Nutter on a train
Short fiction - Subnormal on the Subway
So here I am again, trundling along on the Central Line, reading the adverts above the windows on the Underground, which are only there to distract you from looking other people in the eye anyway, or as an excuse to look away if someone is looking YOU in the eye.
What’s this one?
In your dreams you’ve been to Tunisia
Well, last night I dreamed I was at the funfair which comes on at the top of my road every year on the wasteground that everybody says is going to be a McDonald’s or a Lidl’s. At least, it WAS my road, but at the same time it wasn’t, if you see what I mean. Up to number 70 was all OK but where number 72 has a green wooden door in real life this one was glass paneling. 86 had swapped with one of the ones across the road and now the letterbox had gone. The bungalow by the traffic island had grown a first floor and was now lived in by the drummer from Genesis (the first one, before they got good). The one with the bird bath out front had turned into a workmen’s tent with spiders in it, playing table tennis. I was on the rifle range and the bullets were real so I killed twenty seven before I was asked to leave by Al Pacino dressed as a crocodile.
So if that’s Tunisia, you can forget it.
She’s still at it, the lunatic opposite me.. the perennial nutter on a train…
…sitting straight ahead in front of me, leaning completely forward and saying the same thing over and over and over whilst trying to look me directly in the eye.
‘’NOOSH! NOOSH! NOOSH!’’
It’s been going on since Bond Street. She’s been saying it for so long that it now just sounds like Sean Connery saying ‘noose’. If only she’d just widen her mouth slightly for variation it would turn into ‘niche’, perhaps talking about which furrow of insanity she’d fallen into after carving it out for herself. Or maybe ‘Nietzsche’, in reference to how life is meaningless.
No, I can take it, really. We’ve all had a nutter on a train, it’s fine. I’m having the last laugh and I am the clever one and I am actually getting my own back right now, right in front of her without her even knowing. She probably thinks that just because I’m in a suit and am hammering away on my laptop that I must be trying desperately to ignore her and that I’m typing about free asset radios and the Footsy 500 and take overs and ball and bare markets and such like, but I’m not. I’m right in front of her, writing right in front of her ABOUT her, about what a complete fruitcake she is, for other people to read any time they like
I shouldn’t be too hard on her though. She got nothing on that other one that got off two stops ago whose face kept on turning from green to blue to red to black to yellow to green to blue to pink to black and pink and then back again.
