The train line never changes, as the carriage chunters out of London Bridge the brown grey track intersect and deviate like the patterns of a bomb site. Drizzle filters down the outside of the window in interlocking random patterns, but nothing is random. Connex, Southeastern, Intercity the names are changing interchangeable but the halogen glow of the strip lighting remains the same. The two seats nearest the vestibule with a square handle for commuters to grab onto and squeeze, to keep themselves upright throughout the jolts. But the evening is calm as the light fades and I head down south. To the chasm beyond Bermondsey, to the open goal of property developers as snobbery dissipates in the face of the desperate scramble to join the march of the morning. To have the opportunity to squeeze that square plastic handle by the vestibule, to feel the jolt up your legs. This is what you have been missing.
The graffiti has been buffed numerous times, the brown uniform paint with the spiked arches of chrome jutting above the parapet of societal decency. They are trying to remind us that they are there. Reoh, Merk, Cosa, Teach, Drape,, Zombie, Vamp, Known where are you now? Beneath the frayed brickwork etched into the routine of those who passed this walls day in day out subjected to the monotony of the chunk chink in the rock rock the locomotive motiveless shuffle. Glaring in are the daubs of the lost, I imagine them dappled yellow beneath the fading streetlights. Brows pushed taught with perspiration, coke and MDMA rigid with concentration. Utterly fearless in their drug induced state. I’m still here, see me, incandescent territory marking free from virtue. They defy you but I cannot.
The train takes a hard jolt to the left but the velocity is greatly decreased due to the hour and the slight rain. I push my feet against the base of the frame of the chair in front of me and the base of my spine straightens against the vertex of the seat. My backstretches upwards unfurling but lacking the crick I so desperately crave. I turn my head to the right and behind the thigh of a commuter a woman’s face bobs in and out of view as if she were emerging from his scrotum. She is beautiful but the image is grotesque and I turn back towards the drizzle-veined window my mind full of twisted images, Hieronymus Bosch intertwined with a Next pencil skirt and photocopier spitting endless symbolism.
An increase in momentum as the vessel gathers speed, past the confines of the inner city flats. St George’s flags adorn the railings and abandoned plastic tri fixwheels scattered asunder, plastic mockeries of bicycles. Never a human being in sight, just the contested ideological banners, the red cross like a target. Flying away from the cross hairs leaving the wreckage behind, as far as New Cross where it starts all over again.
I am gold, I am silver and the rain is copper bearings beating in the plate glass. A day by day proliferation of patterns, a pin in the chaos map, as New Cross flitters by my window onward to the Island of St John’s, a temporary location at one time, a transient factor in the system that skews the final results. The strip lighting remains constant, as if it would flicker in the unending sameness but the hunk of flesh to my right has moved somewhat and the beautiful woman’s face comes back into view. A wide face with a curved nose swished across her features gracefully, a waterfall of mousy brown hair, conically spiralling about her shoulders. The tightness of her jacket pressed against her slight shoulders with the trails of two white bud headphones intertwining downwards between her breasts. Branded trail to perverse perusing I force my eyes away before I have stared too long. Force my eyes to the grey square of plastic in front of my face.
I am birthed onto Lewisham’s platform reluctantly slapping towards the exit in the stream of humans both joyless and hopeful that the pointlessness of their day will be cushioned by the pirouette of a television presenter pointing to perpendicular lines on the ceiling of a property in Putney. The endless quest to cement our footprint on the green and pleasant lands purity purveyed from your own personal square; the place that you call home.
