Farringdon

CHAPTER 7 - Flooding At Farringdon

As the boy ran into the train station, hre glanced up at the large round clock that hung down inthe middle of the concourse just above the coffee stall. Late. It was all too late. Despair filledhis soul, but little did he realise that only 20 minutes later he'd be hurtling past a sign for Three Bridges. Redemption comes in the most unlikely of forms, but this time the source of his relief was entirely predictable. As he started to sing "Life. That's the name of the game and I wanna play that game with you" to himself, he heard the station announcer do what station announcers had been doing since time began. "We're sorry to announce that due to... " He didn't need to hear any more. Would you Adam and... " the boy said, a comical reference to the fact that the reason for his trip to London was to listen to the new album by Eve, a very important R&B singer he'd never heard of but who Spurs were apparently interested in signing.
As the train thundered along, he wondered what Eve might sound like. He guessed that maybe there'd be about 16 tracks, that it might be about 73 minutes long, that the first song would be called 'Introduction', would be about a minute and a half long and... Life is full of mysteries. Still the train flew along, oblivious to the disasters at Farringdon. Burgess Hill... Haywards Heath... Three Bridges... He considered the next stop, Three Bridges. It was a place that was pivotal to the railway system. All trains went through there so it obviously existed, but he'd never met anyone who came from Three Bridges. He'd never met anyone who knew anyone who came from Three Bridges. There was nothing about it he knew of - and he'd asked. No one ever said "There's this nice country pub, yeah, just by Three Bridges". Then there was the name. Three Bridges. This too was a mystery. Two Bridges, the boy thought, I can get my head around that. One Bridge in, one bridge out. One this way, one that way. That makes a kind of sense. But Three Bridges? Where does the third bridge go? What purpose does it solve? Who built it and why? Will they ever build a fourth bridge? Maybe it was a wartime relic, a code for some long-forgotten defence system.
The train stopped. A man got on who's too fat for the seat. He's sitting there, looking fantastically tall in the way that vrey fat people look tall when they sit down and taking up nearly two seats. Fancy being that fat. How does it happen? Didn't he get to a stage a while back where a seat wasn't good enough and think "Uh-oh. Think I'd better be losing me some weight here". I don't know. It could be that he's halfway through a seriously life-changing diet, he's just lost six stone and what looks like an expression of fat to me is, to him, a major triumph. Maybe it's his first time on a train and it's all come as a terrible shock to him.
Next to me is a young mother with two young kids. They're maybe four or five. She keeps leaning over to attend to them and, as she leans, her jeans - those skinny hipster types with the waistband cut off - slip down to reveal the smallest glimpse of the top of her bottom. Builder's crack, I think it used to be called but she looks nothing like a builder and crack? I don't like the word crack. When she was little, LouLou used to call her bottom her "topham". This is, I think, a much more suitable word. Anyway, she keeps leaning over and it's difficult not to... just a little flicker of the eyes. Does she know she's doing it? Does she know I'm doing it? Silly to even ask.