Sleepers on trains

Sleepers on trains

Waterloo Station looked and sounded as it always did late on a Friday evening. The huge crescent-shaped hall smelling of brake dust and fast food was busy with suburb-dwelling theatre audiences, concert goers and commuters with bellies full of beer, rushing for slam door stock, dust-filled seats and windows obscured with rust-coloured stains. The mood was hurried and furtive. As always, there was an ever-pervasive hint of potential violence, of being mugged in the dark recesses of the platforms out of sight of the cameras, or of the rape of unaccompanied female students on the little used suburban services. Only the obligatory Irish drunk, black matted hair and grasping his can of Special Brew, was directionless in the purposeful migration of humans away from the capital – staggering through the ticket holders asking for ten pence to buy a coffee.

Andrew Palmer, although feeling conspicuous in the melee of couples and suits on account that he was neither, walked as purposefully as could towards platform seven – in London it always paid to make out you knew where you were going. The drunk, though, had spotted him and was heading him off – Andrew hated moments like these and flash of anger tightened his mind. People would see him avert his eyes and pretend that he hadn’t seen the filthy smelling vagrant – they would all be secretly thinking how pleased they were that it wasn’t them that had been selected – they would instantly assume that the little man on his own with the flat cap and horn-rimmed spectacles somehow attracted the disgusting emerald-eyed export because he exuded a weakness that would enable cash to be easily extracted from his pocket and into the black-nailed stumps that pleaded from the ends of the tattered sleeves of the beggar. Resolutely pushing his left hand deeper into his coat pocket – his right was holding a litre of Styrofoam-encased coffee with its spill-free lid that had cost him more than a small jar of instant and which would have provided more than fifty better-tasting examples of the beverage - Andrew pushed past the pleas and onto the platform. Behind him the blackened teeth and rancid tongue enunciated garbled words of rebuke for his failing to have a heart.

Why was it that Andrew, who had just spent two and half hours of utter contentment and purity in the presence of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the cultural civility of the Festival Hall, then had to pass through London’s own iteration of Hades that was Waterloo Station, in order to return to his beloved Hampshire? Perhaps, he mused briefly, the final work of the evening, Shostakovitch’s fifth symphony, which had been written in the middle of the Stalin era as a letter of appeasement to the tyrannical leader, was being given as a warning to everyone having to travel home on the public transport system of the capital. Beyond the achievement of art was the reality of life. Joseph had been hoodwinked by the devious Dmitri who feared being exiled to the gulag more than he believed in his ability to convince the soviet establishment of the efficacy of the fourth symphony, which he kept hidden from public scrutiny until after Stalin’s death. The fifth symphony was, to art, like London itself – an enormous public relations exercise designed to maintain its publicist’s position as a cultural centre of excellence whilst underneath it’s belief was crumbling. London, though, had never been what it claimed to be on the posters.

Walking to front of the of the train so as ensure that he was first in the queue for a taxi at Alton station, Andrew was informed by the crackling tannoy that the 22.25 to Alton via Guildford was to depart ten minutes late because a relief guard had not been found. It seemed that the arteries that had been built to pump the people in and out of the capital were themselves furring up through the successively poor diet of government subsidies and a lack of management foresight to exorcise the working traditions of Victorian England. Andrew sighed resignedly and reached for the door where he could see an available seat on the opposite side of the half-full carriage.

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