Fiction + Reality

The Commute

Feeling tired?

The train is rammed. Two days after the holidays and everyone’s back on the hamster wheel. The guy opposite me is wearing headphones the size of satellite dishes. Nodding along to some buzzing racket while gazing avidly into his phone.

I’ve been trying to read a book for the last twenty minutes, but the tension in the carriage is killing me. Everyone is so feverishly involved in their phones today that I’ve the feeling someone is going to implode.

Maybe it’s the young girl sitting two rows up from me, dressed in a pink Nike tracksuit. She’s texting so quickly that her fingers are a blur, and I wonder what she’s saying.

G4e5àdpd’mhemhod — ùjofdùmjohf

That’s what would happen if I typed that quickly. I’ve got fat fingers and always catch two letters instead of one. It takes me an age to write a simple message to my wife like ‘Home soon.’

When I started commuting in 1998, people read newspapers, books, slept, or stared out of the window. Occasionally people talked. But that rarely happened. Although I did get chatty with a guy called Mike Peters a few years ago.

He had got on at my stop, and as he was starting a new job, wanted to check if it was the correct train. We got talking, and after that, we spoke to each other most mornings. Mainly news, sport, or the weather. Nothing much.

Then one day he vanished.

It wasn’t a big deal— he could have been on holiday. I didn’t see him the week after, or the week after that. And after a month, I forgot about him. That’s how it goes when you are a commuter. You can see the same person for months, years even, and then one day they aren’t there, and no one thinks anything of it. No one reports the person to the police as missing. They are not missing, they’ve just gone.

I stare back at my book. I started it last night and restarted it this morning when I got on the train, but I’m no closer to getting past page one.

It’s about the life of a celebrity chef I’ve never heard of. I only started it because my wife’s sister left it behind on Sunday, and as there was nothing else I fancied, I started reading it.

I should have left it on the shelf. I once read an autobiography of a famous footballer and by the time I finished it, I knew less about him than before. It would have been easier to read his Wikipedia page.

I put the book back in my bag and stand up. We’re nearly there. I don’t have to even look at the time or look out of the window. I know my stop is approaching just from the sound of the tracks.

Humpty-dink! Dink Dink dink! Tak-tak-tak-tak!

Some deformity in the track that signals the end of my journey. The train starts slowing. It’s the busiest station on the line, and each day I go through the same battle.

With ten seconds to go, I move towards the door. This slight pressure causes the person in front of me to move forward as well. By the time the train stops and the doors open, there is an unstoppable force that spews everyone out onto the platform.

Then I see him.

Striding towards the exit, bobbing up and down among the other heads leaving the platform, is a guy wearing a red baseball hat.

‘Mike!’ I shout.

He can’t hear me as he’s got his headphones on.

I try to catch him up. ‘Mike!’ I shout again. He half turns round but doesn’t see me.

I’m about five feet behind him when we’re funnelled into a row of ticket machines. Narrow cheese-presses that if you’ve got luggage bigger than a laptop bag, you get stuck in. Mike has nothing and so glides through.

In front of me and Mike are two other people, one of whom has lost their ticket! When I finally get through the machine, Mike is already halfway up the escalator that leads to street level.

‘Mike!’ I cry.

Someone looks around — perhaps another Mike — and I wave my hand at them indicating it isn’t for them, and point to the guy in the red baseball hat, who’s now stepping off the escalator.

When I get out onto the street, I look around, but he’s gone.

The next morning, I’m standing on the platform waiting for the train. Normally I time it so I have thirty seconds to spare before the train pulls up. Today I’m here five minutes early to see if Peters is around.

Not that I’ve been thinking about him. I just want to know what happened. Maybe he got a new job or something, so all along he’s been on a slightly earlier or later train. Commuters’ lives are so governed by routine that the slightest change in timings can open up, or discard, a whole new set of people.

I’m standing at the back of the platform, so I can get a good view. We’ve two minutes to go, and the crush is increasing as more and more people crowd onto the platform like we’re waiting to be let into the Colosseum.

Then I see him at the far end of the platform. So I start pushing through the crowd sideways. This is a NO-NO in a busy commuter station. The equivalent of splitting a piece of wood sideways instead of down the grain.

‘Can’t you just wait like everyone else, idiot!’ someone says.

I’m about ten feet away. ‘Mike!’ I shout.

He turns around and looks straight at me as I get closer. But nothing computes.

‘Hi?’ he says, unsure.

I shake my head. The guy's twenty years younger. ‘Sorry, I thought you were someone else.’ I motion to the red baseball hat.

‘Oh, right,’ he says, ‘I see, I guess that can happen.’

The train arrives, so we force ourselves on and end up standing next to one another. I tell him about Mike Peters and how one day he didn’t show up, which was why I thought it was him, as he used to wear a red baseball cap as well.

‘Oh right,’ says the guy, getting out his phone. ‘That’s a cool story.’ He smiles weakly at me, looks at his phone and starts texting something.

G4e5àdpd’mhemhod — ùjofdùmjohf

I get out my book about the chef, and start reading.

(If you’re intrigued as to what happened to Mike Peters, here’s the sequel.)