Board a District line train
carriage; I don’t necessarily travel much on these. I usually go Northern or
Overground myself, each of the tubes distinct for the different stand-alone
marauding characters encapsulated and throttling through tunnels. People squeeze and sniffle and look around
them like birds with beaks and specks for eyes, fluffing out and patting down
their briefcases, coats and preening scarfs. Remember where you’re going. Oh, I
had a sweet thought: back to a warm yellow homestead with white slats for
blinds and central heating – the yellow of the walls are of hay bails.
One beautiful frosty
fox-like woman in white coat and collar stands and sways with the carriage,
arms folded in to the velvety flaps of a male-sized coat, sporting a male-sized
man, with big nose and jawline, affably babbling statements loaded with non
sequiturs. Guffaws of laughter and everyone stares down through the ground and
bores holes in the floor and makes time creak. Foxy smiles with glazed over eyes
staring at me and the fellow passengers who make her feel glamorous (surely she
don’t need it) she smells a million dollars. He’s such arm candy, such a silly
money monkey.
The river in London pulses,
it heaves itself up on to the banks and slushes past the Thames Path sploshing
and gulping along. Sometimes at sunset it decides to spread out thinly like a
veil, like mud can be elegant, whilst tyre-filled boats bob up and down playing
above its navel. The tubes make me sick a bit, garish green juxtaposed with
abhorrent orange LEDs, the clatter of metal against metal against railway
track, time seeping whilst under-Thames and damp. Cicadas. That’s the sound of
the prolonged meeeeeen meeeeeeeeen
that you deliciously want to hear to transport you away from this metallic noise
and glare.
