I’d been in Norwich close to four weeks: long enough to ask my new friend Steve if I could pretty-please borrow his bike for the day. My other new friend Joe had mentioned Drayton and Reepham, so that’s what I fed into Google Maps. Joe was supposed to be with me, but he’d partied a bit too hard the night before. What takes you to Drayton and Reepham from Norwich, it turns out, is a pathway that used to be a trainline, Marriott’s way. William Marriott founded the line in 1893 and went on to run it for four decades. It’s called the M&GN trainline. Depending on your level of sarcasm, M&GN stands for ‘Midland & Great Northern’ or ‘Muddle & Go Nowhere’.

I love trains.

I like how they don’t mess about with traffic.

How they cut through the landscape obeying their own logic.

I don’t feel like they muddle at all, even if they go nowhere.

I sent Steve’s bike down Marriott’s Way.

One of my dad’s first jobs was laying track for the Belgian national railway company. My dad didn’t finish high school, so he must have been about 17 when he started. Till then he’d been delivering telegrams for the Belgian telegraph and phone company for about a year. He got into the railways through an acquaintance. He didn’t enjoy laying track, it was hard work, but the Belgian railways were a great employer to land if you didn’t have much schooling. You could take internal exams and work your way up to ticket inspector, then train conductor, which is exactly what he did. He took his early retirement at 57, right before they abolished it. He has a comfortable pension now that he seems to be enjoying. Once a month he goes for a walk in nature with some of his former colleagues.

I’d come to Norwich for a residency, to work on a novel about social class. It’s a book all about mothers and mother tongues. Fathers are mostly absent from it. I’m the first person in our family who gets to do this: sit down on a chair all day exploring pathways in my mind. Be ‘creative’ for a living. Muddle, if I must. Go nowhere. That’s what the university degree is for. Both my parents are from a working-class background, but they’re also from a generation that was able to save up. Universities being subsidized in Belgium, I could surf through four years of study without even having to take a job other than in summer.

I found out about this thing called university through a schoolteacher. If it was on my parents’ radar, they never mentioned it. They didn’t expect my brother and me to get good grades, either. All that mattered was we pass our exams. This mattered a lot, though. Do your best in school so you won’t have to work in the factory. Neither of my parents ever worked in a factory, but where I grew up this is what adults tell children. It’s the most they ever tell them in terms of self-development and expectations for the future. Get a desk job. The work is lighter, the hours are better, and so is the pay—it’s a no-brainer. Sometimes my parents would warn my brother and me about the factory in a way that was louder and angrier than the situation called for. They’d bark or spit it when no one was failing any exams or seemed like they were about to. Their anger was ill-timed. I used to think it came too early. That they were anticipating my brother’s and my failure. I didn’t understand why they didn’t believe in us. Now I think it came too late. It came late by one generation at least. They didn’t work in the factory, but some of their parents did, and some of their parents’ parents, and if it wasn’t in a factory, they held other menial, physically taxing, sometimes degrading jobs. My parents’ anger was misplaced. But it’s hard to call something misplaced if it’s inscribed in the very cells of people’s bodies, as we now know trauma to be, both our own and that of previous generations.

I cycled in the green bed of Marriott’s Way. It was a sunny day. I stopped by a river. There was a rope for kids to swing off of. I threw a stick. There was a swan upstream. It was the end of April. The leaves on the trees were new and bright. All along the path were signs with information about the trainline’s history. Officially the east-west M&GN Line was created to complement the north-south line run by the Great Eastern Railway, the difference being that the M&GN Line didn’t really connect anything major to anything major for any particularly good reason. It was so unprofitable that it went bankrupt before the great 1960s railway rationaliser Richard Beeching could get his hands on it. Joe’s last-minute cancellation had annoyed me at first, but in the end I was happy to cycle alone. I got a chance to read the signs and pay attention to the skies and the fields and the ground and the wheels. Memories could come up. Memories of my dad. Nice ones. I could feel sadness, gratitude, closeness. I cycled past one abandoned railway station after another.

When I was little, whenever a train zipped past, my mom would say ‘That’s your daddy there!’ and we’d wave at it. In Belgium most clouds you see are cut across by overhead lines. Trains zip past a lot. Boy, did I wave. I waved with everything I had. I always wanted my dad closer. I wanted a gentle physical closeness that he himself, like most from his background, had never experienced and was unable to give. It wasn’t so much that, to my little mind, every train that went past contained my dad. More simply, every train was my dad. It still is to my grown mind. I still wave at every train I see. To this day, taking the train is the closest I get to being hugged by my dad. I love taking the train.

Whenever I took a break, the black plastic of the handlebars would warm with the sun. It felt nice laying my hands to it when I continued down Marriott’s Way. In Brussels where I live, I do most things by bike. In the year leading up to the Norwich residency I’d been enjoying that more than usually because I was able to feel things. I could feel my muscles contract and relax. I felt the pedals through my soles. Fence posts whipped past softly as the wheels worked the air. As the tiniest bits of gravel found the grooves in my tires and were released again, they made a sound, and all sounds together made a track. I’d make a slight movement with my right hand alone and the whole beast of my bike would react. I’d feel it swerve. I’m quite good at cycling, as it turns out. I know how much force to apply. I know how to balance weight. I manoeuvre and anticipate and enjoy working with the space and its unforeseens, its moving parts. It’s nice to feel your body do something well. To feel it has a mastery independently from your mind. You could try controlling it, but it wouldn’t help. Quite the opposite.

I have a tendency to want to control things. I like to retreat into my mind and pretend I don’t have a body at all. I seem to think my mind is where safety is. If I was able to feel my body cycling, it was thanks to three months spent at an excellent psychiatric program in a hospital on the outskirts of Brussels. Before those three months I hadn’t really noticed how many things don’t go as planned. Nice things. How many of them escape the mind’s control. I hadn’t noticed that’s where much of life flows. In and through the body. I didn’t know the body could also be that. That it could be trusted. I think the psychiatric program was excellent because it focused on the body.

It’ s true what they say about riding a bike.

You don’t unlearn, it’s muscle memory.

Because he worked in shifts and was often home during the daytime, my dad cooked many meals for my brother and me. My parents were right: I was a lucky, well-fed child who hadn’t been hungry a day in their life. Neither had my parents, to my knowledge, but it was another thing adults told children where I grew up. On Wednesdays my brother and me got more than food. There was a market in our town on Wednesdays. My dad would go there if he wasn’t working and buy a roasted chicken. He’d make rice with spinach on the side, which he’d sculpt into volcanoes on our plates. He’d carve a hole in the middle. The chicken grease was lava. On Wednesdays we didn’t just get food. We got hot, boiling, lava-like love. It’s improved a lot with time, but acts of kindness made me cry well into adulthood. When I first heard the term ‘skin hunger,’ I understood it intuitively.

Otherwise without clear purpose, the M&GN trainline can give you the impression that it was created just so William Marriott could be its benevolent director. He personally oversaw much of the construction and made a point of paying the workers more than they made elsewhere. Apprentices took classes in reading, writing, and arithmetic in the company’s time. When the rural stations began to spring up out of nowhere, he led by example and moved to one of them. It would seem William Marriott loved his Bible. It would seem he was committed to creating a more rounded workforce. He would be a good father to all his children alike.

He doesn’t know how to hug, but my dad puts his body to work for me every chance he gets. I’ve lost count of the times he’s helped me move house. I have to tell him not to carry so much, he’d break his back. I’ve always known my dad doing sports. He used to do triathlons. He still cycles, though not in clubs anymore. He says he’s not as fast as he used to be. I think my dad likes his body fast, tough, powerful, reliable. The last time I moved house, I found a note he wrote by hand when I unpacked one of the book-filled boxes. The note said when he’d be back, where I could find a plate of food. It addressed me rhyming as ‘Soof de filosoof’, ‘Soof’ being short for ‘Sofie’, which used to be my name, and me being a philosopher, I suppose, because I was always reading books. I did get into philosophy proper as a teen, and considered studying it at university, but my parents said no in the same way they’d told me not to study Latin at the end of primary school. Latin was a dead language: there was no point. At university I studied living languages because they always need people who know languages. ‘They’ are the bosses with desk jobs on offer.

The boxes of books are what make me feel most guilty when my dad helps me move.

There are so many of them.

They’re all so heavy.

I remember a day my dad took me to work with him. We spent all afternoon riding trains. He let me play with the blue tracing paper train conductors used back then. It was wonderful, except at every station, he left me alone at the little table. He didn’t tell me where he was going. I tried to locate him through the window. Sometimes I could. I’d find him on the platform, but he always disappeared again. I’d see people get on the train, calmly first, then more hurriedly—the train was about to leave. I didn’t want the tracing paper anymore. I wanted my dad. If he did a round of ticket inspection, it could take up to fifteen minutes before he’d materialize at the little table again. Where I grew up people aren’t big on words. They use them very sparingly. They’re wary of educated people who talk too much. Things don’t need explaining; they need doing. My dad hadn’t explained to me how his job works. That the whole reason the conductor gets out at each station is to make sure everyone gets on board safely. It was him giving that signal to the driver. Him and no one else. My own dad. I was the safest kid on that train.