Late

I check my watch; I am running late but I can’t remember what time I was meant to have been where I was going. There is water dripping from the ceiling, rain running off the back of the city above. I catch my reflection in a puddle, a formless grey thing and late, always, always so very very late. There are others around me carrying the items of their jobs, briefcases, backpacks, and folding bicycles. The trappings of trapped people in a tiled cage. The escalator moves us further down and deeper into the off-white tiles of the underground. Black mould forms in the cracks and crevices alongside brightly coloured square posters displaying nothing I have the time to read. It becomes a blur of colour and noise, coalescing into a single object that is a spectrum in a single wall of sensory input.

Standing on the platform I feel the hot rush of air the train forces through the tunnel, the slight electric discharge of its motion translates into a tingling in the air like the shift in air pressure that preludes a storm. I can hear the rumble of its approach, shaking the earth like the footsteps of a hundred stampeding giants. The train pulls in with brakes screaming. The carriages are empty but lit with that strange white, grey florescence that makes anything in their glow look dirty and aged. As the doors open, the others around me begin to rush in. I feel them barging past me, I apologise and move aside to let the others get onboard till the carriages are brimming and the platform is empty. The doors squeeze shut, forcing the others back further into space they did not realise was there. There is a distorted bell ringing to signify the train has completed boarding. I do not get onboard the train.

Ding, dong.

The train begins to leave, pulling forwards into the tunnel and hauling the rest of it out of the tunnel behind. I tell myself it’s okay, I’ll get the next one, it won’t be that long. When you cross a certain threshold of lateness any additional time becomes ancillary. Like the statistics that force a tragedy into a chart it becomes numerical noise, divergent from the source. I look around and notice I am the only one left on the platform. I’m sure others will get here eventually. Although I can’t hear any approaching footsteps. The static and mumbling of the announcements fade into fractured noise.

Time passes at a glacial pace as I wait for the train to end, for the tracks and tunnel to empty so another can arrive and take me away. No one else has come to the platform to wait with me. Did I miss a notice that warned this was the only train? I walk up and down the length of the platform, the signs are blank, the timetables a mess of swirling nonsensical words and numbers.

The train is still leaving, speeding now so the windows are a blur of almost unbroken light, but the end of the train never comes. The doppler noise of the engine and the tracks and the rushing air and buzzing lights is unceasing. It just keeps going and going and going and going like a metallic, glass and plastic jörmungandr. An endless world length serpent wrapped around winding labyrinthian network of the London Underground.

I’m sure it will reach its end eventually then I can get the next one.

The train keeps going and I am not on it.

I am alone on a platform and everyone else is aboard that endless train.