Liverpool Street

The station was alive with an ocean of people. Everywhere he looked there were men and women, some children as well. Most of them stood perfectly still, their eyes raised at the black and amber notice boards dominating the echoing cavern of the train station. Amidst this sea of commuters - each one an island of solipsism in a crowd of apparent non-entities – individual people danced through the silent multitude, like sharks scenting blood. Digital stop-motion signs blurred; playing advertisements and scrolling lists of presence-less destinations, all of which the assembled commuters took in with silently impassive nonchalance. Until, all of a sudden, there would be movement. The minnows react as one; not to the shadow of a predator, but to the shifting currents of hollow information that flowed all around them.

Here was a woman, her face representing the sum total of her Being, yet even that had been elided away to present little more than a series of stylised contours. The curve of her profile swept away beneath the glacial landscape of a frozen Scandinavian fjord. Her eyes melted away, disappearing by a trick of perception. The windows to her soul comprising little more than an optical illusion, occluding a designer urban four-wheel-drive vehicle, a safety net for the terminally affluent and their fragile children.

A man in a tan raincoat, features ruddy and forehead beaded by perspiration stared through the thin lenses of his designer spectacles. A series of dislocated, hyper-realised station names ran horizontally in coded yellow LED patterns. The reverence that he paid to the digital display, the colour of the blood suffusing his skin and the aggressive nihilism in his stance betrayed a desperate search for some kind of religious meaning that was absent from his life. Would it have made any difference to the life of this man, if the tanoy speakers played the anguished ecstasies of Christian saints or the notice boards begun to project a list of the locations and names of the largest mass-graves of the 20th century?

1) Marilyn Monroe discharges a blunt revolver, a panorama of orchids beneath a pale sun.
2) The fingers of heaven count coup on the bones of war-orphans given up to the horrors of peacetime abuses within the social services.
3) Treblinka, all trains calling for Treblinka boarding now. Will all passengers please exit their bodies through the bullet hole beneath the shattered remains of our collective left eye. A statement rather than a question.
4) All choice, all hope is gone.

A man in a suit at the end of a platform gives up the ghost of his wife with a fountain of flowers and imagines pulling a gun on everyone here and shooting them dead. His name is Barry. He doesn’t think in anything but long sentences that invariably or nearly always seem to include a distinctive lack of punctuation. Or grammar. Then again, he thinks that most of the time people don’t really think grammatically. Mind you, as far as he knows, most people don’t think about killing idle strangers they have never really met. He’s wrong about that, of course. He’s wrong because of the trains.

A woman walks down the concourse, her heels clicking away like the sound of the old fashioned typewriter she uses to write her letters on. Sometimes it sounds like the drip of water on a drum next to her head. Of course she’s not really remembering all this. Those things happened to an American GI, in a prisoner-of-war camp in Japan in 1944. Yet she has his thoughts in her head and as she is walking through the vast and mindless innards of the sleeping giant called ‘Crowd’, she is looking for avenues of attack, anticipating the rush of adrenaline that comes with the threat of violence. She is a predator here, with her bright red shoes and memories of murdering men in time to the advice of her patron saint cartoon characters.

Here is a father of three. He’s called Ahmed and he looks at the Underground sign and refuses to go down there. He has too many memories of too many times where people had clubbed together under the comforting glow of tabloid headlines. Yesterday it had been an article on the greed of public sector pensions. The announcement had come across on the tanoy, the driver of the train intoning a mantra of hatred. A teacher and her daughter were murdered down there. It had begun with shouted insults; the commuters grasping their newspapers like they were life jackets in the ocean – or knives in the streets. The mother had tried to defend her child as the kicks and the punches began. Ahmed had sat there, terrified, the only one to remember what had happened. Throughout it all, the voice of the driver had directed the execution with simple directness. They had all walked away, those men and women. Drifting one-by-one into the night, covered with blood and cuts and bruises, each carrying their paper. Each taking a piece of the mother and daughter to be posted to the private address of the columnist who owned their souls. It would take time, but Ahmed would come to realise his place in the greater scheme of things.