Steve, travels from work (1)
Sitting beside a woman reading Vogue, like some maniac Japanese commuter reading a manga text on the Tokyo subway/metro eyes raking the images, if they are even seen at all, no difference registering between images in editorial and advertising copy - just images, pages flicking by at 5 frames a second, but who's counting ?
Its a northbound tube train, DH sitting opposite, some part of the system has broken down, somewhere. Bored Steve begins to talk about a TV program of the previous night, which had been about the return of the mythical illness TB - what would Thomas Mann have written about without it - Steve says - The Magic Mountain, the dance of words wrapped up in myth. How it became a disease returning like the repressed and so on.
Then a swift inversion as the other woman, drunk next to him on the other side began to talk about how she'd a friend who had got TB - he's in Whipps Cross hospital you know - he'd been in Columbia and maybe he'd got it there, he's been in hospital since April - my friends say don't drink and share the cups with him - (Oh shit she's gone into an never-ending loop) - but he's my friend and I do - he's in Whipps Cross hospital you know - he'd been in Columbia and maybe he'd got it there, (why me) - he's been in hospital since April - my friends say don't drink and share the cups with him - but he's my friend and I do - he's in Whipps Cross hospital you know - he'd been in Columbia and maybe he'd got it there, he's been in hospital since April - my friends say don't drink and share the cups with him - but he's my friend and I do. Why did he get it ? do you know ? The disease has returned, mutated into new forms. You need isolation hospitals, new drugs. Its about probability, go to Columbia and it's 10% etc.... he's my friend and I do but my friends say don't drink and share the cups with him - He didn't sleep around, no women you know, no drugs not a dangerous lifestyle..... Do you know what methadone linctus is ? Yes I know what methadone is. DH said sorry ? - methadone ? - no I don't. She reached down and began to take a large brown bottle out of her leather bag. Sudden smirks from the drug aware as the guy on the left of DH almost falls off his seat suppressing his convulsions, a shade of William Burroughs drifts through the train. Steve thinks she'll drink it down on the train next to him, in one gulp. It says on the label - don't take with alcohol - Mrs Lawrence. She gets cross at his suppressed smirk not knowing that he his laughing at his own reaction not at her ludicrous and pitiful responses. He thinks that life is shorter than he'd like and wonders how come he's in a teflon raincoat and she's a methadone junkie....
It's not like this everyday just on those occasional days when the world feels like creeping up and reminding him that things aren't quite as he imagines. Maybe she's got an angel crying over her, Steve thinks as he gets off the train at Finchley Road, no longer able to stay sitting next to her, retreating out onto the platform to buy a quick glass of wine and some chocolate from the newspaper stand, he buys a copy of Le Monde and quickly retreats into the reading about safe things such as the war in Afghanisatan and the slaughter of some more Muslims.
Steve de Vos - London November 1996