Short Story: Commute

Submission

This story is one of the few I submitted to a magazine. It didn’t make the cut but I still like it enough to share with you, dear reader. It’s a short story with a pretty clear collection of themes and what always felt to me like a pleasing format. I hope you enjoy it!

Commute

by Ronan McNamee

The train doors beep beep beep behind me. I stand on the slick floor and liberally drip. A clunk and a peep signal the train’s readiness to depart. I sigh.

The carriage is half full of half drowned suits and sodden hairdos. Ill-placed umbrellas release their gathered torrent in streams. It’s safer in a seat so I seek one out. All the usual faces, the grumps and the chatterers, the sleepy-heads and the readers, the men and the women. I’m looking for a woman. I get chatted up enough in work. There’s Sophia, eyes closed, head back against the headrest, lips pursed, breathing regular. That’s what I named her, of course. I’ve never even spoken to her. To me, she is the epitome of ‘Sophia,’ perfectly turned out, black hair, sallow skin, sophisticated. Too sophisticated, in fact, to even be fazed by the goings-on on the train. I’ve never seen her so much as open her eyes, though I’m certain she’s not sleeping. Distant cymbals can be heard from her earphones. In my mind that’s the percussion on a Zucchero song. I sit next to her and sigh another sigh, anxiety creeping up my oesophagus. Every moment is a moment closer to another eight hours in hell.

I wipe the last crumb of sleep from my eye and look around. The seats are all packed with familiar commuters. A holidaying couple corral their luggage in the space in front of the doors at one end of the carriage, a cyclist obliviously pisses off regulars at the other end. Debs is sitting across the aisle from me. Debs plays games all weekend long. It’s her only escape from a life that is otherwise unsatisfactory. She works in a game store where her boss leers at her and the customers joke about whether they would or wouldn’t as though she were a lewd selfie. Not my finest character to date. Swap the game store for a music store, her leering boss for my lecherous one (Greg has been ogling me since the interview) and her gaming for my vinyl collection and Debs is basically me. A little one dimensional, maybe. I notice she’s looking a wee bit uncomfortable with the attentions of the guy across the table from her. She pretends to apply her makeup, glances once anxiously at him over her compact. I watch as her irises widen and her mascara applicator pauses mid-stroke. She’s rocked by a shudder, almost drops the mirror, but her eyes are captured by his.

I take a look at her captor. The man is grey, not of hair, which is more like stringy, dry rice noodles, but of complexion. He seems ancient, mostly dust and brittle bones wrapped imperfectly in paper. His suit is a pigeon-grey that was once a raven-black. A black orb shifts under his bald brow, tracking Debs’ movements. I shiver involuntarily but I can’t keep my gaze from him. He fascinates me. He’s a physical manifestation of “Swordfishtrombones.” The train jolts to a stop. Debs breaks his hold on her. Then, heels and umbrella thrown out behind her, she click-clacks through the train car and out the beeping doors as fast as her bejegginged legs will carry her.

Swordfishtrombones just sits there, eyes in his lap with his gathered hands. The top of his head is blackened and blemished with sores and liver spots beneath his noodle-hair. I look away, out the window past Sophia, and turn up the volume on “Hazards of Love.” He doesn’t even look up when I pass him on my way to alight at Central.

Next morning and I’m taking off my shades to get a better look at my seating options as I step on the 08:09. My sun-dappled mood darkens as I spot all those usual faces. I struggle past Mrs Costello’s enormous handbag, sprawled in the aisle as per usual, Tuesday to Saturday. Mrs Costello I named for Elvis (‘Every Day I Write The Book’ Elvis, not ‘Suspicious Mind’ Elvis.) It’s her thick, black spectacle frames and spiky, black hairdo. She blabs away on her mobile, unaware of the commuter trauma caused by her oversized hand luggage.

My seat is the same as yesterday, right beside Sophia. Debs is missing, though. Odd. She normally applies her make-up somewhere on my carriage between 8:09 and whatever time she gets off, Monday to Friday. Maybe she’s on holiday, maybe she’s sick. Swordfishtombones is absent today too. I name the resulting emotion, “relievappointed.”

I fill my ears with Joanna Newsom. “Caaas-i-o-p-ah,” sings Joanna as I stew yesterday’s memories, mixing Greg’s lewd condescension with a dollop of Fallout-Boy-kid’s breast-obsession and a healthy twist of my own pickled bitterness. By the time I step onto the platform it has been stirred up into what I can only describe as a reddish-brown anxiety bisque. I sigh hard and march off to my doom again.

Black vinyl hair hangs in front of my face. Rain water falls from it in a sheet. I feel like bawling. I’m sick of this fucking train and all these assholes being herded to their shitty jobs in their depressing offices. I’m sick of this fucking country and its roulette-wheel weather not to mention its cheap, plastic umbrellas. I stand, fuming for a minute as I wipe my face and then check out my raccoon bandit mask in my reversed phone camera. Great! Fucking Wednesday! I pull a wipe out of my bag and stomp to the nearest free seat to sort my makeup out. My seat is at the same table that is occupied every week day by Indian Lou Reed (I assume this needs no explanation.) Indian Lou Reed nods at me but does not smile. I glare at him. Indian Lou Reed’s day job is as warehouse manager of a mid-size office-supply company where he attempts to ignore his colleagues’ casual racism all day long. But by night he is front man to tribute band, “The Velvet Underworld,” which cleverly mashes the music of his two favourite bands. It looks like he had a hard night on stage last night but the worst signs of it are hidden by his trademark shades.

Across the aisle… My breath actually catches. Directly across the aisle from me sits Swordfishtrombones. A spider crawls up my spine and another one skitters around my brain. He looks different, not younger exactly but more filled out, a starving man who’s had a good meal. On his head the dried noodles have become more like greasy squid ink pasta, plastered thinly to his worm-grey scalp. In profile I can make out the frayed end of a smile. I am staring now and I have no shame. His one visible eye, a marble shifting around in its pallid socket, draws me in. It reminds me of an old cathode ray tube television that has been switched off, dark and distortingly reflective. I glance away from his eye to see even his suit is a little more raven and a little less pigeon today. This time the object of his attentions is Sophia. Sophia has her eyes open. They are bloodshot and rheumy. This startles me more than Swordfishtrombones’ trip to the mortuary’s make-over artist.
Sophia’s face is almost unrecognisable. Gone is the sophisticated lady. Here sits an alcoholic bereft of hope. I can see a sob struggling to escape her throat as her lip trembles. She’s watching Swordfishtrombones. In fact, she can’t rip her bloody eyes from his. I want to reach out to her, touch her arm and comfort her, tell her he’s just some weirdo, tell her she’s too classy for this sort of behaviour. Instead, I keep my hands folded in my lap and watch their psychic battle over the table. I watch them until my stop is announced. I rise, feeling a hard, little bubble of anxiety squirming up from my belly. I back away down the aisle, all the while watching Sophia’s eyes. The doors beep, I start to turn to leave, Sophia’s eyes flicker my way, irises like bullet holes in her vein-cracked eyes. She fixes me with that gaze, pleading, then terrified, then resigned, then they flick back to Swordfishtrombones and I run. I’m weeping freely by the time I hit the platform.

“Why don’t I just quit,” is the question of the day. It is the question of many days, honestly. “Money,” and “fear,” are the usual answers. I’m on the train again. Preoccupied, I shove my sunglasses up on top of my head and sit opposite Mrs Costello. Auto-pilot. I’m on auto-pilot. That bastard, Greg. That fucking bastard. Did I lead him on? Did he just get the wrong idea? Maybe I said something to make him think I wanted to fuck him in the dirty old fucking shitty storeroom. Fuck that! This is not me! I don’t think this way! I’m beginning to understand why people do think this way, though. My stupid brain repeats this loop or something very similar every few minutes. Finally, my stomach lurches as the train pulls into Central. I close my eyes, clamp my jaw shut and rise.

Friday! I wish the Cure song were true. I’m not in love though, I think I’m in hate. My head pounds and I feel sick. One more day with that bastard. The sky roars as I mind my step through the 8:29’s sliding doors. I turn to watch the first tentative drops. I’m not even seated before a psychotic drummer starts to beat out a cacophony along the roof. My eyes are drawn to the darkening world beyond the window as I take a seat across a table from Mrs Costello. I choose it so he can’t sit opposite me. I can’t deal with any further existential terror this morning. My life is doing a good enough job providing that all on its own. Once I’m sitting, Sophia occurs to me. I was so wrapped up in my own shit yesterday I didn’t even look for her. I grip my armrest and whip my head around, the better to check out the carriage. No Sophia. I turn back knowing he’s there across from me. I keep my eyes closed, as if mid-blink. He comes with the rain. He comes with the misery and the end of the rope. He comes when you need him. I open my eyes.

Today he looks more like a rakish undertaker. His hair is slicked into a cow’s lick across his maggot-coloured forehead, the ghosts of black eyebrows have grown above his eyes, right above his… dark, quarry pool eye…