too scared not to focus on it. If I get sidetracked then my body won’t carry on breathing.
Sit, focus, breathe, stay clam. Don’t look at the guy, don’t show Sam there’s a problem, he’s fighting his own demons. Fuck, I need a piss. Have you ever tried to focus a thought in the real world when your brain is locked elsewhere? This is the reality, any decision is based upon that. Try not to think, let it all wash over you, but there is no imagination here, no escape. I just want to jump up, run around, make new visions arise but I can’t. My brain is rushing over all the events, picking out all the images of déjà vu. But what if this is the only now, nothing else has existed. It was all a dream and now awake I have to live everything I dreamt. Live knowing every outcome, knowing every word and unable to change it. Surely that would drive a man insane, to know the future, to know the outcomes of everything you will do, unable to make a change, to watch every failure, knowing everything you do will end that way. How must it feel to build a empire knowing the precise moment it will end? Living each day with the dread that every tick of the clock brings that fate closer. No escape, no way out. I can’t think of any worse form of torture.
The train pulls into Euston and we can get off. My body feels strained after the effort of holding back all the laughter, after all the thoughts that have rushed through my head. Let the laughter out, let it flow out of me in thick spasms. I look to Sam, he isn’t laughing.
‘We need to get out of here,’ he says, his voice different, more like mine.
‘Why?’ My answer a question, quick, eager.
‘This isn’t good.’
‘Why?’
His eyes stare hard at me, telling me a message at odds with the smile forming on his face. My eyes evidently communicate the same message back. He nods, turns. We walk.
It’s always busy where we end up, none of our trips for the most part have taken place alone. Constantly surrounded by life, movement, change. Nothing ever static, nothing remaining the same. Today is no different, all around us people, flat people, two dimensional. They walk past, living paper cut outs, as bland and lifeless as a magazine photo. My mind has broken them down, removed the framework that makes them three dimensional. As I look, focus, I can see this framework, a grid attached to all their bodies. Three colours, red, blue, green. When I watch this framework move it leaps out, three dimensions with a two dimensional centre. Facial expressions and features mapped and visible with the lines but the body it surrounds at odds with this. The world viewed without 3D glasses. Imagine those pictures that were a mess of colour until you wore those glasses, this is what it is like, a mess of lines. Confusing, intriguing, annoying. I look down at my hand and wave it from side to side. Two dimensional flesh surrounded by a three dimensional grid, even the blurred trails of movement have grid, a complex blur of the three colours. Maybe the old tales of the world being flat were true and it’s just this grid that gives it its volume, its depth. Our eyes acting as the red and green lenses on the glasses. Flat two dimensional creatures made three dimensional through an illusion of three coloured two dimensional lines.
How hard to navigate without a notion of depth to pinpoint. My fingers grab onto the back of Sam’s jacket, lightly held but enough to provide a connection. If we stick together we will get through this, make it home. Up, down, across. We walk through this illusion, a series of complicated tricks to confuse the mind when in fact it is all as flat as a game board. London’s truer form closer to that of a Monopoly board than long concrete fingers reaching to the sky. Another platform, another dice controlled train. Step on the wrong square and go directly to jail without passing go.
V
The Victoria line, a blue trail on the map. Our destination two stops from Euston. Rattle, shake, rattle. Your body always swaying, always a noise in the air. So we sit, sit opposite each other on an almost disserted carriage. We're sat close to the door, that one step closer to freedom. My thumb slowly picks away at my middle finger, scratching, trying to seek reality. Pinch yourself to wake up, but what do you do when you’re already awake? Sam’s eyes stare forward, he’s chewing on his lip, a nervous chew, we’re disconnected yet connected, a juxtaposition existing through everything going wrong.
A voice, we look. A tramp stands with a simple plastic cup in his hand. It rattles, he reels off a designated and well practised speech aimed to pull at the heart strings of people who’d rather give their money to a taxman than a tramp. I shake my head in the negative to him and sit back, he’s half way down the carriage in a flash. How? What happened in those few moments? Sam’s eyes look shocked. What had I done? Memory loss for no reason. What did my brain want me to forget? Sam’s head shakes and his eyes look away.
There’s an old man sat next to me, I don’t know where he’s materialised from, he wasn’t there a few moments ago. I can’t recall anyone changing seats to sit next to me. He’d made me jump when I’d first noticed his presence, but now my eyes keep getting drawn to him, flicking sideways to just get a glance. He looks funny, I want to laugh. He probably looks quite normal to most people, but to me he looks weird, not elephant man weird but in the way that his winkles line his face, it’s amazing. The man sits, no movement, like a photo, a snapshot of time, not even a blink as his eyes stare into the black chasm outside the windows. The deep set wrinkles never move, never change, not a single movement, it is as though he is paralysed by rigor mortis. He has no presence, no smell, nothing that would draw your attention to him. A solitary figure making a solitary journey. The age old question, do you exist if no one notices your presence? Can you have presence when you don’t exist? Does one set of eyes upon you justify existence or just make you part of their imagination?
The train stops and we rise. Almost home. The old man doesn’t move, his eyes don’t ponder us as we get off. Set in stone, a statue. We step out and onto the platform, very much alive and in joint existence.
Shit, I’ve just remembered something, the reason why we are here, the reason for this quick escape to the sanctuary of home. I grip Sam’s arm. ‘You okay?’
‘No,’ he answers, his eyes burning into me. His mouth finally about to word what the eyes have been saying all along. Everything falling further into place. I’m finally listening to the words he’d mouthed across to me on the train, words I’d ignored as my mind wondered about the statue sat next to me. ‘I want off. I really want to get off this trip.’
‘I know.’ Our eyes connect and the message is no longer hidden. ‘Me too.’
Time to move, there’s no need to remain down here now we know what we want, to stay would be like remaining in Hell even through the stairs to the pearly gates are but two steps away from you. Speaking of steps to Heaven, I wonder if they’ve modernised, so now when you die you find an escalator or maybe a glass lift. I mean we use such lazy contraptions in life, why not create them when we die? Lazy in life, even lazier in afterlife.
So here’s the tunnels, it’s hard to feel enthusiastic about something you see daily. The walls down here are never changing, unlike the world above ground, down here is always the same, lit the same, there’s no nature to provide change other than the faces of people. Yet despite this monotony there’s singing, someone obviously happy with the world around him. Eyes search, trying to seek him out. Pinpoint, locate, lock. It’s a man, no, the word ‘man’ denies his enigmatic status. This isn’t a man, this is an aged rockstar. We move towards him as he swaggers confidently, a blonde haired girl walking beside him, their arms linked. Tight jeans, flamboyant top and hair without the dusting of grey expected on a man of his age. From what I can see his face is wrinkled, make up used in an attempt to hide the natural decay of the body.
We’re right behind him now, his singing broken up with brief snippets of conversation to the girl who gives this man her undivided attention, laughing in all the right places. My foot catches on a step, a misjudgement on my behalf. I stumble forward
slightly, gently knocking the woman's handbag. Natural impulse tells me to laugh, I do so, so does Sam. The singing stops. What have I done?
My laughing face turns from Sam and swings right into the face of Mick Jagger. The aged rockstar has turned his attention to look at the person who interrupted his fun. We’re still walking forward but his enigmatically wrinkled face surveys mine, taking in all necessary details before it looks to the blonde and the words ‘check your bags’ filter back to me. We never stop walking, our feet on autopilot as we exist from waist up. Interesting scene, Sam and I laughing as a rockstar and his lover search their bags to ensure that I haven’t taken anything. But would a thief remain and laugh at the scene of his crime?
The walk continues in silence, a once drug fuelled famous musician quietened by a currently drugged fuelled unknown musician. A silence filled with respect, past and present, a vision of the future. Would I one day find myself in his position? The circle of life rotating, creating scenarios, unlike mankind, natural happenings don’t have plans which are mapped out or scheduled, maybe that’s why it has become so commonplace for us to be forced into order,