Norwich to Twickenham

1.
Norwich Station: red bricks, high ceilings. It’s too cold and airy to actually seem as if you’re ‘indoors’ in here. I’ve given myself half an hour before my train arrives.

Plenty of time.

I can feel the blood fleeing my hands where I grip my kit bag and drag my case. The handles are moist with the sweat from my hands. The bus was packed full, and I had to juggle my luggage on my knees like fat children. My laptop bag swings around like a rogue limb.

Still, I’m on the concourse with half an hour to spare. I have the time, and this is the place (I double-checked). Clearing my head and releasing the aching knots in my shoulders, I ponder my next move. My options are:

1) Collect my tickets from the machine.
2) Buy a coffee.

See, a coffee won’t get me back to London in any conventional sense, but then it might just give me everything I need to make it to the right platform without throwing myself in front of the next departing train. I need my caffeine.

But the masochist inside wills me to see if I can last another five minutes without my injection. Maybe the coffee will be a reward for successfully getting my ticket. Hooray for me, I might think, while killing my heart.

The reward idea appeals. Taking up my bags, I walk to the machine. A message on the touch-screen tells me it’s out of order. I look to my right, and with a feeling of dread that comes instantly but feels protracted, like the onset of vomiting, I notice the queue for the other machine.

It’s colossal.

It’s so big that I must have barely perceived it, which in that sense makes it the only queue comparable to the sky. It stretches right the way around the concourse, gradually accumulating new faces, dead with despair. A woman in the queue, who must have been watching my own confused countenance and waiting for the penny to drop, calls over to me:

‘This is the only machine working in the station love; it’s a bloody disgrace ainnit?’

In the entire fucking station.

I eventually get to about halfway through the queue when the giant clock above the entrance reminds me how little time there is until the 12.30 train.

To take my mind off it, I picture my homecoming. Twickenham unfolds in endless rows of identical semis and arterial A-roads, wrappers rolling in the wind-wake left by passing cars. Above the roof-scape I see the orange street lit towers of the Ivybridge Estate, and the massive, squat frame of the rugby stadium. I will walk down my road past the battered bus stop and the Stone Mason’s hall. I will turn the key. I will see my dog, I will make a cup of blissful beige tea and watch the match and…

And suddenly I’m being kicked full force in the knee.

I’m startled to see that the person kicking me is a man at the grey end of middle age, laughing in a shining blue anorak and a baseball cap. How did he manage to kick me so hard? I think about saying something, but then a young, worried looking woman grabs him by the shoulders.

‘So sorry about that’ she says to me. I burble that it’s fine. ‘You mustn’t do that, Arthur’ she says, turning to the old man. She leads him by the hand to the end of the queue, and as she does it, she gives me one last apologetic smile, which compounds my feeling: I am a bastard. I am a bastard for ever considering any sort of rant or retaliation. But Christ does my knee hurt.

The queue limps along, out of time with the clock. I kick my bags forward. I see some people, similarly encumbered, behind me in the queue, and I smile that I’m not one of them.

I get to the front of the queue with five minutes to spare, and pull out my booking reference notice. I excitedly jab the touch screen a few times before I realise…

The scrap of paper on my hand, the only scrap I have, is not my booking reference notice.

It’s a list of things to remember.

And marked on it, number three on the list, are the words ‘booking reference notice’.

2.
The train: green field after green field rushes past behind the ghost of my window reflection. I’m travelling on a later train with a ticket I had to re-purchase, sold at a price I had to argue down.

Still, this is the train. The only task I’m left with is to get off at the right station. Until then, the train does the work. It’s out of my hands.

The atmosphere inside the carriage is hypnotic. The quiet bubbling of conversation, the steady beat of the wheels and the yellow tinge of the lights – I sink into it all like a bath. A woman in the seat in front of me is clutching a large bouquet of flowers. I wonder who gave them to her, or who they’re for. At a table next to me are two kids, maybe 16, boyfriend and girlfriend. The girl is plump, wearing a black ‘Billy Talent’ T-shirt and has pink blotches on her forearms. Her boyfriend is dressed in a waistcoat and shirt. He has sideburns, and the upward-slung jaw of a piranha. I spy on their conversations and I glean that they went to see ‘You Me at Six’ in Norwich, and stayed together in a hotel. I bet their parents bought them separate rooms. Still, I bet they had sex, and I bet it was awkward.

After contemplating this for an uncomfortable length of time, I realise I haven’t yet rewarded myself in the way I promised: an invigorating, enriching, heartening cup of coffee. I immediately start the shaky walk to the café car and spend £2 on a cup.

So here I am, on the right train, to the right place, with a cup of coffee in my hand. Time for some tips:

1) When you’re on a moving train, try moving very fast in the direction opposite that in which the train is travelling. It makes you feel like you’re playing with the laws of space and time. I am convinced that if you could move fast enough, and had a train long enough, you could reach a point when you and the train are moving at the same rate, and you are effectively covering no ground in any direction. Imagine the forces involved.
2) Don’t do this when holding a coffee.

A stray elbow catches me and knocks me off the course of my quest through physics, and sends coffee splashing rudely down my chin and shirt. Droplets spin to the floor. I make my way back to my seat at a sensible pace, nurturing what’s left of my cup.

Back in my seat, coffee in hand, the favourite part of my trip begins: the approach to Manningtree station. I watch the view. It starts with warehouses, crippled and abandoned. Every window has been smashed. The warehouses frame construction yards filled with pile after pile of splintered frames, dead machinery. A solitary figure walks among the mounds, poking at them with a stick. Arched above the scene are the skeletal figures of construction cranes, towers. Everything is rusted, everything is faded. This landscape gives way to a flat expanse of water. The sun picks out gold flashes amongst its browns and greys, and the bows of small, broken boats crest above its surface. Across the water is Manningtree. A church spire rises against the sky; the houses seem clustered in an almost random fashion over a hill, and around the waters edge.

The train rolls into the station, and a man is standing at the platform, mystifyingly, with a pint in each hand.

It’s beautiful, to me.

3.
I heave myself and my caravan of bags off the train at Stratford, and trip my way around the station to the Jubilee line. Going through any ticket barrier presents a challenge to me and my collective of bags. I have to both toss them ahead of me and dart through the gate before it shuts on me and shatters my ribcage, or dive through hoping I’m fast enough to avoid my bag being trapped by the pincer-like movement of the barrier’s panels. Anyway, that’s only once I have my oyster card out. You know they say it’s always in the last place you look? Well it’s actually always in the first place you’ve looked, the third time you checked there.

Still, the tube is kind and I step aboard with ten minutes to go before it leaves for Waterloo. I make a little fort out of my bags at one end of the carriage and switch on my ipod. Jackson Browne starts asking me not to confront him with his failures, which I think is a bit rich coming from someone who was writing songs for ‘The Eagles’ when he was 18.

I can feel the tube hum into life beneath me. I can sense the roughness of the seat’s upholstery, and the smoother, colder spots where gum has been mashed into the fronds of the fabric.

I’m startled into full consciousness again when the carriage fills with schoolchildren. They come in shrieking and babbling, flinging themselves into seats and swinging around the poles. They must be primary. The teachers usher them aboard with concerned expressions, grabbing them by their rucksacks. The children instinctively keep their distance from me, the unkempt, unshaved, sweating man with his hood up and a skid mark of coffee down his shirt.

‘Stay away children.’ I think I hear a teacher say, looking at me.

Thank fuck.

At Waterloo I hump my baggage up several flights of immobilized escalators like a crippled Sherpa. People avoid my swinging bags like a bear’s paws: one swipe from them and you’re out. I shunt my cargo through a crowd of irate businessmen in pinstripes to the Station’s main hall. I don’t even have time to give my wrists and shoulders a rest before my train flashes up on the massive departure board. I shuffle towards the barrier, which I successfully negotiate without giving any nearby children brain damage. I collapse on just the right side of the train doors.

My train, homeward bound.

I settle myself. It’s raining heavily outside. I watch as MI6 and MI5 fly past the window. A pre-recorded female voice calls out the stations in a calm, neutral voice. Everyone in the carriage bobs their heads in unison.

At Putney a young couple get on board and sit facing towards me. The woman has white teeth and is hiding under so many layers of fake tan that her skin has turned to an arresting shade of terracotta. The man has the pinkish, boneless face of an overgrown infant. When he smiles he reveals a single gold-capped incisor, which scares me. All his clothes are highly branded. I note them all while pretending to read my book (Flat cap - Lacoste. Polo shirt - Hugo Boss. Jeans -Unknown, but fashionable, I think. Trainers – Nike, perfectly white.) They start kissing lustily in front of me, and my mind can’t cope with the distraction. It’s getting no easier to pretend to read my book. They only stop when the ticket inspector calls.

Dressed in a dark blue coat with a red stripe, he approves their tickets and turns to me. I start to rummage around for it. You know they say it’s always in the last place you look? That’s not always true. Sometimes it’s never anywhere you look, because you never find it.

I look at him. There’s a family of hairs making their way from one of his eyebrows to the other.

‘I’m sorry, I lost my ticket.’

He raises his eyebrows but doesn’t look at me.

‘Well that’s no good is it?’

Obviously not.

‘Well, I’m sorry but that’s going to be a £20 fine for fare evasion. I’ve got to do it, I’m afraid.’

I’m too tired to argue. I hand him a crumpled note, close my eyes and sink into my nest of luggage, listening to the couple opposite kiss while the train announces the stops to Twickenham.

4.
The rain beats down hard outside Twickenham Station. I take in the familiar landmarks of my walk home. The post office depot, the newsagent on the Y-junction, the brown river filled with discarded shopping trolleys, bollards. They all seem somehow fresh to me. They’re different, now that I’ve been away from them.

My case makes a roaring sound as I roll it down the street. My laptop bag batters the wall as I walk. I don’t even feel the rain.

I see the battered bus stop. Little hailstones of glass are scattered across the pavement from where its glass has shattered. I smile as I hear them crunch beneath the wheels of my case. The rain gets heavier. I hear it in the sound, like turning the volume up on radio static.

I fumble at my front gate; it’s easier than the ticket barriers at least. I slot my key into the lock and immediately hear my Dog barking on the other side of the door. Before I can turn the key it all begins to flash in front of me, the cup of tea, the dog, the match, the warmth.

I think I realise, just for now, why the journeys home are the longest.