Just having caught the train to B_____ before it pulled out, I was out of breath and had the feeling I had dropped something important in my dash. But no, everything seemed fine. As there were no doubles available, I insinuated myself into a window seat, next to a fat woman. At least, I assumed she was fat, though it was hard to tell, and needless to say I didn’t probe for where her apparently numerous layers of coats and assorted loose garments ended and her actual flesh began. A bald man opposite was already regarding me from over his newspaper when I looked at him, but he dropped his eyes quickly. Encouraged by this small victory, I took further stock of my surroundings and companion passengers. The seat diagonally opposite mine had as its occupant a man who was fast and, to judge from the repose of his fine features, serenely asleep. He was remarkable primarily for his moustache, which was a fine specimen, curling upwards at the tips (for which style there is probably a name, though I don’t know it), and secondarily for the fact that he appeared to be very short indeed; his feet seemed to have a good inch of clearance between their drooping toe-points and the floor.
In the four seats across the aisle there sat a young man and woman opposite one another, apparently a couple, and seemingly engrossed in conversation. By the window, there was another man, with a pudgy, stubbly face, and thick- rimmed glasses, in totality producing such a familiar look that he must be one of those people who construct their image consciously, or semi-consciously, by choosing and copying one of a finite number of instantly recognisable types. Which is to say that you certainly see a lot of people who look like him about and they can hardly not be aware of the fact of their ubiquity, unless the workings of the human mind are so strange that they mark only their unique features when they look in the mirror, oblivious to the fact that any individuality they perceive is lost on the rest of us. After a while of scrutinising him, wondering whether it would be a social obstacle or at least an embarrassment, if you were one of those people, to have a friend who had cultivated the same look, and deciding that for me it would (imagine walking into a bar together and looking like two cartoon characters, being all but indistinguishable to your mutual passing acquaintances), I had the unpleasant feeling that my voyeurism, which I had felt was safely and subtly inconspicuous, was in fact being monitored by this man – not directly, but in the reflection of the window. Instead of looking away quickly, which every peeping Tom knows from experience is a dead giveaway, I kept looking but made my gaze less focussed, more (I hoped) glassy and introspective or disinterested or even gormless, and in short more like the kind of look that everyone has all the time, or at least for much of it. After all, one’s eyes have to be directed somewhere. In any case, I realised that he seemed actually to be looking not at me but at my own neighbour, the possibly fat woman (who was obviously the one person I could not satisfactorily assess without a serious violation of social mores, or without a pretence strategy I felt would be more than a little pointless). If this were the case, I hoped my own scrutiny did not take quite the same form as his, as his reflected eyes flashed, while I was looking, something in their expression I would call a lasciviousness, but in a somehow deeply unhealthy way, which was accentuated (to my sensibility) by the film of sweat which seemed to cling to his expanse of facial skin. The more I considered his oozing pores and folds of pink neck fat, the more faint, silent horror I felt. Horror, of course, is too strong a word, but the feeling was definitely an early step on the road to true horror, and I felt that there would come a point of latched and hypnotised fascination after which it would be hard to reverse from the gathering disaster. I knew his object of attention, next to me, was reading, or pretending to read, and so was perhaps naively unaware of the meanings that were being projected onto her, contained in the man’s furtive gaze.
Such were the scant visual stimulations on offer.
I was cursing myself for packing my book at the bottom of my rucksack, which, although not large, was bulging dangerously with all manner of stuff I had crammed into it without much thought for utility, but rather with the intention of feeling some reassuring signifiers to be near at hand. Bored, I tried to tune in to the low conversation that the young man and woman were having. The quietness and the background noise made it difficult, as did the curiously flat tone of their voices, which sounded devoid of any emotion or animation, but which equally were without dissatisfaction or antagonism. The man was dominating the conversation:
“So we stayed at the venue until about midnight, which was after Paul’s band played. They were good but, you know, I’ve seen them like a hundred times [ I won’t include any more of the likes or you knows that peppered the short conversation in my transcription] so we thought we’d leave and just go round to Chris’ place for a few drinks-”
Here he was cut short by the female voice:
“You mean Chris from our halls?”
“Yeah that’s right,” he replied, sounding mildly annoyed to have been interrupted, “and we stayed there till late, then I came home”
“How late?”
“I dunno, two, maybe three.”
“And who was there?” If this insistent line of questioning (pedantic, yes, but perhaps she had her reasons) bothered him then he didn’t seem to show it. He listed some names, which were all male, pausing between them for thought, or while pretending to think, and as he said the fourth of the names (which was James, or Jim, or Jack, or something similar), he momentarily looked up and looked her in the eye. At this point I was struck by the absolute certainty that he was lying, and, which is even more far-fetched, but believe me, the certainty that she knew he was lying – despite the fact that her face remained as impassive as before and her voice was still as toneless when she gave her brief acknowledgement of the list he had reeled off, using a word which may have been “right” or “OK”, or perhaps was even just a sound like “aha” or “hmm”, sounds which when written respectively conventionally convey either an epiphany which marks a shift in conversational status, or a (disingenuous) contemplation of something, but which in real life do not necessarily stand for these things. It struck me that the woman knew he was lying but calmly accepted the lie for reasons of her own, and this made me unhappy as I felt the realisation at that moment that truth and lies, or any kind of intention, are unimportant when compared to the way they are received (as old Roland Barthes could tell you), that judging a proposition by its truth or falsehood was somehow anachronistic at best, dangerous and unlikely to lead anywhere good or fun at worst, and I concluded my conjecture by wishing that some of my own lies, both big and small, told over the span of my life, had been received in the same spirit: as lies, as symptoms of a common ailment perhaps, but not with pathology of interpretation, and not as means or ends. At this point I opened my bag to retrieve my book, feeling the weight even of so relatively short a journey suddenly unbearably oppressive, and, as I had feared, the contents, freed from their constraint, seized the opportunity to burst out and spill onto the carriage floor, which, along with my embarrassed efforts to collect and re-inter them, made me the centre of attention for a while.
