Saturday 12 July 2014

Flakes On A Train



Sometimes, on a train, I see something that makes me think “N’aww. We’re all just in this together, huh?” Like when a girl was having a tearful barney with her boyfriend over the phone and a man walked past and gave her a fun-sized Milky Way.

At other times, on a train, I see something that makes me want to raise both hands up, surrender style, and say ‘You know what, I’m out -  I am DONE with people’.

This is about that second thing.

I get the same train to work nearly every day and on that train with me are other people who get that same train to work every day. My feelings towards most of the people on the train are on the pleasant side of indifference, but there are a few that would burn at the stake. A couple weeks ago, I added two more people to that list.

I was two stops into the journey and although I couldn’t see the doors, I knew that a ‘character’ had gotten on the train. The complete mentalists who like to stand beside the doors for the entire forty minute journey despite there being ample seating when they first board the train all began to shuffle around uncomfortably. One lady even walked down the aisle into the next carriage. I craned my neck and saw what all the fuss was about.

I saw a man wearing a Hard Rock Café T-shirt that had been through the wash too many times and a pair of bobbly jogging bottoms. He was carrying a carrier bag full of carrier bags and had those headphones with the foam on them over his ears. He was singing loudly and unintelligibly, despite the end of the headphones – the little plug in bit  (look, I don’t know all of the headphone terms, ok?) hanging freely by his stomach, not plugged in to anything. Not even a personal cassette player.

The atmosphere in the carriage tightened somewhat  - “Uh oh, we’ve got ourselves a real live crazy person here, guys’.

He made his way down the aisle to a seat that was a few in front of me. He didn’t smell great and everyone noticed, trying to find a way to make sitting with their hand over their nose and mouth look completely natural, whilst he clutched onto his train ticket with both hands and carried on singing.

On the seats directly across the aisle from him , pretty much next to him but for one a half feet of space, were two women. Office women. I mean, I know that most of us work in an office, but these were real office women. By that, I mean that they definitely work in the same office, have definitely bought the 5:2 diet book after Philip Schofield recommended it and they definitely both have a glasses case that looks like a little handbag, which they bought because they thought it was cute.
Woman A, let’s call her Julie, looked at Woman B, let’s call her Nicola (although, Julie probably calls her Nic) and wrinkled her nose whilst turning the corners of her mouth down. She grimaced. Julie did a grimace about that man who had just got on the train.
Nicola did a fake heave in response. A very loud fake heave.

The man in the Hard Rock Café t-shirt carried on singing and Julie and Nicola carried on giggling and smirking between themselves. After a while he looked right at them and stopped singing for a while after that.

I sat there watching with a lump in my throat – partly with anger and partly because the whole thing made me feel so sad that I felt like I might break down into that gasping kind of crying.

If you get trains regularly, you’ll have encountered a crazy person or two. Sometimes, they’ll be the sing/talk to themselves crazy. Maybe they’ll be the sing/talk to everyone else kind of crazy. Maybe they just look dazed or shakey. More often than not they will smell, and at least two people in the carriage will pull a disgusted face – possibly because they want to be clear to everyone that the smell is not coming from them and possibly because they are an immature, uncompassionate moron.

The smells make me sad. They remind me that most of these people are alone and if there is one thing that is guaranteed to make me feel weepy (putting aside the 71902 other things that make me weepy) it’s the idea of people being alone.
When I was crazy for while, I had people around me to care for me. They made sure that I didn’t go outside smelling like damp washing and that my hair still looked clean and shiny and thank god they did, because at that point in time, I cared about nothing apart from lying in bed, trying to sleep so that my life would go by quicker.

It makes my heart crack a little to think that the reason the man in the Hard Rock Café t-shirt’s clothes are all bobbly and a bit out of shape, or that he doesn’t smell as fresh as perhaps he could is because he doesn’t have anyone to help him - bar the person who’s paid to pop in for twenty minutes twice a week to check that he’s a) not dead and b) not harboring his neighbor’s dead body in the bath.

I realize that I sound like a sanctimonious shitbag. I’m not saying all of this because I’m a nice person. I’ve turned the volume up a notch to drown out with unsettling whispering of the person sitting opposite me, or have pulled my scarf up higher to cover my nose and mouth in an attempt to not smell that smell. Sometimes, I’ve even got up and moved carriages because someone’s ill brain has made me feel so uncomfortable – so yeah, I’m not exactly one of the good guys here.

However, there are plenty of things that I find more offensive on trains than someone who is mentally ill and hasn’t showered that day. Keypad tones are one thing, for a start. Listening to two men talk to their friend about his “fat mess” of a girlfriend (“I remember when you brought her to the pub and I thought ‘fucking hell, mate.”) is another., as well as other people’s breath and the man who I once saw cut his fingernails on the tube – those are some other things that offend me much, much more than someone who is, essentially, ill.

I tried to imagine what it must feel like, to be that man in the Hard Rock Café t-shirt. I came up with this - You know that horrible feeling you get when you feel like strangers are staring at you. You can maybe even see two friends exchange a look or a whisper about you. It could be because of that shirt that you bought ‘for a change’ or the trousers that you picked up because you were tired of always wearing dark colours. Maybe it’s because of the instant tan that you slapped on this morning because you couldn’t face wearing jeans.

I think it would be like that, but ten times worse, because you get it all the time. People look at you weird all of the time, or won’t sit by you ever or it goes really quiet around you pretty much always and you don’t know why.

Or, you do know why and you’re trying your very best to stop it.