Trains Archives - The Pure Life of Dreams

May 25, 2023May 28, 2023

Getting to the Party on Time (via the Angels)

We are going to a party at Siobhan’s friend’s apartment on the south side of the Embankment and are taking the train. So we get on at the Angel and take the lift, an old wooden box, down into the Underground.

The platforms we walk through are dark and grimy, brown muddied walls and hidden tunnels, and the service is running slow.

We wait on Platform 2 of the Central line, it seems like for an age, before a train finally arrives, but when it comes to a stop it is already full, people crushed together, all the way up to the ceiling.

The bodies are pressed flat against the glass and there is no way we are getting on. We will wait for the next one.

The next train is a flat bed, cargo only, with a thick plain white rectangular box which covers the deck. It speeds through the tunnel, and we continue to wait.

And the next train will be a passenger train but it will be a long time coming. We wait in anticipation but by the time it arrives the train is ill-lit from the inside and it speeds through the tunnel and disappears the other side without stopping.

It seems we’ll never get there.

“We’ll take the Circle or the District line,” I suggest. Only you have to exit the station and cross the road to the other side of the roundabout to get to the platform.

So we leave, ascending once more with the lift and cross over to the entrance of the Circle and District.

“We can take either line,” I say as we enter down into a dark corridor, intersecting rail line tracks to our left, cavernous walls dark and dripping with sweat. We have to hurry as the District line carriages clank across the lines and past us, towards their stop.

But when we arrive at the platform the problem is the same; though at the start, there were only a few passengers waiting, the crowd begins to pile up. People in dark clothing, faces barely discernible.

“We are meeting at The Kestrel,” says Siobhan. She means Reed’s place.

“But that is nowhere near the Embankment,” I say. “That is in Hammersmith.” I pull out a piece of paper to work out the directions, but it is too small to write on.

“I need something bigger,” and I turn back to her. “Have you got something?”

But Siobhan is distracted, she doesn’t reply and I have to repeat it. And only then does she pull out a larger piece of paper, the size of my hand, that I can use.

“We should go back to the Central line,” I continue. I am getting frustrated that we wasted all this time waiting for the wrong train.

We are exiting the station, onto the road that leads away from both stations, when I suggest we can take an Uber. The greying light of dusk is in the distance.

“Why didn’t you suggest that in the first place?” she says, spitting the words at me, but it was her who got us lost in the first place.

“I’m not going,” I respond, “I’ve had it!”

And I walk away, to the right of me a chain link fence, a construction site behind the fence, both stations further behind me.

“I’m not going,” I reiterate. I walk slowly.

And she follows me, she too is going the wrong way.

But this is it. Where we will really part.

I circle even slower back round the roundabout, time and fear crawls, me slightly ahead of her, until we are back on the Angel side.

I am practically at a stop when Siobhan comes up alongside, to my left. She has thick pale blonde hair and a slightly pudgy face, thick lips like Becky Farmer, unvarnished, and she is attractive at that very moment; it is eating me up.

“I want to fly around naked,” she says and she smiles.

We cannot do it. Part. I don’t want to.

“Will you do that for me?” I ask her. And then I kiss her full on the lips.

Photo via Wallpaper Flare

January 25, 2023January 28, 2023

Competing for Gina Lollobrigida

I am with a group of Italians waiting to take the train from Palermo to Milan. The group is a mix of men and women in their 40s. And one woman wears her hair short, and straight, with spiky brown bangs.

She is thin, tall, and not classically my type but she has a sexuality about her.

January 12, 2023February 5, 2023

What a Long Strange Trip

We are off on vacation but to get there we have a number of stops. And first up is Saudi Arabia by plane. We sit at the back and the seats are worn, brown leather, cracked, and I can’t get the buckle out from the slit up by my left shoulder.

“Forget it,” I think to myself as the plane takes off. “We will be OK.”

December 2, 2022February 17, 2023

Unloading on High School and its Consequences

I sat at my desk but Rebecca Farmer suggested we go get some ice cream . It was unusual because I had never really spent time with her before.

“Sure,” I said and we went down to the lunch hall, but when we got there there was a long line of people with trays.

“We must have hit the lunch time,” I suggested. And instead we returned our desks and talked a little bit. We sat face to face and Becky, as she preferred to be called, propped her feet up on the chair next to mine.

Only we did not have much to say to each other. Until she asked me about my high school.

“I went to St. Pariah’s,” I said, “only it was very difficult for me.” I struggled to find the right words. “Because I was… was slightly darker than the other kids.”

And she looked at me and said, “It can’t have been that bad.”

“No, you got to realize this was in the eighties.”

After our conversation I decided to leave the office and take a ride on the train.

I got on the overland and it clanked out of the station. It headed through unfamiliar stops into the Bangkok suburbs and snaked across the rusted rail tracks of a major railway intersection.

We passed tall buildings either side of the train that I did not recognize.

We passed a big white sign with the train stop written in green lettering. Underneath, it said “Sponsored by the Thai Democratic Party” and I thought it strange that they would sponsor a railway sign.

I was depressed, so I decided to take the train to the end of the line because I could always just take it back again.

And the route map above the window looked like it would return the same way, and wouldn’t fork in another direction, though I couldn’t be sure.

I put on my headphones and called Elaine.

“I just unloaded on a colleague,” I told her.

We tried to talk, but the screeching sound of the wheels against the rails made it difficult to hear her. Then we hit a dead zone and she went silent for a bit.

And when the train hit the end of the line I got out and there was already a train on the opposite platform so I stepped right on and settled into the last cabin by the door.

As it set off, I looked around at the other passengers and they were all locals. I could see a family with babies but though I looked across at the seats the other side they were not there. Instead the family was a green tinted figment mirrored in the glass. They must have been behind me, or on a parallel train passing by.

It made no sense, but just as I thought I had figured out the illusion, and seen where the family was actually sitting, a young woman smartly dressed in a matching pale pink jacket and shorts walked up to me.

I was taking off my headphones at the time. I remember the warped mouth piece, and she got real close. Too close for comfort. She stood directly over me. She grabbed my wrists with both hands, before sliding one hand under to grab something from my inside pocket.

It was an object I had not seen before, half oval, flat and black but smooth and no larger than the woman’s fist. Like a blackened Venus shell~~, or one of a pair of castanets~~.

Photo by Bernard Spragg via Flickr

February 9, 2022June 7, 2024

Late Night Crush on the Tube

Trying to get the tube home.

A young Chinese woman in a brown plaid jacket and skirt holds a black briefcase and stands with her back to me on the platform. She watches a District Line train passing through, but it is too late for me and has left by the time I get there.