Alone on Train, 2007
Isolation
Train stops suddenly outside of London Bridge Station. Normal delay, normal day, my copy of Heat on the table – dietary supplement ignored once again in favour of relishing a cream cake, a workaday vice. The man beside me drops his copy of FHM on top of my handbag and my laziness recoils at the perfect, glossy figure on the perfect, glossy cover. I’m not enough of a feminist to object. He swears down the phone to “Tony, you shitter” about lateness and meetings and it gets lost amid the bustle of the 8.39 jam. Sink back into my chair. Sink into anonymity, under the crowd of chatter and mobiles and iPods and adverts.
Eyes wander. I see the erection of a schoolboy as he gawps at the lads mag on the table, a first sexual awakening? The billboard on the opposite side of the tracks screams “FLICKS ONLINE FOR £1.99″, the poetry spoiled by the application of a bit of pray paint that joins up the ‘L’ and ‘I’ of “FLICKS”. I see in the warehouse window beside it some studio, a young woman fitted with a corset, a costume? As the assistant lowers the tape measure and wanders out of view the model begins to remove her dress, exposing slender shoulders and young breasts. Jealousy and embarrassment accumulate. I miss a figure I never had as FHM stares accusingly at the patisserie wrapper.
She looks at me. She walks towards the window and I don’t look away, though I feel a red flush across my face and chest. She waves and I look around, but nobody notices me and nobody notices her. In the whole world there is her, there is me, there are two panes of glass and there is nothing. Surrounded by nothing, separated by nothing. She is smiling. She is waving.
Her assistant steps back, the train starts to trundle forward, and I am invisible again.
© Matthew Sheret, 2008
