he had at the beginning of the day, with all the warmth of a long-lost brother, of a fellow professional discovered by accident in a desertland of amateurs, and arranged to meet him in a saloon for a drink after supper. And Jonathan, my grandfather, turned and ran across the railroad yard, jumping the tracks as he came to them.

3

The saloon was the Home Rule Bar, named for the Irish Republican movement – for home rule in Ireland – and so as Irish as everything else around the railroads. It was plainly a wicked place: night inside, even with the sun still shining in the streets – night inside because the windows were plastered over with Wanted posters. Jonathan’s heart fluttered in his chest. There were layer upon layer of Wanted posters on the windows, year after year of them. Why hadn’t he had the sense to call himself Kelly? or Brady? Anybody but Carrick, the murderer.

One of the modern-day hostages – one of the men held in Lebanon – wrote that the life of a hostage is a kind of quarter life; a hostage, like any prisoner, is a species of slave: ‘The mind forming and informing itself in patterns of maniacal exuberance and mind-wrenching despair: the hostage is a convoluted man, a man pushed so far and so deep into himself that he can do little but experience a kind of mental narcosis like a diver in rarefied air.’ Then comes release: the sudden freedom, the multiplicity of it, the dazzling, dizzying disorder of it. And when the maelstrom settles a little, when there’s time to draw in a breath, the ex-hostage finds himself left with what others who delve too deep are left with: this pretty but brittle surface of ours, cheap, artificial, irrelevant. What once fit – what once was life itself – no longer fits, could never be made to fit again. Normality becomes another kind of bondage.