Shuffles Nervously

1.

And on the train I see landscapes I know well transformed from their banality by the screaming sunlight… particularly a concrete sports field populated by puddles reflecting trees, pylons- an array of scorched melting metallic.

Stalling. Stalling.

Two Goldfrapp posters disappear quickly and are therefore indelible in your mind. A runner of your ilk, the kind that does this out of necessity, rather than a love of running. Then at the station you spy a guy that wouldn’t look too out of place in the Lake District with backpack and thinsulate hat, eating a pastie. There are ghosts that turn into people at Oxford Road Station by coming out of the frosted glass stairs.

Stalling. Stalling.

A lad with a hairdo like a girl’s is being kissed by his older girlfriend. People at the station are always gazing upwards with that look of slight consternation on their faces, to view the train times.

‘Has my train left yet? Am I on the right platform?’

Out of nowhere some pigeons attack the boy with the girl’s hairdo, a half ponytail…

‘ Is this an indiscriminate attack?’

Then movement again… The aircon systems at the top of buildings become giant hamburgers.

Stalling. Stalling.

A middle-aged man with neon green laces in his trainers and black dye in his hair shuffles nervously, wondering whether to get on my train. A giant billboard in the distance shouts: ‘INSTRUCTIONS: CHILL AT HOME’.

2.


An old gentleman in his 80’s seems to frequent the laundrette almost as much as the black-maned woman. He has an aristocratic face even though his clothes are gray, old, ill-fitting, much as all of us in the laundrette are in our commie type rags. That’s why we appear there, to absolve ourselves from the dirt, the clothes that sometimes should have been washed a while ago. One day I start talking to him, properly. I learn a few things from him, he comes to get away from home. His wife has Alzheimer’s.

‘She’s been a good mother. A good wife’…

I remark that some men go fishing, much as he comes here. He laughs quietly. His cheeks are a dangerous rosy. I start talking to him rather quickly, almost nervously…

Fifteen minutes ago a skinheaded young male with the necessary neck tattoos, is f-ing and blinding, remarking that this

‘laundrette’s gash!’…

Hmmmm, never heard such strong sentiments levied towards such a simple establishment as a laundrette. He has no washing powder and is getting increasingly irate. Thankfully, no-one reacts and they just calmly inform him that in the shop 3 doors down, they do sell washing powder. ‘Right’ he concedes, which coming from him, sounds like a

‘Thank-you kind sir’.

The tense, violent attitude impresses no-one and by the time he comes back and strips down to his boxers, he is more of a comic figure, an abrasive version of the Diet Coke guy, without the patented prettiness. I shuffle less nervously. Just a cocky young lad wanting attention.

I return to my bittersweet conversation. The black-maned woman sings. She repeatedly sighs always recounting that these washing rituals are for

‘the grand-kids’… ‘You wouldn’t believe how many clothes they go through’.

I can. I know she lives there. Camps out there like a Blyton Faraway Tree character- the washerwoman. The bull with the swagger holds the door open for the rosy-cheeked old man.

‘Thanks, son’.

He goes to his battered white car, smiling, back to his old love who can’t remember him.

3.

We look at her with the indifference of tired commuters. Her stories are more entertaining than her poems. Her voice comes alive, sings, is louder when retelling the instances in which her poems were just semblances.

We, the audience sit scruffily attired in faded fleeces and unclassifiable pieces of clothing while a slight air of pretentiousness pervades the room.

The students cannot stop scribbling the names of every poem and huff desolately if they miss the title of one. They do not hang on her every word, but shuffle nervously, asking their companions for the titles. It’s getting late; I can’t afford to miss my train.

On the narrowly caught train the sole sound I can hear are the remains of a crisp packet’s crumbs being devoured. I look out and see a girl and boy contriving pictures.

The boy holds a camera and signals to the girl to throw the bread NOW. The birds scatter, and click goes the shutter I can’t hear.