Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
Beautiful writing on a subject of little or no importance.
The hum of the train, still out of sight, lit up the station. Those huddling under the awning started to spread out across the long platform. Three minutes. The men with their briefcases and their three piece suits, armor that allows them to treat the rest of the world like dirt and walk straight as if nothing is in their path, forcing the rest of us, even the stationary people to the side.
The old Greek women sit on the bench together, three of them, this time every day. The train will stop and go and they’ll still be sitting there. There are no other routes on that line. The teens with their folders that seemingly look haphazardly decorated but I’m not so much older that I can’t remember the painstaking hours of work that went into making it look like that folder had been dragged through the bush backward stand in small groups, sometimes holding hands. Two young boys in Barker uniforms standing over the yellow line stare and snigger at a young girl in a Tempe High uniform. They make fun of her hair and start to act like monkeys. I’m tempted to bump into those boys, standing over the yellow line as the train pulls in.
The guys who look like they spend their weekends playing Dungeons and Dragons, with their long ponytails discussing which protein powder they used in their shake this morning and how they can bench press twice their weight in some odd dick measuring contest. Two minutes. The couple, who at first I thought were mother and son but if their morning tounging is anything to go by they aren’t stand in the middle of the walkway pashing. The old Greek ladies start to huff and I can only imagine what they’re whispering. The father with his baby in one of those weird looking baby carriers, one with a sun shade over the top stands near the old women talking on his phone, briefcase in hand while the baby eats his tie, possibly without his knowledge. The train pulls in and nobody gets off, not that they had a chance the crowds along the platform are huddled where the doors of the train land. I hustle onto the second last carriage, never the last, I’m convinced if there’s an accident the first and last carriages are the most dangerous although I have no idea why I think that, it’s just a superstition. The children sitting jump up to hurry to the middle of the train carriage to avoid being whacked by ‘accident’ with a bag attached to an angry adult who wants a seat, their seat. I sit in the first seat, the one that’s facing another seat, in theory it can seat six but really it’s three;
person, space, person,
space, person, space.
I pull out my book, it’ll stay in my lap while I flick back and forth between twitter and facebook, but it’s way too early only the mums will be on facebook with another photo of their kids eating breakfast in front of ABC for kids, in television merchandise pajamas. Bob the builder (is that guy still fixing shit?), Hoot, Peppa Pig (founder of the next wave of feminism), Ben Ten and the list of money makers goes on. There are only so many photos of a person I went to school with’s kid eating wheatbix I want to see and that would be none. I don’t want kids, I like them when they’ve come from other peoples bodies and they’ve been roused, dressed, fed by other people, people who will take them away after an hour or two to deal with tantrums and lolly induced rage. Children like the tie eater in the baby carrier whose dad is now busy typing on the phone tie dripping still unaware, children like the Barker boys’ gory pancakes in my head, the ones who spend hours painstakingly trashing their folders and not doing their maths homework, which they now do standing in the middle of the carriage in a circle calling out answers. The Tempe High girl with the enviable skill to ignore idiots. I don’t know these people but it seems like a ritual we do together every day on loop and with this realization the train pulls into St James and I merge with the crowd of suits up, up, up to daylight.