There was a definite hint of trepidation as I clicked into my skis at the beginning of the tour. A Sunday morning, early, the day after the perfect storm that never arrived. I had woken up at 7 to clear blue skies, and at that moment it became certain. I was going to the mountains. Call Rodrigo, Ciro — shall we take the skis? I stepped out onto the balcony as I hit the call button on my phone. It was a little too warm for 7.15 in the morning. Rodrigo isn’t taking his skis, Ciro is. One all. I finish my cup of coffee and pick up my ski boots. I might as well take them. After all, I can always leave them in the car.

I arrive at Plaza America 15 minutes early to find some slight confusion. Nobody knows if there’s space or not, and the bus has gone to the wrong place. It arrives and people jump aboard, Rodrigo and I are last — we didn’t sign up after all, and it turns out there’s no seats left. Never mind, that’s why I brought my car. Rodrigo gets in the passenger seat, with the usual comments about how much discount I got for having the steering wheel on the wrong side. Plug in the Ipod and Eric Clapton is singing Layla. We look at the cloudless sky, look at each other, and smile. This is going to be a good day. Down the motorway, into Quirós, and then up the pass towards Puerto Ventana. There’s not much snow, but the temperature is dropping. Soon we catch up to the bus, and start climbing. Patches of snow start to appear. Another fifteen minutes later and I’m driving slowly, a good distance behind the minibus, wondering if I’ll make it to the top of the pass without getting out and putting chains on. We made it. Just.

We get out of the car. “Joder” — Rodrigo breathes in sharply.“Fuck, it’s cold!”. And it is cold. Cold enough — and snowy enough to get the skis out. And so after a little discussion and a few jokes, we’re standing on the snow, skins on, ready to head off up the mountain. The target is El Ranchón, a summit of about 2100m. There’s still some way to go, but as I stride past the others, gliding over the top of the snow they are sinking into, knee-deep, I start to think that I’ve made the right decision.

Heading up past the walkers

Two hours later I’m struggling up an icy slope, watching the walkers in crampons filing past. I really need to buy some ski-crampons. They certainly would make life easier in these conditions, but a month cross country skiing in Norway has taught me a thing or too about skiing uphill, and I manage better than the more experienced skiers think I would. There are even one or two words of praise. “You’re brave, coming up this without them” comments one of my companions. That’s one word for it, I reply, thinking to myself that perhaps stupid or stubborn might be more appropriate. The ice steepens and steepens; It’s alright when it’s textured by the wind or breakable, giving me something to dig the edges of my skis into, but as Ciro and I approach the top, it starts to get really tricky, and the last 15 meters take me about ten minutes, laboriously side-stepping my way up. “It’s all worth it when you’re up here” he shouts down to me.

Heading up behind the walkers!

On the peak, a swig of water and a bite to eat, then I peel the climbing skins off my skis – without taking the skis off, much to the surprise of Ciro. “How do you do that?” he asks. It’s good to know that I learned a few things in Norway that I can teach to people over here. Ciro is still eating, and besides, I suppose I should go first for a change. “Right, I’m off”, I tell him. I slide towards the edge of the summit, and my earlier worries become more concrete. I look down at the 60º sheet of ice below me, with a few rocky islands sticking out here and there, and realise that the days I spend skiing on-piste in Andorra won’t help me at all here. But there’s no way i’m coming all the way up a mountain with skis on my feet and then taking them off to go down. Count to three. One. Two.

Getting ready for the off.

Three. And I push off, sliding sideways down the first few metres through a gap in the rocks only just wide enough for my skis. “Faster is Easier. Faster is Easier”, I repeat to myself, the advice I got from pretty much every experienced skier I asked. I point my skis downhill, and start to pick up the pace. Lean left, lean right, and lean forward. Ski aggressively. Oh my god, it’s working, I’m going, I’m not on my arse! I see someone at the bottom taking photos, and realise I have remained on my feet for the whole steep section. I start to cruise towards Alberto, his camera still trained on me. I look up from the snow in front of me, smile, and my ski tip drops into a hiker’s footprint. Before I know what’s happened I’m in a heap on the floor. I burst out laughing. So do the spectators. “And it was all going so well”, I comment. I get myself back on my feet, and continue on down, sightly flatter now. The next descent seems easier at first, but I hit a patch of ice and cartwheel down the hill, hearing my left shoulder crunch as I go over. A quick yelp, count to three, and back up again. It’ll get better by next weekend, I think to myself. I’m right-handed anyway.

Ovidio at the beginning of the walking part.

As I approach the beginning of the next downhill section, someone calls out. If I want to get back to my car, I need to put my foot down. I cruise down the last downhill section, flying past all the hikers until I take a final comedy bail into a snowbank. This time I stand up unharmed. Ovidio is standing, waiting for me, looking amused by my enthusiastic incompetence. We ski to the bus together, two perfect examples: one of how to ski, and one of how not to ski. I’ll let you guess which was which. The final couple of kilometres we have to walk, carrying our skis. We arrive at the bus, and the weather is closing in. We’re all onboard just in time, and the doors close as the cloud, wind and snow arrive. Back up to the car, a quick repack, and Rodrigo and I are on our way down, wondering where the bus got to. As we arrive at the bar everyone is stopping at on the way home, we still can’t work out how it got down so fast.

In the bar I continually decline the cider I’m offered, choosing cecina and chorizo instead, nursing a lemonade. This is the price you pay for not signing up for the trip in advance. Chatting away, I am always amazed by how keen all these people that I have just met are to help me. “I’ve done the bike-ride you’re doing this easter,” says Alberto,” I’ll see if I can dig out some maps and stuff”. Last week, Miguel, who is sitting opposite us, lent me a pair of bicycles for the trip. I think back to England, and wonder how many people would lend be a bike after I’d known them for a fortnight. Not so many, I think to myself. More jokes about my backwards car, and finally everyone is rounded up and it’s time to go. Rodrigo and his fiancée María José pile into my car for the ride back to Oviedo, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to wipe the smile off my face for the next few days. I drop them near my house, and we say our goodbyes. “So, I’ll call you next weekend then,” says Rodrigo, “and let you know what we’re up to. There will probably still be snow in the Picos.”

Living for the weekend. This is my weekend.

I’ve cleared my diary.

Related posts:

1. A busy few months
2. Winter is coming…
3. Let it snow

In Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, one of the many methods used to create a Native American narrative, rather than a Westernised one, is the radical re-versioning of Western-Christian mythology. In the sections of the novel which detail the various versions and revisions of the traditional western creation myth, King satirises and reinvents many of the cornerstone figures of Christianity, and at the same time muddles them with Native American creation myths, Western literature and popular culture, creating a new story of creation with no sense of time, space or tradition. Furthermore, his use of magical realism to blend this mythology with the everyday throughout the novel demystifies the creation stories, leaving the stories, and perhaps more importantly their protagonists, open to criticism from and comparison to a modern and quotidian point of view.

The book is structured as a series of interlinked ‘real life’ plots, interspersed by this new creation myth. The real and the magical are intrinsically intertwined, and often the surreal and real sections are linked by sharing the same words in the last lines of one section and the first lines of the next (e.g “Well, for one thing, what happened to them?’ / ‘What happened to the trees’” [pp. 21–2], “‘Have we made another mistake?’ / Lionel had made only three mistakes in his entire life” [pp. 29–30]). This magical realism further confuses the already muddled creation myth with the novel’s ‘real’ plot, which forces the reader to accept a view of the world where the divine or magical can, and does, affect every day life.

King imposes Native American mythology upon Christianity as Christian mythology was forced upon the Native Americans during the colonisation. The very beginning of the book serves to demonstrate how ridiculous, not to mention sacrilegious and insulting, this practise must have seemed to Native Americans by reversing the process. King chooses the holiest of holies, the all seeing Christian ‘God’, as his first point of attack, reducing this omniscient, omnipotent being to nothing more than a dream (thus refuting the traditional Christian notion of God as an all powerful being, apart from and above human experience), and further more a dream of a dog, traditionally an animal used in western cultures to represent an inferior being. By casting God as little more than a petulant, confused animal King immediately trivialises and insults the basis of all Christian belief in the same way that early Christian settlers in the Americas brushed aside belief systems as established, if not more so, than their own as primitive or ridiculous: “I am god, says that Dog Dream. ‘Isn’t that cute,’ says Coyote. ‘That Dog Dream is contrary. That Dog Dream has everything backward’”(p. 2). This could also be seen as a direct contradiction of Genesis, in which God gives man dominion over animals; within this revision of the creation myth it seems that an animal — Coyote — has dominion over God. Even an attempt to categorise Coyote as a God figure fails, as the nameless narrator affirms later in the book that “[t]his world is full of Coyotes” (p. 272).

The author similarly dispenses with other quintessential biblical figures. Noah is portrayed as a sex-starved misogynist, who follows a perverted set of Christian rules (amongst which, for example, is “Thou Shalt Have Big Breasts”[p. 147]). The Angel Gabriel (A. A. Gabriel) we see as a stereotypical politician figure, “a little short guy with a big briefcase” (p. 269), trying to coerce Thought Woman into signing a contract for the immaculate conception, but constantly revealing himself to be not who he seems. First he shows a business card which has two sides (on one “A. A. Gabriel, Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.” [p.269] on the other “A. A. Gabriel, Heavenly Host” [p. 270]), then instead of the contract he pulls out some papers containing the phrase “as long as the grass is green and the waters run” (p. 271), a phrase often used in contracts between settlers and natives when Canada was colonised – contracts that were frequently broken. This depiction of the Angel Gabriel as a sort of double-agent also serves as a metaphor for how religion has been used by colonisers for far more self-serving purposes than simply ‘enlightening’ Native Americans, and parodies modern political machinery and the deceptions that are made through manipulation of Native Americans and of the media: “No problem, says A. A. Gabriel. Sign this paper… We’re going to need a picture” (p. 271).

Even Jesus Christ himself is mockingly portrayed, in one of Kings several versions of the creation story, as “Young Man Walking on Water” (p. 350). Far from the kind, gentle, benevolent Christ of the Bible, this Christ is angry and self-important. He portrays his biblical qualities of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence as more “Christian Rules… And the first rule that is no one can help me. The second rule is that no one can tell me anything. Third, no one is allowed to be in two places at once. Except me.” Coming from the mouth of an angry young man, instead of a mysticised messianic figure, these three cornerstones of Christian belief sound ridiculous, and the tone of their delivery is almost childish. After Old Woman saves the disciples on the boat, and Christ takes the credit, King also mocks another of Christianity’s failings: its inherent misogyny. When one of the men in the boat points out that it was Old Woman that saved them, and not Christ, Christ replies: “Nonsense…That other person is a woman.”

King further dilutes the importance of the Western creation myth by including several incongruous characters, all from books largely regarded as colonialist (the same characters as which First Woman, Thought Woman, Changing Woman and Old Woman disguise themselves, and as which these four women are present in the real world as the four escaped Indians). These characters are archetypal colonialists, and there are many examples of this (in fact, nearly everything these characters say is verging on cliché in its portrayal of colonialist ideals). One such striking example would be the dialogue between Thought Woman and Robinson Crusoe, which epitomises the colonialist destructively patronising ideology of bringing a superior style of life to inferior people: “as a civilised white man, it has been difficult not having someone of color around whom I could educate and protect”.  King expounds this point in each of the sections relating to a character from Western fiction, the final of which is Nasty Bumppo. Here, King makes the point in the most blunt and obvious dialogue in the text, as Bumppo lists what he calls “Indian gifts” and “white gifts” (p. 393), and King continues:

“So, says Old Woman. Whites are superior, and Indians are inferior.Exactly right, says Nasty Bumppo. Any questions?‘Oops,’ says Coyote. ‘We have a problem.’‘Only if you’re an Indian,’ I says.” (p. 393)

Ultimately by juxtaposing Western and Native American mythologies, King deconstructs the Christian creation story, and shows us that through the eyes of a Native American, it is as primitive and ridiculous as Native American traditions seemed to the colonists that settled in Canada and tried to displace and ‘educate’ the American Indians who lived there. Instead, he reconstructs a world where everyone, and everything is fallible, and even the mythical characters who created the world are prone to mistakes – King’s characters even describe the great flood and Christ’s birth as mistakes, appropriating Christian biblical events into King’s invented muddle of Native and Christian mythology:

“‘The last time you fooled around like this,’ said Robinson Crusoe, ‘the world got very wet.’
‘And we had to start all over again,’ said Hawkeye […]
‘But I was helpful, too,’ says Coyote. ‘That woman who wanted a baby. Now, that was helpful.’
‘Helpful!’ said Robinson Crusoe. ‘You remember the last time you did that?’ […]
‘We haven’t straightened out that mess yet,’ said Hawkeye.” (p. 416)

King’s humour, though, throughout the novel, means that this de/reconstruction of mythologies is not as aggressive or destructive as it could be. This is a book of many messages, with an enormous number of possible interpretations, and there are certainly a few direct criticisms of the way that Western settlers treat Native Americans and their traditions. In some respects, though, by mixing and muddling the two mythologies to create a single mythology which is universally absurd, King is demonstrating the similarities, as well as the differences, between the two cultures. Not only does he mock the Christian creation myth, but by using this comic style, also the Native American one. He makes fun of Native American oral traditions with his constantly restarting narrative of the creation as much as the western written literary idiom with his depiction of Moby-Jane, the black lesbian whale, and his stereotyped and exaggerated literary figures. By creating a world in which all traditions and cultures are ridiculous, King demonstrates that it is impossible to impose a predetermined set of cultural signifiers onto another culture and another culture’s mythology, in either direction. Perhaps this is best summed up by Kings narrator, when Coyote interrupts with a series of suggestions for where Old Woman fell when she fell from the sky, trying to impose images from several different cultures into the narrator’s story. The narrator finally tells the Coyote to abandon this tactic of trying to make different cultures to conform to each other’s ideologies, and replies:

“‘Where do you get these things?’ I says.
‘I read a book,’ says Coyote.
‘Forget the book,’ I says. ‘We’ve got a story to tell.’” (p. 349)

Related posts:

1. “What’s a play without a woman in it?”: The Role of Women in The Spanish Tragedy
2. Mrs. Dalloway
3. Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and The Death of the Author

Every addict knows the feeling. Itching, tickling, scratching away at you. I need another fix. And it’s been too long. I’m not picky any more, I’m willing to go for something less pure, willing to steal a little to get it. Steal a little time from classes; give up on that night out so that I can get up early just to see if the weather is good. I need to get into the mountains. I don’t mind any more if it’s climbing or running, skiing or just walking, but I need to get out.

But the next problem is just as bad: nobody understands your addiction. Just come out, don’t bother this weekend, come on, wouldn’t you rather be out with your friends? “Sure”, I think. I’d rather be out with my friends. In the mountains. So you have to make new friends, friends who are addicts like you. And the cycle deepens. Soon there is no escape, it becomes normal, even mundane.

Getting my fix.

And when it becomes mundane, that’s when it really gets bad. When last week’s fix just isn’t enough anymore. You need something harder, stronger, a richer experience. You have to push your limits, exhaust yourself, put yourself in harm’s way. And you try to explain, but there are no words to describe the feeling; there is no logic to your actions.

And so nobody understands.

No related posts.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we tell stories. I enjoy writing, and it is obvious to me that the invention of the written word, and more specifically the invention of the printing press and mass media, has been more or less the most fundamental revolution in the history of what we now know as literature. It is abundantly clear what we have gained by this revolution, and we are quick to cite the many advantages: the mass dissemination of literature; a huge increase in literacy; the preservation of literary and historical texts not only for centuries and millennia, but with the advent of digitisation perhaps infinitely. But how often do we focus on what we most obviously lost: the Oral Tradition. By this I mean the art of telling stories, and reciting poetry not from any book or record, but from memory. Whilst on the face of it this might seem a small distinction (after all, what is the difference between reciting a poem from an anthology and memorising it verbatim?), the real difference lies in how literature is transferred from person to person.

A literary tradition in a folkloric idiom, from the Icelandic Saga to the Basque contest-poetry of bertsolaritza has many key differences from a written one. These stories, passed down from generation to generation and often with some degree of improvisation create a literature in constant evolution. It is also a literature which, apart from a very few respected storytellers, does not elevate the author to the revered position that he occupies in modern written literature — in fact, there is no real concept of author in a story told for so many years that it simply becomes ‘a story’ rather than ‘a story by x’. It is a literature which applauds deviating from the original, improvising, improving, forgetting and remembering. It is a literature which thrives on constant innovation. Even in the act of transcribing Sagas and other primarily oral traditions we are irrevocably altering the dynamic of a literature which previously existed in a state of constant evolution and flux. It is also a literature in which any evolution is gradual, there are few paradigm shifts, since the basic stories stay more or less the same for decades if not centuries.

There is no solution to this problem. Oral storytelling and tradition (and by this I more specifically I mean the skill of remembering and telling stories that are never written down) is all but dead in first-world western culture. In written stories, and even in recordings of stories being told we are creating a subtle but crucial change in how these stories are transmitted: we are giving the listener the ability to re-read, re-listen, and therefore learn much more closely the stories being told. That is to say, the re-teller of a story no longer has to gloss over or make up the parts of the story that he doesn’t remember. However, it seems ridiculous not to record a tradition that is so obviously on the decline. These opposing points of view are equally valid, and I find it almost impossible not to agree, however hypocritically, with both statements. I cannot deny that the written word, and in most cases modern media, is supremely beneficial to society: it allows the development and retention of complex ideas and fantastic levels of creativity through development and revision; it allows us to learn and transmit knowledge in a way that is all but impossible within a society with no knowledge of the written word; it allows the dissemination of this knowledge to previously unthinkable numbers of people.

But part of me really misses being told a good story.

Related posts:

1. Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and The Death of the Author

I headed up into the mountains today for a run, after frustratingly not being able to find anyone to go climbing with in the first spell of good weather we’ve had for nearly a fortnight. I knew where I was going, I’d been before with Simon. Blast down the motorway towards Léon, come off at Campomanes, then follow the signs to Sotiello, through Tuiza and on to Tuiza Arriba — the end of the road. After getting stuck behind some heavy machinery on its way to one of the many construction sites for the new high-speed railway, I passed the last half built tunnel, and I was away, slowly twisting my way up the winding switchback road to the top. After the steep climb of almost 1000 metres (poor car!) which had my water bottle crackling all the way up with the pressure, I parked up in Tuiza Arriba, got out of my car and stared at the mountains in front of me.

Snow on the mountains behind Tuiza Arriba (1300m), Asturias, Spain

They were covered in snow.

Of course, I knew that the first snows had hit the Picos de Europa last week, but this was some one thousand metres lower in altitude, and still there was a decent covering. My mind was racing with the possibilities for climbing in the big mountains. Now the need to find a partner of equal ability and experience is even more pressing. I pulled myself away from the view and after a quick stretch — I never was a great believer in long warm-ups — I set off running. I wanted to reach the col above the village so that I could see the view on the other side, and with sunset in two hours, I was going to have to get a move on. Oh well, I thought, I’ve packed a head-torch, what’s the worst that can happen.

As it turns out, Bulls. Lots of bulls, all over the path I was running along. I’d driven nearly an hour to get here, there was no way I was turning back. I started trotting towards them, and to my amazement, they all turned and ran away. It must have been a bad hair day. With my bovine obstacles out of the way, all that stood between me and the col was… well, a very steep hill. I arrived at the top, some 400 metres higher and 4 kilometres along the track, panting and spluttering my way to an incredible view. After soaking it up for a few minutes, I noticed that my hands were numb. It was windy and cold up here, and I was dressed for running, not for hanging about. Better get back on the move, before I get so cold that I injure myself. I looked behind me at Tuiza, my starting point. It seemed a long way, although thankfully now it was a long way down, instead of a long way up.

Looking down on Tuiza from the col above. You can just see the village in the valley below.

I tumbled back down, my earlier adversaries nowhere to be seen, and had a quick look around the village before getting into my car and riding the brakes all the way down to the motorway. This is how I want to spend my afternoons. This is why I came here. This is Asturias.

Related posts:

1. Junkie
2. A busy few months

I’m not sure anything sums up my first month in Spain better than making this post a day late. It’s been hectic and laid back at the same time, I’ve met a mountain of new people, been to a lot of new places, and generally had a very good time. I’ve been climbing, studying, eating, drinking, exploring — I have that strange feeling of having been here forever, but at the same time being very conscious of how little time I really have here. The countryside around here is incredible, and I’ve spent a lot of my weekends in the mountains enjoying the unseasonally good weather with my newly found friends. I’m enjoying living here a lot, even if certain things, such as the massive ineffectiveness of the university administration, do frustrate the hell out of me. That’s all for now, I’m off to the beach!

Related posts:

1. Junkie

It’s been how long since I posted? I really need to get on with it, I’ve been doing so much in Spain that I hardly know where to start. I’m setting myself the deadline of one week to get a decent, interesting post up here. My God I’m lazy.

Related posts:

1. I’m getting bad at this…

So, Leeds is over for the next year. I’m back in Birmingham, and as of next Wednesday I will have nowhere to live in the city I had got used to calling home. It’s quite sad really, and it didn’t really hit me until I packed all my stuff up and saw my empty room. But now I can’t stop looking forward to Spain, which should be amazing! Birmingham has been pretty mundane so far (with one notable exception), since none of my friends are about, and I’ve been stricken by terrible hayfever which has kept me in the house most of the time. At least it has given me time to read, and to tinker with the blog among other things.

The exception was last monday, when I went along to take photos of my Mum’s birthday present to my Grandad — a day of falconry with a bloke on the edge of town. It was great fun, and the birds were amazing creatures. I had never realised (or really been able to see in my imagination) just how far these falcons can see. It’s literally miles, of course, but until you actually witness it in the flesh, it’s hard to picture. I got a few good photos too, although my hayfever did eventuall absolutely ruin me. A few more of my mates should be around in the next few days, so hopefully things will liven up a bit!

No related posts.

Playing around with a new layout for the site, hopefully it will be a bit easier on the eye than the last one. Of course the real reason I’m doing it is because hayfever has me imprisoned in my own house, and I have nothing better to do. Ho hum!

Related posts:

1. Blogger Bummer
2. Click

He sat on the train and stared at reflection stacked upon reflection in the window at his side. So fragile, a trick of the light. Everything was so fragile. It seemed to him that the carriage was a world of its own, a goldfish bowl for humanity. It wasn’t full, but it was busy. Bustling. People from all walks of life united only by a destination. Students, sitting at their laptops, furiously pretending to work; football fans, elated, steadily draining the train’s limited bar; businessmen with loosened ties and crumpled shirts slumped into the worn seats after another day in the city. How could they not see that it was all so fragile?

Each group of people existed in its own world, with its own language, its own culture; and here they clashed. The businessman looked over with irritation at the self-righteous laziness of the students. The student sneered at the football fans’ lack of formal education. The football fan laughed at the ‘suits’, tied in to the monotony of their profitable careers. He felt nothing for any of them, no empathy, no similarity, no disgust. For him, they simply existed, separate and set apart. He didn’t consider himself above them, so much as alongside, observing, detached.

He sat, watching, considering. He spent much of his time lost in thought, although rarely about himself. Seeing no use for introspection, he preferred to examine the outer workings of society, rather than the inner workings of his own mind. Had he taken time to plunge the depths of his own psyche, he would have found that his sense of detachment was partly due to a lack of confidence, the feeling of never belonging. Instead, he analysed the minutiae of daily life, the unnoticed machinations of modern society. It appeared to him that nobody else was aware of the sudden magnitude of everyday, split-second choices, the irreversible mechanisms of thought, the impossibility of making a right or wrong decision. Once we have acted, he assures himself, the alternatives simply cease to exist, and yet he wonders if this opinion of which he is so self-importantly proud is really just pompously post-modern.

* * *

Why did he keep staring at her? She hated the train. It was always like this, full of fucking weirdoes, louts and balding, middle-aged office-jockeys. They were the worst in a way, so urbane and condescending when they handed out their cards. Shit. He was staring again. If he kept this up she’d have to fucking move. And this was her seat! She’d reserved it, hadn’t she? She’d already had a stand-up row with some fat bitch who seemed to think that being old meant that you didn’t have to book a seat like everyone else. She screwed her headphones further into her ears. Salvation in stereo. Nobody tries to talk to you when you’re wearing headphones. Unless some prick actually taps you on the shoulder. She fucking hated that.

If she stopped looking at him he might stop staring. Or she wouldn’t know. Either way, it was better than eye-contact with that freak. She looked out of the window. Fields, fields, fields. She hated going home. She’d forged her independence, but only for eight months a year. She wished she could stay in London through the holidays, but she couldn’t afford the rent. And her parents were so fucking inconsiderate. They wouldn’t even help her out. “Get a job” they said. She had a job. They should try getting well-paid work in London without a fucking degree. And her tutor was always on her back about putting more time into the course. They didn’t have a clue about how hard it was for students now. “When I was at university…” seemed to start every sentence. Who cares? University twenty years ago might as well have not existed.

Field. Cow. Field. Cow. Field. Why did her parents live in such a boring place? There was never anything to do, no bars, no nightlife. There wasn’t even a cinema. Had he stopped staring yet? No, she could see him in the window. For fuck’s sake, what did this prick want? Weirdoes like him always seemed to pick her out. She closed her eyes. Another three months until she was back in London. Fuck.

* * *

He had noticed her just before Birmingham. He didn’t make an effort not to stare; he had never held much stock in the belief that staring was rude. She was an interesting study, so youthful, violent in her manner; so angry that she seemed almost serene, certain in her condemnation of all around her.  He was sure that he would be the focal point of her rage simply for looking, but this did not faze him. Indeed, he revelled in the glow of such strong emotion; emotion that he himself had never managed to replicate. He smiled as she forcefully twisted the headphones of her Walkman, a subtle outpouring of the discomfort that he supposed his attention was causing her.

He continued to stare, but was now distracted by the words falling all around him, pattering like raindrops, bouncing between the train’s tubular walls. He was not listening to any conversation in particular, but rather absorbing what he saw as a sublime symphony of syllables, The unique tone and colour of every voice added to the sumptuous texture of this aural canvas, which had a kind of ghostly timbre, not exactly haunting, but somehow ethereal, the absence of a single chain of communication destroying any sense of reality. If the words’ communicative sense was lost, were they still words? Could they still be seen as language, or were they simply noise, a cacophony of… unmeaning.

She had stopped looking at him, obviously she had decided that her confrontational glare would not work, and had moved on to ignoring him, pretending he wasn’t there. That was one way around it. But such a weak one, he couldn’t help thinking, and in that weakness some of his admiration for the girl was lost. He considered himself a thinker; a renaissance man, he supposed the stereotype was. But to be a renaissance man was to be stuck in the past, and he believed himself to be very much in the present. Still he was fixated on the girl. What was it about her that made her so compelling?

* * *

Turn on. Tune in. Drop out. They said she was part of the iPod generation. What the fuck did that mean? What, so because she listened to music she was somehow inferior? A ‘hoody’; an ‘asbo’? The kind of bigoted generalisations that made her cringe every time some middle-aged Daily Mail reader reeled them off. Cretins. And what did they suggest as an alternative: Gardening? Golf? Fuck that. She continued to glare out of the window. Whoever had said that thing about art galleries in the North  being pointless was right. There was no fucking life up here, let alone culture. Sheep. Field. Sheep. Field. Sheep. Nothing.

And her parents would be unbearable. It was always the same, paraded in front of auntie this and uncle that. Isn’t she grown up? Isn’t she pretty? Isn’t she standing right fucking there? They were coming up through Derby now. The beginning of the end. That station summed up what was coming. A series of green plywood boxes with yellow stripes surrounded the pillars, remnants of some half-finished building project doomed by budget cuts to become a permanent feature. They’d been building it ever since the railway was invented. She fucking hated that station. Birmingham, the end of the South, the last remnant of cultured society, had receded. And here she was in fucking Derby. She folded down her table and buried her head in her arms.

The minute she shut her eyes she was back in London. South Bank. Camden Town. Eel Pie Island. She missed it already. It was like a different world. Fuck. This was going to be a drag. She wasn’t even sure she’d get on with her old friends any more. What if they were just like before? Would they even have changed one little bit? Even thinking about them annoyed her. But then again thinking about her old self annoyed her just as much. She used to be such a fucking bumpkin.  The southerners laughed at her when she arrived in London. But she soon showed them that she could stick up for herself. She was a fighter. London was a war. She felt like one of those soldiers she’d read about coming home after world war two: No sense of purpose. Everything up here was so much less alive.

* * *

Wakefield. It was getting close to his stop. He had to change at York for Harrogate. The thought of leaving this train, stepping out of its atmosphere and bursting back into reality saddened him slightly. In the quotidian bustle of the city, there was no time for him to sit and watch; to examine, extract, extrapolate. His thoughts bounced back to the girl. Where was she getting off, he wondered? He resumed his vigil, trying to work out from her demeanour where she was going. He was certain she was a London girl; she had the air of stroppy self-confidence that pervaded the inhabitants of that pompous city. Although somehow it seemed false, put on. His mind worked to unravel her identity.

Why was she distracting him so much? He was usually able to distribute his time equally between his studies, watching each one, weighing them up against one another. This time, he was completely taken by the girl, but why? He didn’t have a daughter or a sister to relate her to, and she was far too young for him to find her attractive. He abandoned his abortive moment of self-examination, and plunged himself back into observation. He needed to divert his attention and regain his composure. He looked again at the reflections in the window, and noted his five o’ clock shadow. He wondered if other people watched like he did. Where would they put him, in what category would he reside; executive, aristocrat, banker? He didn’t suppose that self-taught intellectual was a category that was on many people’s lists.

The majority of the football fans had left at Wakefield, and the train was a good deal quieter now. He noted that without the camaraderie of their peers, the few remaining supporters had calmed down significantly. The psychology of group dynamics in action: no belonging, no confidence. The girl seemed more relaxed now that the louder fans had gone. In fact she seemed to be sleeping, with her head on the table in front of her. The difference between her defiant, aggressive manner only a few minutes ago and her current complete tranquility was staggering.

* * *

She had never been able to sleep on trains. She was too terrified of missing her stop, and of who might sit next to her. She wasn’t afraid to fake it though, when it suited her. Like when the ticket inspector (or ‘Train Manager’ – what a joke that was) was waddling past. Or like now, for those invasions of privacy that even the power of the ipod doesn’t stop. It gave you time to think, an excuse to free yourself from the restrictions of politeness and manners, to exempt yourself from banal conversation with strangers.

One more stop and she would be off this train and back into the real world. Thank fuck for that. This train was getting too much for her, shoehorned in with all these people who she didn’t care about. Who she couldn’t care about. Because who the fuck were they anyway? A load of people all going to the same place, with nothing in common. She was glad she couldn’t see them any more, that she didn’t have to think about them. It was such a waste of time wondering about people that she would never see again. What use could that possibly have? She wouldn’t remember a single face from this train. She never did. They meant nothing to her.

She peeped through a crack between her elbow and her hand. How long would it be before he got bored and stopped looking? She knew she would be smudging her mascara, but it would be worth it if he would just stop fucking staring. He was probably some kind of head case. She remembered that time in Italy when some old man in a raincoat sat next to her on a park bench and started to tug himself off. That was fucking weird. I mean, what do they get out of that anyway? He’d be better off just paying a hooker to do it for him. The freak was still watching. Only one more stop until she got off. And not a moment too soon. She imagined him with a huge hard-on underneath his scruffy, worn suit. What a fucking pervert.

* * *

He observed her slyly as she lifted her head and rustled her things. Leeds then. She seemed uncomfortable, it was obvious that she disliked travelling. She had smudged her make-up in her sleep, but seemed not to have noticed as she hurriedly stuffed her possessions into her duffel bag. It was at least another quarter of an hour until Leeds. Only her Walkman lay unpacked, he noticed, her barrier between herself and the outside world remains. It would be a shame to lose her, such an interesting subject. He had spent nearly the whole journey watching her, and had become somewhat attached. Not to her, as such, but to the occupation of studying her, and of extracting (or perhaps creating, he had to admit) her story from her manner.

She sat back down, ready to leave a full ten minutes before the train arrived at the station. Such nervous travellers never failed to amuse him, rushing and pushing, always on their feet for so long before they have a chance to escape. They queued as the minutes passed, so typically English. It was the same with the people who queued at airport gates, seeming to imagine that there are more passengers than seats. He gazed again out of the window, watching the view refashion itself, fields giving way to concrete and steel. He realised that he was almost angry at her for leaving, unreasonable though that was. Perhaps he was a little angry at himself for being so passive. Could he ever work up the nerve to talk to her? He silently chastised himself for lacking the courage to approach someone who so completely captivated him.

As the train slowed past the platforms, the panic intensified. People were grabbing for bags, suitcases tumbling from luggage racks upset by frantic passengers. The girl had ended up stood next to him, and he couldn’t help but stare. Was there beauty, he wondered, in her insolence? Maybe he was jealous of her self-certainty, of a rebellious confidence that he had never felt. But it was too late now, she was about to leave, and there was nothing for him to do.

* * *

How the fuck had she ended up stood next to the one person she wanted to be furthest away from. And her ipod had just run out of battery. That really took the piss. You could never count on technology, it always bit you in the arse when you needed it most. She grabbed the ipod and shook it in anger. It wouldn’t do anything, but it made her feel better. At last it was time to get off. She stuffed the ipod in her pocket and started to shuffle forward.

* * *

They were all getting off now, and as she angrily shoved her walkman into her pocket, he noticed that her headphones were trailing along the floor. This was it. His moment to reach out to her in banal, impersonal conversation, with the excuse of goodwill to back him up. Excitement mingled with fear. He touched her arm, and as she whipped her head round he saw the glint of rage in her eyes.

“Ex… Excuse me”, he stammered.

“Prick”, she snapped, as she disappeared through the train’s sliding door, her headphones trailing behind her.

No related posts.