Crashing and circling

A few weeks ago, as I opened my bag up in the train and a pantry moth escaped, I dashed it against my trousers. And so why the regret -- why the pain when, after moving to the door so that I could get out at the next station, I turned back to see it circling the spot that I'd left -- crashing and circling and crashing? All the way walking past the stationary people on the escalator -- all the way in the queue at the exit gates -- pushing through the crowd at the corner of the street so that I might jay walk when I wanted to -- all the way walking into the lift when the lift doors opened and riding in silence to the second top floor, I kept thinking of that circling moth in the empty spot that I'd left, but also trying not to think about it, because who wants to think about one of those tiny pesky moths for hours and hours or even days?

And who can avert their eyes?

I'm sure that the only reason I thought he resembled Prince William was because the news had been everywhere yesterday about the new baby Charlotte -- and who can avert their eyes? -- the prince in the features of the red-hooded, slack-jawed man lying sideways with his tracky-dack legs on the seat across the aisle in the train -- his eyes hardly open, his skin at the jowls knobbled, raw -- his too pink too thin too wet-looking lips hanging open in a crescent that had been rested on its front -- these lips, I've been thinking, which must have been the only feature in common (no matter that I have never seen the prince with his mouth like this), since nothing else of the man was visible -- no hair, no forehead, no ears -- and the skin, which was pale as an expensive plate, was obviously suffering too much from the grease at the rim of the hooding to have ever have been placed alongside in a similar set.

When the ticket inspectors stopped at his seat, it was impossible not to hear how there had been so many people at the barriers at Central asking for money that he hadn't wanted to take out his wallet -- that instead he had walked through the gate for the disabled and prams -- nobody stopping him -- and that it had been important to rest right now because he was going to the gym and he shouldn't overdo it -- to lose some weight -- and as he took out a wallet that was furred on the inside with unreadable receipts -- he had left, he said, his I. D. in a taxi -- one of the inspectors had asked about the gym -- which weights was he doing? -- the circuits? -- was any of it helping? (as if a friend) -- and somehow, like this, he pulled from the hood an address, a name (the spelling) -- by which time the man was saying he was feeling that he might have a heart attack or something.

Bucket

On the day that the police were going to ring me about my fifteen-year-old son, I was still thinking about what he had called out to me – at least what I could remember of it, which was only the single word ‘bucket’ – just before he left the house for school – thinking about this odd word ‘bucket’ even when I arrived at the top of the stairs at Erskineville station where, seeing that there was a man who looked as if he were reluctant to descend and another already descending the last of the stairs to the platform, I made the rapid interpretation that there was something wrong with the man who was nearly on the platform and that the man at the top of the stairs could see this and preferred to keep himself safe. On a weekday, I’d noticed, and particularly when I left the house this late, platform two was usually mostly empty, so my decision to keep going down the stairs, past the reluctant man, towards the other man, who didn’t yet seem particularly strange, even though I knew he was, and who was the only other person on the platform – this decision must have looked to the reluctant man like a lapse of caution. After all, I was thinking, surely a beefy, serious-looking, knowing man would stand a much better chance against what looked to be a lither, younger, but worse-dressed man than a smallish woman of my sort. After all, if a man such as the man at the top of the stairs was reluctant to go down to the platform where the younger man, as I saw, was already weaving as he walked, now hunched with his hands to his face, as if lighting a joint, and not far enough from the steps for me to stop short of him without drawing attention – if such a serious-looking man was so reluctant to descend the stairs onto the platform, then wasn’t my decision to go down the stairs all the same the most stupid decision that a woman of my sort could make?

Of course, once I got going, it seemed far more ridiculous to stop short at the bottom of the stairs, so I passed the badly-dressed man, who had turned (no joint) and was now in mid soliloquy about the fucking smoke (from a passing train) and the fucking signs, and just at the moment when I was most quietly proud of my decision to defy the better-dressed man who was probably still watching from the stairs, I was asked by the badly-dressed man if the trains on this platform went west and my answer, which was yes, at least I hope so, could not have been more provocative, I realised even as I said it, because his answering you hope so, you hope so, went high and loud, reaching out to the Woolworths sign on the fence. I have got this far, I was thinking then. Now that I have passed the man and responded to his question, I should go to the farthest end of the platform. The people on platform one across the lines will then be able to see if I am attacked by the badly-dressed man who might now have been stirred into an unstoppable mania by my words at least I hope so. They might watch the assault and do nothing, but at least they might watch it. Even the man at the top of the stairs might watch what happens.

Not knowing, yet, about what my son was doing with his friends on another loop of the lines – the Inner West Line – when he should have been at school – his participation, as it was put, in the incident involving the death of a young man and the defacement of railway property – in fact not knowing yet what I should have known if I’d given my mind to it, which was that my son had been giving me clues all year about what he’d been doing with his friends, but that I had not picked up on a single one of these clues – that I had always thought I had to respect him and that I had always respected him, that I had always treated my son as I continued to imagine he would like to be treated – not knowing any of this, by the time I got on the train when it pulled alongside the platform, I was feeling so elated by my near miss, as I had fashioned it in my head, and my bravery, in particular, for daring to descend the stairs towards what could even have turned out to be a maniac or a rapist, that I turned to look out the window when I sat down and was entranced, soon, by the spooling outwards of the streets and of my ebbing, bright tipped energy, of my thrumming, quiet connection with the world about me.

The wide stare

All yesterday I was wondering how to write about the young girl on the train who was signalling what might have been disgust to her even younger sister when a thick set boy shoved back one of the seats near them and then flung his body onto the vinyl in a way that might have expressed how he just does things and doesn't complain -- just as, in company, he will nod to his friends as if to agree to something risky even as his thoughts are taken up with the wide stare of several nearly teenage kids who might be watching from a window on the other side of the street. It was not easy, I was thinking, because the girls were soon looking at something in a plastic casing that the older one had taken from her bag.