A Marriage

His chicken head teeters on a long scrag of neck. She seems to have no neck at all: a medicine ball topped with a limp brown wig rests on buffalo's shoulders, about five feet off the ground. It's as if their skulls are linked by a string, like a child's gloves in a winter coat, and a cruel hand has yanked one end, stretching his spine and ramming hers into a bowl of bone and fat.

The lady is irate. On the platform at Vauxhall, under tower blocks vanishing into orange-brown gloom, a finger jabs the air, a lank fringe flaps, squat shoulders hunch even deeper into a sack-like torso. High above her a wattled head rears, ready to peck.

The ten pm commuter crowd — bleary eyed, Surbiton bound — ignore the spat. Apart from me. Siegneur notices my circling attention — writers are carrion birds — and his gaze dances up to the departure board like a guilty schoolboy. Can he tell, his expression asks, Does he know? No, how could he tell. But his fascination with the 10.15 to Dorking, now arriving at the platform, announces his desires as clearly as if they were spelled out by the orange LEDs crawling across the board: I want to kill my wife. I want to throw her under that train.