Entrained

The three am goods train seemed to pass hard against the house this morning, the gap between a kind of funnel that sucked the roar directly through the walls. Everything was child’s scale: the leaping side of the passing beast, the funnel of the street, the vulnerable house. Adding to the helplessness were the detonations. (Surely Arthur can’t be right about the warnings to the workmen up the line. It seems it is only the train in the middle of the night that carries that accompaniment.)

Following fuller wakefulness, another industrial-like blast a little distance off. Escaping steam it might have been. 

With the repetition it was clear it was the possum in a kind of undertone, snorting a casual warning, or mating was it? This was far from the fierce, hellish battle-cry that we have become used to through the summer. And no clambering recently, either along the side of the house or over the roof.

Last night for an earlier train the diesel hung heavy in the air a long while after it had passed. Sometimes on a Sunday the steam engine still comes by. 

Heavily loaded wagons rocking over the sleepers make the glass in the windows vibrate on that side of the house. The train to Adelaide is sometimes shunted through Newport and passes. 

Interesting to note, guests in the house settle to the ruckus after even a single night. We have more or less domesticated our train.

Years ago Neda from around in the next street threw herself under the wheels, as Babi too had thought to do once or twice back in the early days.