Freedom
He is wearing an impeccably tailored flannel shirt in muted reds, trousers a rare rusty mustard colour, and pointy-toed brown leather shoes that haven’t seen a polish in months, only just holding their shape, soles thin enough that they could be a sort of leather dress slipper, their elfin bedragglement suggesting the wearer has surprises in store, that his life has had phases, that he doesn’t mind if a few things get scuffed along the way, bent out of shape, even something as important as shoes.
He has a sensitive face, nose slightly upturned, regal cheekbones, full lips, and chestnut hair you suspect will never be allowed to share the squalor of those shoe-slippers. A brown leather satchel rests across his knees. It serves as the desk for a rather chunky paperback he’s reading, which proves, upon casual but persistent attention, to be “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen.
12:32pm
A man with enormous muscles rippling through his tight black T-shirt, tanned skin, bald bullet head, standing near the bar, holding a pint of Guinness but barely drinking it, alone, and not smiling. An hour or so later, when I passed by again, he’d barely moved.
2:23pm
In one hand she held a Starbucks cup,
And with the other munched a wrap;
The coffee arm was crooked to hook
An enormous shoulderbag.
I wondered, if from the depths of that
Mammoth purse she heard her phone go off,
What she’d do? And then I saw
The Bluetooth wire snaked through her coif.
Oh, she had the whole thing figured out.
In fact, as she got close,
I could see her talking as she packed
More sandwich in her snout.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with skinny lattes
Or talking on the phone.
Walking, eating, texting, tweeting —
Each is fine if on its own.
But if you do all of these at once,
Please — try to be alert.
Don’t run right the fuck into me,
And keep your coffee off my shirt.
5:40pm
She was unmissable.
The heat that had descended on the city was pleasant enough in the street, where it hit you less like a molten bearhug and more like a friendly punch in the arm — but in the Tube it was diabolical. So my two-year-old companion and I thought ourselves lucky to be confronted with such a sparsely occupied Victoria Line. We homed in on two empty seats right next to each other.
Then she walked on the train. She was in her seventies, and every piece of clothing she wore depended on pink. Pink and yellow leggings, a purple and pink tunic swirled with black paisley, hair assiduously wrangled into shape with pink clips, and a tiny pink hat perched upon her head. She eyed the car. It wasn’t rammed by any means, but a few people did have to stand. A young, strapping man just beside me offered her his seat. He spoke with an East European accent. Maybe Poland. I was busy with my own affairs so didn’t quite catch this part of the conversation; she seemed to decline his offer. But he insisted. “Really,” he said. She murmured something through her thin, pinkly painted lips and moved past him to sit down.
I don’t know why, but I felt generous toward this lady, too. She seemed to be in a bad mood. Maybe I wanted to cheer her up. “Oh, I just say yes,” I said with a wink. “No shame in it.” She looked at me sharply.
“What?”
“I just say yes. When I’m with this guy and somebody offers me a seat - I take it.”
“What do you mean?”
I swallowed. Was there a way to be clearer? I shouldn’t have said anything to this woman.
“In my day,” she began, looking down at her hands as she smoothed her tunic, “people had much better manners than they do today. It’s just awful today.”
I felt that to point out what had just transpired — that possibly the most canonical example of good manners in the history of humankind, a young man offering his seat to an aged woman — seemed to at least comprise an exception to her feelings about the modern world — well, it would probably fall on ears that were, at the very least, deaf in a figurative sense. So I said nothing, and let her irascible mumbling trail off. We were like airplane neighbors who find we despise one another.
The rest of the car had now been silenced. This striking woman, who had arrived with such panache, and with such a promising superciliousness, had turned into a garden variety nutter.
Then my travelling companion piped up.
“Daddy?” he said, in his clear, high voice.
“Yes?” I said.
“What was that woman saying?”
Do it.
“Well, she said that in her day, people had much better manners.”
The silence was now total.
Eventually people settled back into their papers, and I back into the stream of low-level questions and answers that defines toddler conversation.
A few stops later, after a longer than usual silence, he piped up again.
“We get off now?”
“No, we’re going all the way to the end. To Brixton. The last stop.”
At this, the pink lady got up, walked to the other end of the car, and sat down in another seat.
15:14
I had the bad luck today of sitting near a man who had confused the word “correct” with the word “yes”.
“So do you think we can move ahead with Phase 2 if everything comes in on time?”
“Correct.”
I imagine him going home on the 17:35 to West Malling - perhaps allowing himself a brief snooze in his hard-won seat, hand slackening its grip on the umbrella, then shaking himself awake, out the doors and down the steps to the car park - and upon return to his somewhat miraculously pleasant homestead, his wife gives him a kiss. He smiles wearily, gives out his usual comforting grump about the day, sheds his jacket and heads, like clockwork, to the fridge. His wife is looking at him.
“Jake?”
“Mmm hmm?” he says, scanning for whatever it is in there he wants. He probably doesn’t know, himself.
“Jake.” Something in her tone makes him stop. He looks up at her. “Do you love me?”
The weary half-smile again, and his head turns back to the fridge.
“Correct.”
9:19am
Is the subject Ireland?
How about:
A little piggie,
Drinking stout?
Is China in
ascendancy?
We’ll put Mao
In a red Humvee.
And if Greece
Is in the news again
What better way
To illustrate it
Than stock photography
Of men in togas,
From the Parthenon
Self-defenestrated?
No doing
Is too rare or grand
To evade reduction
By my hand.
What’s my bag?
You haven’t guessed?
I design the cover
of the Economist.
11:49am
Look, I could make fun of your stupid watch - a “funky” vision in chunky orange day-glo plastic - I believe this is known as “peacocking” in pick-up-artist circles - or I could make fun of the many rips in the knees of your acid-washed jeans. I could. No one has rips like that in their jeans unless they wanted them; and why would you want rips in your jeans? It just lets in the cold air. Granted, it’s not that cold today. In fact, it’s the first really nice day of the season. Maybe these are your special “drafty slacks”. Which, obviously, is even stupider. You poor man. Where did you go wrong? There was a turning in your life, a path so overthicketed with bullshit that it obscured you to yourself, and you were unable to see what you’d become.
And then you sit next to me. Spreading your beripped, jeansy knees out wide, so wide as to impinge me. (Yes, reader, he did this.) You fish in your pockets, your elbow hoving dangerously close to my rib cage now, all your bony corners are off the reservation, my own body quietly shrinking from you. A device is located. The flapping subsides. Suddenly the tinny shriek of music. Music without body, sound without love. A rush of needling percussion. You smirk. You love this song.
That is why I moved to the other side of the carriage.
5:04pm
Every day I’m 5-10 minutes late for work. Not boasting. That’s just the way it is. Very occasionally, I’ll be asked to come in “early” (this is a relative term). On these days, the jigsaw of my morning life must be solved anew. Breakfast? What do I eat for breakfast? Where is my towel? It’s like I’m living in a different person’s house. But once I make it into work, I feel great. In fact, I feel superior to others. Which others? Those who have not made it into work yet. The sluggards. The layabouts. They come streaming in, some 20 minutes after I’ve arrived, checked my email, gone for a coffee, and wandered back to sit down. “I know what they’ve been up to,” I chuckle to myself. “And they think they can just walk in like that, without anyone noticing! Please!”
And the next day I come in as usual, 5-10 minutes late. Scowling at some imaginary obstacle for my colleagues’ benefit. You going to give me beef? Please.
11:38am
There he is in front of me. Hair cut in the new style - practically shaved on the back and sides, while the top surges up into a huge, glossy quiff. His shirt is exactly the right cut for him, as are his trousers, which hug his legs close but comfortably, exposing a flash of red sock. His calves slope backwards and down, giving his body the appearance of a kind of low-slung, perfectly balanced letter “S”. His shoes are shiny, very narrow, and long, coming almost to a point in the end, as is the fashion. I hate this man profoundly. He speaks to the cashier in a surprisingly quiet voice, asking for a white Americano and a vanilla muffin. He is quiet but firm. He wastes no time, unlike so many other strangers I have loathed. His is not the fumbling inaudibility of the shy, it is the confidence of a man who knows that people are listening to him, and will listen, and that he will get what he wants.
To his left stands another, in the same flush of youthful manhood, with approximately the same quantity of groom in his hair, but this other man possesses a toothy grin of irredeemable goofiness. I can’t help thinking of him as a child, of what he was like as a child, before he became this sweaty thing with an overbite, dressed well but shifting on his feet, hanging onto the first man’s words with a helpless obedience. This other man is no cobra. He will never be the suave package the man with the red socks is. And so I hate him less.
