How not to eat in public

It’s funny how you get a rhythm by accident sometimes. With words. How they work sometimes.

 

I was sitting on a crowded train, on my way to London. All I could think about was how bereft I felt without him. Had I lost him? I felt sick with the grief of it and wondered if travelling from one place to another for no particular reason might help. The moving about of my body from A to B might stop this terrible weight of sadness from settling down. It wasn’t that I was trying not to face things – just trying not to mind so much.

 

I’d had a reserved seat somewhere down the carriages but somehow this girl looked like she wouldn’t in any way get into my space. So I got into her space and asked her if I could sit beside her. She had a sweet little Apple Mac computer and she was tip tapping away with earphones in. I sat down and immediately put my table down so it matched hers and so I could put my boiling hot pint of coffee down at last. I desperately wanted to keep checking my phone but now I couldn’t reach it. I tried to fumble about under the table blindly but realised I was in danger of looking very fidgety so told myself to calm down and check it after my drink. Then the train made a noise a bit like my phone and I couldn’t stand it so I delved into the darkness again and pulled it out of my bag. Nothing. Maybe if I sent a long message to everyone I knew it would somehow make him text me back. I wanted to say things like:

 

Would you like me to stop talking to you?

Would you like me to leave you alone?

Would you like me to fuck off?

 

Then realised I would sound like that strange man I met briefly at a friend’s funeral last year who texted me ten times before I’d even gotten home from it and started to second guess my annoyance – correctly in actual fact – but which I decided not to reply to after the first polite, Oh, hi, yes it was nice wasn’t it. Let’s stay in touch type yellow blandness.

 

So I restrained myself.

 

Then a message came to me from the ether. It felt balanced.

 

How are you?

 

Yes. I felt good about sending that. So I sent it. Then checked my phone twenty more times to see if the “How are you?” looked ok.

 

A man in the seats opposite had a pretty, tall  girl sit next to him with a huge portfolio of drawings and they’d struck up a conversation. Or rather he had.

 

What accent is that?

 

She hadn’t quite heard him as she talked over to some other people who’d obviously suggested she put her luggage in the luggage rack.

 

Oh no they’re too precious. To me. Though I doubt they’d be worth anything to anyone else.

 

So he said it again.

 

What accent is that? Italian?

 

I heard her give quite a long explanation about her family. Her father had been Italian and her mother half Ukranian and half Greek and she was looking for work in the UK because her friends had suggested there was work here.

 

At first I had been a bit suspicious of the guy, who was in his late sixties, talking to this young woman, but he responded with lots of nods and yeses he began to talk about his own life, how he lived in Geneva and he used the word Geneva lots of times and then somehow got onto Morroco and Amsterdam and all the other places he needed to visit because his wife was Swiss and how it was a very small country and perhaps that was why it was so well run. The young woman didn’t seem overwhelmed but nodded and smiled and responded where she could.

 

I decided to tell him about this. In one sentence.

 

I’m sitting on a train trying not to listen to a man who has mentioned every country in the world in his conversation with a beautiful Italian girl who has had to sit next to him with her huge portfolio.

 

I texted.

 

And it made me laugh a bit. I liked what I had written because it didn’t sound fucked up and seemed more like a note to myself.

 

The girl got off and a man asked if he could sit there and he was very beefy and large with a bald head and aviator sunglasses and a bit of a tan. He looked like a bodyguard or a gangster. That’ll shut him up, I thought. But, unbelievably, the man started up again.

 

You look like you’re in the security business or something.

 

The other man laughed and said oh no he worked for the railway. Was he a driver? Another smile and the guy said oh no I’m blah de blah de blah.

 

I couldn’t hear properly because Apple girl had had her connection cut off in a tunnel and had bothered to ring up her wifi providers who were asking for her computer number and locating her, on the train, beside me, halfway between Ipswich and London to try and switch her back on. She was being quite patient. I wondered what it was she needed to work on so badly.

 

Mr Conversation was talking about the trains in Switzerland now and how they were double decker sometimes. And other countries again. One sentence flowing into another without a chance to interrupt yet the beefy guy seemed to be smiling happily.  I decided to give an update.

 

And now he’s on about Switzerland and Morocco, trains and his career in accountancy to a big bald man in sunglasses.

 

I wanted to update more. I found myself wanting to write everything down. The coffee had gone so I put my table up and took out my notebook.

 

And now Einstein’s cropped up as the girl beside me taps away. I need the loo but she’s just spent half an hour trying to sort out her wifi and I’m loath to disrupt it.

 

There was no reply of course. But I was feeling really happy. And I hadn’t been feeling happy for a while. What would I do if he never replied?

 

The train was pulling into Liverpool Street. Big bald man was saying a big thank you to Mr Conversation. It had been nice to talk.

 

It had been nice to write, actually. I had wanted to write. Maybe that awful sick feeling had been frustration about writing. I checked my phone. Nothing again. I got off the train feeling tragic.

 

I decided to go to the old Tate. I got onto the first tube I could see and realised I was on the wrong line altogether. I got off at Aldgate East and saw signs to Whitechapel gallery. I’d never been and felt it was a sign or an opportunity, at least. As I exited I realised the gallery didn’t open for half an hour. I didn’t have time to wait so decided to go back underground and keep going. I nearly made it to Victoria then decided to get off at the Embankment – vaguely thinking that was where the new Tate might be and the Mapplethorpe photos I’d missed when I went there last time.

 

As I exited I realised it was the wrong side of the river. I decided to walk over to the other side. To keep moving.

 

A text finally came back when I was walking over the pedestrian bridge. The sun had come out and there was a warm breeze hovering over the water. I had 1.5 hours to kill. He was west apparently so I told him where I was and tried to keep the one sentence thing going.

 

I’m on the South Bank having got lost in Aldgate East and the Whitechapel didn’t open til 11am so now I’m uncooly walking with icecream round my mouth.

 

I had wanted to bring in a mouth somewhere.

 

He texted me back. He needed coffee.

 

I felt so overjoyed that I nearly didn’t notice I was walking towards the tunnel where I’d walked with you that time, you know, when I said I secretly thought my writing was amazing, as a joke, but instead of it coming out like that the tunnel had made it really loud so it sounded like I was saying I thought my writing was AMAZING. And it made me want to tell you so I started another text when I realised the sun was too bright on the screen and I’d have to stop in a dark corner and my icecream was melting and there were twin boys walking in front of me on the path and they looked so arresting it made me want to look at them instead. I wondered whether people around us would think I was their mother if I walked closely enough to them. They were wearing the same outfits of turned up jeans, DMs and donkey jackets, their honey-blonde quiffs bouncing as they walked. Suddenly their mother stopped and I walked past them. She took off her sunglasses and called out my name loudly. She was a mother of one of my son’s oldest friends and I gave her a huge hug.

 

A real person. To talk to.

 

We walked to the Tate together.

 

I got to see the Mapplethorpe too.

 

As I took the escalator down again a view caught my eye and I tried to capture it with my phone. For you, actually. It was full of a dark movie I’d accidentally taken of my pocket – probably when I was shuffling about on the train doing my earwigging.

 

So I deleted what I could and took the snap. Feeling all arty.

 

I ran up the ramp towards the sun outside then walked happily to London Bridge to get the tube into town for this lecture I was supposed to be going to in the first place.

 

All those moments.