A fan is shared, a pound is heisted to a saxophonist, and Terence attends like a bailiff
Monday. The Central line achieved thirty-one degrees this morning, a figure I know because a man beside me was broadcasting it from his phone to the carriage in the tone of a war correspondent, and the carriage received it in the London manner, total silence, one collective blink, and a woman by the doors closing her eyes as if remembering cooler lives. The Central line in summer is the city’s great leveller, bankers and bricklayers alike reduced to the same glazed poach, all of us pressed together in a tube of borrowed air, pretending to read. Nobody reads. The book is a screen we hold between ourselves and the truth, which is that we have paid, at peak fare, to be braised.
I have taken to carrying the little handheld fan, which marks a woman’s surrender to the season, and this morning I shared its output with the stranger wedged against my shoulder, an act of intimacy for which, in this city, we will now never speak again. That is the covenant. You may share a fan, a Polo mint, or a raised eyebrow at a delay announcement, and each transaction closes permanently at the doors. London intimacy is a series of completed miracles that must never be mentioned. I have exchanged glances of profound understanding with perhaps four thousand strangers across my years on the Underground and I could not pick one of them out of a police line-up, and this is correct, and we all prefer it.
The Meeting About the Meeting
Work, then, where the morning was consumed by a meeting to plan Thursday’s meeting, a form of corporate devotion the modern office has perfected. Eleven of us in a room called Innovate, which contains a broken screen and a plant enduring conditions that violate several conventions, deciding the agenda for a future gathering of the same eleven. Gareth from Delivery shared his screen, an act preceded, as ever, by ninety seconds of us regarding his desktop, his 400 unread emails, and a folder titled GARETH FINAL FINAL 2, which I intend to request at his retirement as a leaving gift for the nation. Minutes were taken. The minutes of the meeting about the meeting will be reviewed at the meeting. Somewhere Kafka is unemployed and bitter about it.
Lunch was the meal deal, eaten on a bench in the churchyard with the office pigeons, who have organised themselves into a protection racket of real sophistication. There is one, I call him Terence, missing a toe, decorated veteran, who has learned to stand precisely where guilt lives. He does not beg, begging is for amateurs, he simply attends, at a small distance, like a bailiff. I gave him crust. We both knew I would. The RSPB’s bird guidance maintains the feral pigeon is a descendant of the rock dove, cliffs traded for ledges, and I respect any species that assessed this city and concluded, correctly, that the cliffs here are made of sandwiches.
The Evening Commute, Reversed
Homeward, the carriage now at gas mark two, and at Mile End a busker’s saxophone came in through the doors playing Careless Whisper, as it is legally required to do, and the carriage performed its silent negotiation, everyone deciding at once whether this was an ordeal or a gift, and it settled, as it always does when the man can actually play, into gift, and a fellow opposite tapped one finger against his briefcase, which in commuter terms is a standing ovation. He got off at Bethnal Green, the finger man, and gave the busker a pound through the doors as they closed, timed like a heist, no eye contact, gone. Four thousand strangers, I tell you. Miracles on the half hour, all unmentioned.
Supper was an assembly of fridge diplomacy, the last of Sunday’s roast negotiating with an egg, and I ate it on the step with a glass of something Spanish, watching next door’s cat patrol the wall with the bearing of a customs officer. The evening cooled at last around nine, the city exhaling all at once, every window open, everyone’s radio and arguments and frying onions mingling over the gardens into the great summer broadcast of London generally, which is my favourite programme and has been running, unscheduled, since the Romans.
Filed today’s pages with the satirical desk at The London Prat, my parish newsletter, and sent the weekly letter to the colonial desk at Bohiney Magazine in America, where my correspondent reports their trains are air-conditioned to meat-locker standards and strangers speak to each other voluntarily, in queues, about nothing, and I have written back explaining gently that we tried conversation here once, in 1976, during the heatwave, and the man involved moved to Shropshire. Some experiments conclude themselves. He also asks what Londoners do instead of small talk, and the answer, which I have posted, is that we conduct it entirely through apology, a full conversation being achievable in this city using only the word sorry at different pitches, rising for after you, falling for that was your foot, flat for we are both British and trapped here together, and the fluent can manage whole friendships this way, decades long, sorry all the way down.
Tally, one fan shared, one covenant honoured, one pound heisted to a saxophonist, Terence paid in full. Thirty-one degrees and the city held. It always holds. That is the entire secret of the place, and we keep it by never once saying it aloud on the train.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk