Tube (Part 1 of 2)

London had Graham on high alert. Everything usually mundane was laced with intimidation: cycle lanes, franchised chicken shops, footpaths under railway bridges. Graham spent his life paying for buses with loose change and even that wasn’t allowed here. He didn’t understand the rules. What made it worse was the way in which everyone around him seemed to operate with some preordained knowledge of the system and somehow he was the only luddite that still bought a hardcopy ticket for the tube and baulked at the idea of paying four pounds for a blueberry muffin. This was not his world but today it was his to conquer.

He munched begrudgingly on the muffin he’d bought from the Upper Crust on the concourse at St Pancras. From somewhere across the station he could hear the sound of an attention seeker at one of those unnecessary public pianos. He’d just come  in on the 8.40 train from Derby and there’d been not the whiff  of a food trolley the whole journey down. He was starving and he regretted not bringing sandwiches from home. 

He studied the tube map and pinched the last crumbs of the muffin together, popped them in his mouth and did his best to look casual in the process. Picaddily line to Leicester Square - that’s what the app told him. It seemed simple enough and Graham wasn’t an idiot - he grasped the concept of the map. He found St Pancras and followed the deep blue line along it’s snaking course until he reached the little white circle representing Leicester Square. A woman appeared next to him and studied the map with an unobscured view yet Graham instinctively apologised and moved several inches to the left. She looked at him and gave an embarrassed half-smile before leaning in with a squint to inspect the map more closely.

He bought a ticket from the machine. He was not about to recklessly slap his debit card on the gate with no clue as to the charge. Human traffic flowed around him. Rush hour, Graham thought. It was 10.30 and ‘rush hour’ was definitely over but any crowd over fifty qualified as such in Graham’s humble opinion. Polished Oxfords and pointed heels slapped the grubby station floor and Graham felt sorry for the people forced to do this everyday. They all looked the same, these apparatchiks. If it wasn’t for the rolling clamour of the busy station you’d hear the beep boop of the transmitter built into the mainframe of everyone one of these faceless office drones. 

Approaching the gate, his bum clenched a little. The relentless open - shut - open - shut of the barriers was like the chomping jaw of a herculean beast, devouring each willing morsel one oyster card at a time. And they were throwing themselves gladly down it’s throat. The most orderly gullet in the world. Please stand to the right as you’re swallowed whole. 

The leering faces of soap stars in pantomime drag grinned down from posters on the wall. The new bestseller from Ian Rankin was described as a tour de force in suspense and Graham entertained the idea of reading it even though he definitely wouldn’t. The escalator took him further down, not so much into the belly of the beast but it’s intestines; it’s sprawling tubes. The warm, stale air blew on his face. He brushed his shoe along the bristles at the base of the escalator and considered what chaotic lives people must lead if racing down the left-hand side of a moving staircase had that much of a bearing on their schedule. Graham didn’t think much of people who flew by the seat of their pants. He checked his watch. He had an abundance of time.

Last month he’d bought two tickets to a matinee showing of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s latest production of Cymbeline. It sounded sophisticated and cultural and was bought as a birthday present for Grace. She often bemoaned the fact that she was a high-school English teacher who’d never seen any of Shakespeare’s work on the stage. Graham lamented the fact she referred to her own place of work as a ‘high-school’ but said nothing because he agreed with the general sentiment that it was a poor effort on her part to have seen no live performances. Not that he was a Shakespeare aficionado himself. Most of his education on the subject had occurred fortuitously in that Film 4 happened to be running a Kenneth Branagh season the same week he was bed-ridden recovering from tonsilitis. But he was not an English teacher, it was not his job to know about such things, and therefore his knowledge was not open to the same level of scrutiny. 

Grace left him two weeks ago due to some inexplicable, premature mid-life crisis. She packed her bag and left to spend the summer holiday working on a llama farm in Andalucia with a man called Devon and his pet Alsatian, Nebuchadnezzar. But Graham had already booked the time off work for this trip and it would’ve been a shame to waste a ticket. He ceremonially burned the other.     

Dwelling on the inconsistency of Devon’s pseudo-Bohemian world philosophy - as Grace had thought necessary to share during their breakup brunch - proved distracting enough for Graham to not realise that he was striding confidently down the wrong side of the barrier towards the platform. By the time he noticed, it was too late. He was met with a throng of people stomping towards destinations unknown and he was trapped on the far side of the tunnel, where the walls curved outwards. He had the look in his eye of a pheasant that miscalculated the speed of an approaching car. How’d he end up here? It was like a pedestrianised dual-carriageway and he was the geriatric nutter driving the wrong way down it. 

A woman typing furiously into her phone bumped shoulders with his’ and threw him a filthy look. He could feel the awkwardness rising - the socially reprehensible state of affairs. He felt like a fool. Graham realised he was going to have to make a break for the other side, fast. There was a gap in the railing about ten feet ahead if he could only…

But his passage to safety was blocked by a six foot behemoth in tight lycra wheeling his bike along quite obliviously. The wheel went over Graham’s foot without the faintest hint of a sorry - or even acknowledgment - from the oaf. Putting your bike on another mode of transport, Graham thought, does not count as cycling to work. He thought about how the unassuming folk in the high-rise office of this great pretender probably thought he cycled in everyday and it annoyed him immeasurably. Well you’ve been rumbled here buddy, he muttered. Enjoy your cardiovascular problems with the rest of us.   

He missed the break and was forced to plough on, weaving through oncomers and muttering sorry under his breath over and over again. He glanced across to the other side of the barrier - the promised land. He pleaded for eye contact with someone that could help him. His fellow Piccadilly-ites - although he doubted they had ever been referred to as such. A second gap in the railings was fast approaching and Graham geared himself up for the risky maneuver. This was it. This was his chance. Carpe diem and all that. 

What was built in his head as the storming of the Winter Palace translated in reality as just about the most tepid course of decisive action ever undertaken, but Graham was thrilled and relieved all the same. He bloody made it! He looked around with a self-congratulating smile but the blank faces, well-worn by the commuter crowd, remained unchanged. Miserable bastards, he thought. It deflated his moment of triumph somewhat and he was left feeling, in his mind, how Bilbo felt when he returned from the Lonely Mountain and none of the Shirefolk gave a shit.

He neared the end of the tunnel and could hear the train pulling up at the station. As he bounced down the stairs, he scanned the northbound and southbound signs for Leicester Square, not confident enough in his local geography to just know these kinds of things. He wasn’t about to run for the train. If he missed it, he’d simply get the next. So by a near-imperceptible fraction he increased the speed of his walk. Bored eyes from inside the carriage watched him, no doubt secretly willing him to fail. But just as the beep of the doors began to chime he made a jaunty little skip into the carriage and the doors closed behind him. Graham looked around to see if anyone was impressed but was met with the familiar expressionless faces of the local tube-zombies. Too busy with their newspapers and their iPods and their crippling rent costs to care. He checked his watch. Despite the setback in the tunnel, he was making excellent time. At this rate he might even be early, which was exactly how he liked it. 

Graham surveyed the carriage. There was a bizarre Goth standing up by the far doors wearing sunglasses for no discernable reason. Everyone else was seated and there were three or four spaces still vacant. There was no reason for Graham not to sit down yet a little voice in the back of his head challenged him on the idea. He reasoned with this voice that there was no one else looking to make use of it. Yet, the voice clarified. But Graham overruled his own conscience and took a seat between a juiceless old fossil that could barely stay awake and a bodacious, arty-looking type with the skin of an anemic peach. Directly across from him, there was a boy with his hood up and headphones in. He looked around sixteen or seventeen. He was what the newspaper headlines might call the youth of today. The lad chewed a piece of gum with his mouth open and the tinny sound of a music genre Graham couldn’t name and didn’t appreciate was leaking from his headphones. It was the only sound in the carriage not being made by the train’s rhythmic rattling along the tracks.   

Graham wondered whether he looked as out-of-place as he felt. Could these Londoners sense it? Could they discern the smell of a small-town upbringing on his clothes or in the way he sat? He shifted slightly in his seat to look past the kid and at himself in the black mirror of the train window. He tried to see himself in situ but all he could pick out were the early signs of a second chin and an overdue haircut. He’d recently turned thirty-three but had a young face coupled with an old soul that meant people guessed his age as being anywhere between twenty-five and forty. 

His self-critique was interrupted by the kid as he mirrored Graham’s movement and blocked his view. He stared at Graham with mild curiosity and Graham grew uneasy. What did he want? Did he want his money? Perhaps his shoes? He told himself he was being ridiculous. The boy was hardly a tramp.  

The kid leaned forward in his seat and grinned. Graham considered what defensive strategies he’d deploy if he came for him. There was a real chance he could have a knife; a real chance that Graham could be the victim of a genuine, bonafide shanking. This was London, after all. Shank capital. He realised he had very little in the arsenal save for a simple grapple and lamented the fact he hadn’t gone to more of the Taekwondo sessions at the leisure centre in Swadlincote. Their silent standoff was broken by the train arriving at the next station. The kid leaned back in his chair and focused his attention on his phone. Graham thanked the blessing that was the modern obsession with technology. The tannoy-lady announced the station - Russell Square - and a handful of people stood up to leave. They were replaced by a fresh cohort, slightly larger in number. People get on, people get off and the world spins on, thought Graham. 

Amongst the new arrivals was a slick businessman that looked all sun tan, combed hair, and tax avoidance. He surveyed the carriage with its smattering of available seats and decided instead to stand slap bang in front of Graham. He set down his briefcase and shifted so that his crotch ended up at Graham’s eye level. He looked down and flashed that same half-smile worn by the lady at the map. The English mask of insincere politeness. Graham returned the smile.  No doubt you had a hand in the financial crash, he thought. The train jolted on the tracks and sent the businessman lurching, genitalia first, into Graham’s face. He put a hand up by way of an apology and Graham dismissed it with a nonchalant wave as if to say, no worries buddy. In his head he was coming to terms with the harrowing fact that he’d been on the tube less than ten minutes and had found himself harassed by hoodies and dry-humped by Branson.