LION & HAWK

A businessman walks along the 5:45's platform puffing on an e-cigarette.     — “Mate!” calls the platform attendant, “put your cigarette out.”     — “It’s not a cigarette.” says the businessman plaintively.     — “Doesn’t matter,” responds the attendant.  “Cambridge City ordinance. 2014. Includes e-cigarettes in its banning orders.”     — “Oh, sorry.” the business man affirms.  He has the tone of dog-with-tail-between-its-legs.

While I mentally note the exchange, I continue writing my daily card to MaryJane, my shut-in neighbour.  Yesterday’s dog walk brought me onto what sounded like a North American Indian Council of War.  The Hare Krishna had captured Castle Hill.  There, towering over city centre, chants of Hare. Hare. Hare Krishna. Hare Rama. were literally enchanting.

Now, on the platform, with the businessman turned-tail, the attendant took note of me writing.  People often do.  And, they become self-conscious, concerned that I write about them.  This one, the attendant, is making out that he hasn’t noticed me as he does.  It’s normal behaviour: this pretense of I am not thinking of you; therefore, you do not exist. 

He takes a wide, arching path around me, craning his neck to determine what I’m doing.  I pretend not to notice.  But, as he swings around behind my left shoulder, I turn to stare into his eyes.  He is easy on the eyes, a handsome mid-twenty something.  The look forces a confession from him.     — “Oh, it’s a postcard.” he says without a measure of surprise.     — “Does that matter!” I demand.  “What,” I ask more playfully, “might it have been?”  He holds his distance, like a man who finds himself in the lion’s enclosure at the zoo.     — “I thought you were National Rail.  . . . I mean,” he catches himself, “I thought you were an under-cover security agent.” 

The strain he was under couldn’t have made him more vulnerable.  My inner lion pulsed.     — “And, you’ve come to blow my cover, have you?”  He has no answer.  He backs away, as you might from a lion, believing that slow, measured steps might mesmerize the beast into inaction.  And, I turn my attention back to the card, running off to post it before the train arrives.

------------------------------------------------------------

Pay a man attention, and he can be yours!

------------------------------------------------------------

On return to my stand on the platform, there is the attendant.  He’s watching everyone, having released his inner hawk.  Among his jobs is looking out for would-be jumpers.  Suicide by train is a bit too common.  He is also responsible for ‘releasing’ the train.  Most attendants will release a train and walk on to the next train’s platform.  Now seated inside, I sense that this one might be different.  At the sound of his whistle, a precursor to release, I down my pen, turn to look across the carriage, and stare out the window.  I’ll have a final glimpse of him, to see if his curiosity turns him one last time.

The train pulled slowly forward.  The fluid landscape of the station outside drew the figure of the platform attendant into view.  Arms crossed.  Less than a few inches from the glass.  Staring in at the caged lion, as if he were a falconer’s hawk looking on a kitten.

The National Rail’s inspector turns his attention to the young man in a corner of the carriage.  Conspicuous in his discomfort seated across from a beautiful young woman, the young man pulls at his t-shirt.  Crosses his arms in an attempt to hide a burgeoning tummy.     — “Gerbil,” I think.  “Gerbil. Hawk. Lion.”

  

---

Incidentally, on the 16:14 train home out of London, Kings Cross, I sat opposite a National Rail inspector in the far back corner of the train's first carriage.  In a small black notebook, in which was printed a rail map, he noted conditions within and outside the carriage at various way-points along the line.  When he thought that no one was looking, he unfastened his belt and slid his trouser button from its hole.
  
  

The Full English

The Full English is a breakfast meal commonly served on American dinner plates. Here, it's a metaphor, though a bit of misdirection.

There is something not quite normal about the day. I left home this morning at my normal time; yet, here I sit a full five minutes early. That should only be possible were my bike rocket-powered. Then, there's the freaky bit: the carriage rests beside it's platform two-doors-open on a cold morning and, in the cold convection inside, sits Mr. I Feel A Breeze sipping a cold drink. There is much so obviously wrong about this. And, he is ten minutes early! Together, we'll sit here, idle for another fifteen before the train leaves the station.

They say, the early bird catches the worm. The third man, a cyclist, joins us not a minute later. I've never seen him before. He has entered through a door behind two seated women. They, themselves, seem to have appeared from out of nothing whilst I retrieved this tablet from my backpack. I'm coming quickly to believe that the opening of my backpack, whether to pack or unpack gear, opens a rift that swallows time. Do it again, I tell myself, You'll be in London. I spend more than a work day each week riding the train. That would be good. But, there isn't a wormhole in my bag.

Still, something is wrong. Each of seats in this refurbished carriage sit facing me. Everyone else will enter London backward. This is good for the third man, who catches my eye as he looks about furtively, as though he might steal the seats while no one is looking. He strips off his jacket, spreading his arms back like wings, to take flight. Then, he peels off a jumper -- cause and effect is a sweater for the American reader -- which seems perfectly normal. But, then, off comes the white T beneath. He wipes himself with it, in broad cartoon motions, like the creator of Roger Rabbit, changing a scene.

To make room in his bag for his clothes, he removes more clothes and places them on the seat behind. He stuffs old clothes into the bag, then kicks off his shoes. In an instant his trousers are down; and, he stuffs them into the bag as well. I'm guessing, he had an early meeting and needed to change on the train rather than at the office. Fear of losing his expensive fold-up bike likely leaves him changing in the entry galley rather than in the next carriage's public toilet.*

You would no sooner expect that a man standing on a train in little more than budgie smugglers (read, with socks) was bound for Norfolk beaches rather than to London, when he turns expectation aside to reveal the budgie. Of course, you might note that an exhibitionist trades on other people's modesty if not their attention.     -- Me? I'm just experiencing a flashback. All I see is suddenly green. The green of Parker's Piece, where Autumn's rugby boys strip imagination of civies and hop naked into skimpy uniform shorts. The pantheon of haka warriors run onto the field one after another, like the cars of a train.

If I see the man again, I'll know him as Monty, the Full English. After the day I've had, the memory has been hardy enough to stick with me throughout and back on the long train home.

Tēnei te tangata pūhuruhuru . . .

__________
*

American readers should be advised that public toilet is the British English for restroom.   -- Public, in the UK, can sometimes mean private. A public school, as opposed to a state school, for example, is as public as money can buy, just as money in an American political campaign is free speech.

  

The English male is renowned for his reserve.  It will typically take weeks if not months to chat-up, to befriend almost any one of them.  Hence, my use of nicknames for those who regularly share my train into London.  At the same time, however, the English male sometimes seems to have little trouble getting his kit off (changing clothes) in public.  Before Monty, tFE, I'd have sworn this was behaviour limited to rugby players.

  

  

  

Man Down!

Until today, I'd forgotten the story.   — 1987.  New York City. —   One of the local tabloids reported: MAN TAKEN TO HOSPITAL WITH RAT BITE!

My friends' reactions could be summarized in "What else is new?"  I was amused by the construction of the headline, 'with' indicating an object to follow.  I began substituting rat-bite with the names of objects. ... with handbag. ... head lice. ... ruby lipstick. ... with nylons stretched over his face. ... yapping dog. ... handgun. ... pizza slice lodged in his pie-hole.  I imagined a rat bite so vicious that the man was stretchered into the Emergency Room with a set of rodent dentures stitching up his leg.  

I read on.   — He was bitten, as British public school boys might say 'whilst downtrouting the loo' as if he were on some sort of fishing get-away, or, as the New York paper put it plainly, 'while sitting on the toilet'. 

Until today.

The face staring up at me looked serene.  The body, submerged, lifeless as something to be found in a biology lab's bell-jar.  Instead, it was in the toilet of my basement restroom.  The seat and lid, both down, when it emerged through the plumbing.  The bowl, offering nothing to cling to. 

I should have taken a picture.  The image would have been handy to have one on memory card rather than burnt into my memory instead, still, given pause to think 'what if it is still alive!' or 'what if it is just waiting for me to come a bit closer?'  A photographic still would have held it there forever.  Not exactly dead, but not alive either.  Over time, I would have set it aside, forgotten it. 

In the present, I just wanted it gone.  But, how to get rid of it?  I closed my eyes and, after a moment of hesitation, flushed the thought: what comes up must go down.

This just in.  A homeless rat inflicted with head lice pulled a pair of nylons over its face, intending rob the pie-hole of every last pizza slice.  He was dying of hunger, he was overheard to explain to an accomplice waiting in a get-away van.  Inside, sitting at a table facing the pizzeria's flat-glass windows, a yapping dog wearing ruby-red lipstick noticed the rat about to enter.  While barking her order at the waitress, she pulled a loaded handgun, unseen below the table, from her Louis Vuitton handbag.  The threatening rat was dead within seconds of entering the pizzeria, even before pushing his demands like a ventriloquist through his own still clenched teeth.  The dog was lauded as a hero by a cat who witnessed events and spoke to this newspaper's reporter on condition of anonymity.

Mothering Sunday. March.

Remembering 2009.     — Helen, David's mother, on her first visit to us in the UK.

— We'd rented a car. Drove her to see monuments across Anglia. Stopping in a village pub for dinner. 

— There, they fêted her as though she would soon be dead. In a room all our own. A fabulous meal. Fine English ale. And, just for her, a rose and a candle-lit 'pudding' (which was cake to her ... her Quebecoise hair held by a ribbon, Marie Antoinette style). 

— We told her that all of this was in her honour. The waitress willingly played along. It was only as we left, she wished her a "Happy Mother's Day!" 

— When we got to the car, out of ear-shot, she said, "What's wrong wit' her?  C'est absolument fou là!  Mon ostie de saint-sacrament de câlice de crisse! [*no English translation*]  Mother's Day's not 'til May. What's wrong wit' her?" 

— On the ride home, while she was holding the rose like a nosegay as we drove through the Fens freshly spread with manure, we told her: "It's Mothering Sunday. In the UK, today is Mother's Day. And, it was all to honour [her]."  I think that David first actually told her that they give roses to all of the women this time of year "parce que tout le domaine est couvert de merde"   — Happy Mother's Day, indeed.

Sound clouds at midnight

@ almost midnight. Cambridge city centre, UK. Walking Max.
 
Warm enough for a late open air concert in the park.
 
Boisterous crowds being turned out of pubs for closing.
 
The local theatre, releasing its last catch; 
a pitched discussion loud enough at a distance to be taken for English football fans ejected from a Saturday match.

Lion's Yard. 27 February.

This weekend the USA moves one hour closer to Europe. Meanwhile, at a higher latitude, darkness persists. Europe springs forth only at the end of March.

LION'S YARD. 27 FEBRUARY.

“Excuse me”, says the man with the lilting Northern* accent. “Can you tell me if this carriage pulls in closest to the station’s exit?”

“Most certainly”, says the woman whose voice has the hard edge of transplanted Scots. “Bang on.”

“It’s a long train!” says the man, emphasizing the word long.

“Fifteen carriages”, says she.

“People in the rear", he suggests, "must have to climb onto the platform.” The farther north you go on this line, the shorter the platforms become.

“Worse.” She says. “Sun sets before they make it this far.”

She’s not kidding. After a long, dark winter, late February days seem a godsend. Lion’s March has yet to advance on us. Until then, even longer days end quickly.

_____________________
*Like the USA, the UK has a North/South divide. The British North is the near equivalent of the American South.

The Foreigner’s Deamons

The Foreigner’s Deamons

January 15.  The 6:15 a.m. train into London, leaving Cambridge.

Bookman sits one row forward today.  A man, speaking a language unknown to me, has taken Bookman’s usual corner of the carriage.  It’s the perfect vantage from which to watch the rest of us.  Outside of the First Class compartment, it’s the last seat on the train in which a common person can sit.

The foreigner was anything but common.  As I boarded the train, I encountered him in the aisle.  He was just standing there, arms bracing the seats on each side, as though bridging the Bosporus.  He was observing me.  The convention of allowing others to pass never appeared to enter his mind.  It would have been unnerving was I not paying him the same attention.  I was as contented as he was just to stare.

The foreigner had the stature of a projected man, a screen star, specifically in the character of a 1940’s film vampire.  He was from the golden era of the Silver Screen.  It was ironic that the most colourful man on the train this morning should also be the greyest.  His complexion was ashen.  His hair, uniformly grey.  I had seen whiter men.  The Russian waiter at the Bangkok Restaurant on Green Street, for example.  A life lived in long winters of endless night renders colour without colour.  But, the waiter’s tale is one for another day.

Most men — excluding Bookman, myself and the phys-ed instructor sitting several rows forward — wear suits into London.  Most of these are grey.  The foreigner wasn’t unusual in that.  But, the cut of his grey suit was remarkable.  It was formal evening wear.  Evening wear was seen on the 6:15, but only in June after the May Balls at Cambridge University.  Then, it flowed from the hulks of astonishingly handsome young men rather than frozen to the facing side of an old man.  Crushed velvet collar and cut-glass cuff-links marked an era long gone.  The style of it spoke of old money.  And yet, however unfashionable the foreigner’s attire, he wore it like a dead man, without a wrinkle, as if it was new.

With the seed planted, I allowed myself to think the foreigner, a vampire.  Isn’t Bookman brave, I thought, to sit so close.  His neck, protected by little more than a low-rising seatback.  This train, I reminded myself, leaves Cambridge in darkness and arrives London in darkness, too.  A vampire on a winter’s train could easily disembark to take his leave at one of the tenements in the Red Light district near King’s Cross station, savouring the warmth of Bookman’s blood whilst leaving Bookman’s body to cool on the train’s out-bound journey.

If eternal life comes, I am confident that it comes not as a vampire but as the TV rerun of a sit-com.  Like the afterlife of Friends.  Fittingly, two women, who appeared to have been snapped out of an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, demanded passage.  “Uh-erm-um”, the blonde cleared her throat.  “Let us through”, said the other, “Pull-ease!”  I stepped back into the boarding galley.  The foreigner, into Bookman’s row.  Bookman was buried, nose deep, in a volume entitled, Calculus for the Ambitious.  The two women, then, carried themselves forward; the blonde like a runway model, the other like steerage.  And, I followed suit, down the aisle, and into my normal seat opposite to and a few rows on from Bookman and the foreigner.

I turned back to the sound of clicking heels; the foreigner presenting himself to Bookman.  Still as a praying mantis, head bowed, the foreigner simply smiled.  Bookman smiled back, a toothy boyish grin.  It was an ancient exchange that I recalled from my first foray into seedy downtown bars.  “I could eat you all up.“ I think were the words mouthed as the older man leaned in over me, his breath smelling of spent cigarettes and the sweetness of rum.  I remember myself slipping away.  Bookman sank himself back into his book, turning a leaf as if to wave the foreigner on.  And, I turned back into the current of the now moving train.

The Ab Fab women, seated in a row facing the three of us, observed.  “I never watch tele.” said the blonde, staring off in the direction of the foreigner.  “Absolute drivel.”     — “I must admit,” replied the other, “I do like watching the tele-news for pictures of Nigel Farage.”  Nigel Farage leads the U.K. Independence Party, UKIP, in anti-immigrant, anti-European tribalism.  She spoke the name Farage with a hard /g/, rather than its normal soft French /g/ — Far-raj — as though the man might have been the Raj of a Hindu-nationalist Indian state.  “I think I may have caught him” she breathed heavily, “on an episode of the Simpsons the other night.”  She, too, was focused on the foreigner.  “But, what do I know.  I wasn’t sure that I was awake at the time.”  Good ole Nig does appear to be drawn for the Simpsons.  He’d fit in well at Moe’s, for the beer.

A paper cup cannot be made to sing any more than it can be made to conjure a genie; yet I had been nervously rubbing the rim of my espresso cup.  I’d taken it with abandon, as one would a shot of Maker’s Mark.  Still, the train held its course.  The sun didn’t rise.  And, the two women chatted on, aimlessly, about inane things.  “Ever tried ironing in the buff?” asked the blonde.  “Hopeless!” she answered herself.  How difficult could it be too strip off and iron clothes, I wondered.  Mentally, I’d summoned the image of the woman standing before me naked, tattooed with burns from the hotplate.  “The wrinkle suit?” asked her friend.  The two of them, never looking at one another, instead shifting their attentions between the foreigner, Bookman and myself, as if measuring us up as mates.  It would become clear that this was not a conversation about housework but about aging, and exercise and dieting in particular.  The friend understood how unlikely it would be that the blonde would iron her clothes.  If she needed something pressed, she would buy something new.  It was understood that the blonde wasn’t going about ironing but, rather, was ironing-in, or rather pressing-out wrinkles through exercise.  And, buff was a physical state that, over the years became phat, then fit, then just rolled over and died in the wrinkle suit whilst weight lifting a berliner into one’s mouth. 

In the end, both of the women had become briefly fixed on the youngest of us.  I wasn’t so much jealous of Bookman as I was relieved.  I could lift myself from my seat to dispose of the cup without fear of being objectified as dinner.  Poor Bookman, I thought.  If the foreigner doesn’t have him, the two women will instead.  “Have him” wasn’t quite the phrase that I had had in mind; but, it suffices.

As I passed, I noted that the foreigner busied himself, inscribing a series of paired two-digit numbers in a small spiral notebook.  Each held an apparently random position on the page.  Might they, I thought, have been waltzing to the sound of imagined violins?  Had I pressed any figures into the pages of my journal, they’d have calculated the diametric of the average British man’s thighs.  They, like bumblebees’ wings, are a mystery to me. How could anything so thin both lift the body and propel it forward?  London was full of mystery.  Cambridge, with its greater ratio of foreigners, less so. 

But, what mystery did the foreigner’s numbers convey?  I had little time to ponder their meaning.  The foreigner had noted my passing and hid them from me.  Some say that numbers voice the word of God.  Inherent in everything.     — I remember the voice of my boys’ school eleventh grade music teacher singing as she taught us how to Waltz.  One-Two-Two.  One-Two-Two.  The cadence of her voice, its marble-mouthed Alabama accent thick with Dothan’s honeyed dew, mesmerizing, enchanting those of us whom she called her “proper little gentlemen”.     —But, number theory, M Theory, String Theory, the Theory of Everything would have struck my music teacher as the ciphers of heresy.  Turn a rock.  There am I.  “Why, the Gospel of Thomas was no more than a string of fragments recorded from hearsay”, I would overhear her arguing with the Philosophy teacher in the hall, “from those who, in turn, heard the voice of Christ, from the man himself.”  She would pause to gather her strength, to say a silent prayer.  “Come now.  We all know what happens when a secret is passed around a crowded room.”  The numbers held meaning and yet conveyed none at all.

From the galley, I watched the two women watching me as I spied on the foreigner.  I’d binned my cup and stood listening to his voice, the language I had never before heard.  Incantations, as I imagined them, over the book.  Its metal spiral seemed unworthy to hear them.  One could breathe life into a man made of mud with just a few simple words, the old ways suggested.  When Dina Mhatlowski laid the books of Vilna to rest beneath a barnyard floor as protection from the Nazis, her compatriots first built such a golem; and the rabbi gave it life to safeguard the books at rest.  Words held power as long as their meaning was understood by someone.

The ancient Sumerians counted using the five fingers of exchange and the hand of a trading partner to grasp them.  They sealed the deal with a shake to demonstrate how binding was the agreement.  The foreigner’s system of paired pairs had to have some meaning.  The numbers would dance in my head when I understood.  When the Hindu priests discovered the null number — zero — zed — 0 — they realized that it had been there all along.  Hidden in plain sight, it was like dark-matter is to physicists.  Some part of me, I realized, was not simply watching, but, waiting.