While waiting for a train...
I was sitting alone in Pearse Street station waiting for a train. I was twenty minutes early and it was fifteen minutes late. Trains generally are. They use, as far as I can make out, the same scheduling system as women. Which is why I wasn’t too bothered – I’ve learned to make allowances. I knew, you see, that the poor thing was probably torturing itself with perfectly sensible worries about its appearance and odour and had to take time at each crossing to ask cars if its new paintjob made its rear carriage look big.
Besides, it didn’t really matter, because a few minutes later a DART trundled in to distract me. It was extraordinarily crowded. The carriages looked like they’d been vacuum-packed. I’d only seen crowding like it before when loading cattle for the factory into Con Leavey’s lorry, and even then Con had to use a cattle prod and reams of foul language. I assume these people voluntarily boarded and chose to be squashed, unless Con has recently taken a position as “Capacity Planner” with CIE.
As I watched the DART slow, I smiled in some sort of vacant amusement. It’s the kind of smile that often creeps across a face when its owner is having a conversation with himself. Usually people find their own conversation hilarious (if you don’t, give up accountancy), but often keep it to themselves to reduce the risk of being upstaged by some flash bastard with funnier stories. Unless you’re schizophrenic of course, in which case there’s always a flash bastard or three to swagger in and ruin things.
So I was smiling at a packed green train, now stationary, and applauding myself on being such a funny bloke. And then I woke from my reverie. I realised I shouldn’t have been smiling. Something terrible was happening!
Imagine if you will that you’re doing a thirty-minute commute into work on a DART. This is an extremely boring way to start a day. It’s so boring in fact, that you could easily spend the entire journey intently reading the label on the jacket the guy in front of you is wearing. “40% wool, 60% polyester” becomes the latest John Grisham blockbuster. You read it eight times in case you missed something important in the plot. You discuss it later with friends in an attempt to unearth the moral. Actually no – you’ll only do this if you’re the type of person who doesn’t find their own conversation amusing (see above).
And worse things can happen on DART journeys. Sometimes, as your eyes wander, they can meet with somebody else’s and you actually make eye contact. This is awkward for both parties, but more so for the person who was actually caught doing the looking (i.e. The Looker). That person should feel like a pervert or some other class of social outcast. He must take a mental note to never look towards that person again. If he does, he must poke out his eyes with Con Leavey’s cattle prod.
Anyway, the point is that these people are very bored and don’t know what to do with themselves. So it’s entirely understandable that they be delighted at the sudden appearance through their windows of a real living person with a big smiley head on him. “At last,” they sigh, “something we can all stare at together” and they divert their attention towards the poor misfortunate outside.
So there I was – a smiling distraction for 800 unexcited DART occupants. As you might imagine, being unwillingly made the star of the show didn’t go down well with my self-conscious nature. My smile vanished and I got mildly embarrassed. Actually I blushed a little. What am I talking about – so much blood rushed to my face that it became an erection. Then the usual happened. In situations like this, where it’s clear that embarrassment is inevitable, my composure deserts me. It sizes up the situation and decides it’s better off on the other side. “You’re on your own mate” are its parting words and, if I listen carefully, I can sometimes hear it mutter “loser.”
So in its absence, my body went haywire. I started to sweat. I went through a series of hot and cold flushes, flashing between pale and crimson like a cyclist’s taillight. My face began to twitch like a worm during orgasm and my pupils dilated like a hedgehog’s in headlights. None of this helped to divert attention.
So I tried to talk myself into believing nobody was looking. It’s a trick mammy taught me when the big boys in school laughed at my brown cardigan. But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a guy wipe the window with his sleeve and point at me. Goddam it, mammy’s “trick” didn’t work back then and it doesn’t work now. I wanted to cry. But I didn’t. I’m grown up now and I have to look cool.
Wanting to look cool is natural in these situations. Particularly if there is a babe on the train. Then you’re under real pressure to be slick. I mean, you’re sitting in a rail-station waiting for a train so it’s unlikely you’ll have too many opportunities for slickness. And yet you feel like you must ceremonially kill the nearest bull with a red cloth and penknife, catch the congratulatory flowers between your teeth, and walk away in that limpy manner caused by the enormous crotch of a hero. Back in the real world however, where bulls run you through, you just sit there with the words “Hi, I’m Mike and I’m seven” written in blue crayola across your face.
So what did I do, when faced with this pressure? I started humming to myself and staring casually at everything in the vicinity except the faces on the DART. Cigarette butts and really small pieces of dirt became fascinating. My hope was that if I stared for long enough at something, my audience might too. “Oooh look,” I said, “a squished piece of chewing gum. I wonder whose mouth that was in? Do you think it might have been a famous person’s?”
Of course they never buy it. They’ve been in the same situation themselves and want to exact revenge. They speared me with their stares. “Squirm, little man,” they said. “Squirm.” They said this to themselves, of course. Saying it out loud would be crazy, and they’re not crazy. Just evil. Trying to out-stare them was useless. I was outnumbered. I felt like a caveman surrounded by raptors. So I just gave up and laughed at my embarrassment. There was no way out. Unless I was airlifted by my pet pterodactyl.
The thing I noticed though was that I was being stared at an abnormal amount, even by my paranoid standards. I feared that there must have been something really embarrassing about my appearance. Mentally I ran through a checklist of such things that had happened before. Was my Wonder Woman underwear visible through my open fly? No. Was there a troupe of snots doing trapeze on the end of my nose? No. Was there a dog “rubbing” himself against my leg? No. So what was up with these people? “Stare at the goddam chewing gum, why don’t you?” But they didn’t. They continued to stare.
Eventually, after about nine years, the DART left and brought all the scumbags with it. My composure reappeared, apologised, and asked if I’d have it back. I accepted and soon I was feeling cool again. My smile returned because I was talking to myself again and, God knows, I’m a fierce funny man.
Then my train arrived and I jumped sprightly on-board. I took a seat by a window. It was directly in line with the seat on the platform at which I’d been. There was nobody to see me, so I began pointing and staring at some pretend sad bollox sitting there and staring at chewing gum.
Then a guy sat on the bench. He couldn’t settle for some reason, and started to bum-walk to exactly where I’d been. I guess I’d left a warm patch. Bums are very good at detecting warmth like that. "Thermotropism” I think it’s called. Our science teacher was prompted to lecture us on it after Niall Bracken, who’d been out the night before and came to the lab to sleep, lost his eyebrows in an entanglement with a Bunsen burner.
Anyway, as soon as this guy settled I saw what had been so interesting to the people on the DART. Riveted to the railing behind him was a sign bearing the station name. But his shoulder obscured part of it. Suddenly it all became clear. The DART people hadn’t been unnecessarily curious – I would have done the same in their position. And then I asked myself: “Should I tell him, and spare him the humiliation?”
“Nah, shag it!” I answered. “Let him sit there in Arse Station”.
