Train Loop

There are few things about which I could claim to be an expert.  Although as I come to list them, ‘few’ actually means none.  You might expect ‘The Life and Times of Me’ would feature in some personal knowledge inventory but I suspect there’d be too many challenges for that to hold up in court.  And I’d have to accept some responsibility.  Besides, I’m not sure I’ve been in the story the whole time.  And if I have been, perhaps I shouldn’t.  I was quite familiar the soccer stars of 1978 once but I have lost the near complete sticker book.  And there are allegations that during my adolescence I was intimate with certain sections of the Littlewoods mail order catalogue but because I was too young to own a credit card there are no records to prove it.

I am, however, pretty confident that I have a working knowledge of the inside of a railway carriage.  I know, for example, which way the carriages are numbered.  Where First Class will be.  Where the available space in Chicken Class is likely.  How many wretched commuters can squeeze into the luggage rack.  I am fairly certain that I understand both the general construction and physics of the standard railway car.  Until today, I was reasonably sure that the typical Virgin Pendalino did not contain either a cloning device or a wormhole in the Space-Time Continuum.  I am not one, however, to completely disregard empirical evidence.

It was the man with the wedding cake that did it.  Because one tends to remember a man with a wedding cake.  Actually I exaggerate.  He was only carrying one tier of a wedding cake.  In a box.  He carried it past me.  I know – I was there.

Five minutes later, he went past again.  From the same direction.  Now, of course, five minutes had elapsed since the first passing - a period too short to have forgotten and too long to confuse with déjà vu.  I think it was carefully calculated – a stretch just long enough to make you doubt your own sanity.  And, I was as sure as I could be without being a stalker that he hadn’t simply turned around and gone back the way he’d come.

But that was just twice.  I mean, these things happen.  Like World Wars. And alien abductions.  No-one really worries about them. Just coincidence.  A mistaken recurrence.  You can’t define a trend by just two events.  Unless you count my couple of pink shirts. 

A few more minutes then he went past again.  Goddammit.  With the third tier.  Same guy.  I wondered if he was a twin.  Or a triplet.  But would they all wear the same clothes.  That wouldn’t be hygienic, surely?  Dirty and impossible.  Twice, you could pass off.  Twice, you could ignore.  Three times?  Something’s going on.

Needless to say with my cat-like reflexes, he’d gone by the time I’d registered.  It made me really mad.  No-one else seemed to notice.  At least they didn’t notice the Amazing Reappearing Man.  Or his Cake.  They did start to notice a slightly twitchy me though.  I saw the elderly couple opposite nudge each other and in a volume that betrayed the advanced stages of deafness, whisper, ‘What’s eating him?  Do you think he’s simple?  Don’t stare.  He might be dangerous.’

Now though I was watching.   Unblinking.  Staring.  The minutes ticked by.  And what happened?  Oh, he came back.  From the same way.  Without slinking past me.  Or scaling past the window.  Or playing Chinese Traffic Lights with a moving train.  He came back.  The same way.  Without a cake.  But with a small boy.  A crude but effective form of defence.

“Oh come on!  This is ridiculous.”  I shouted at his back as they scurried away.

The elderly couple moved.  I didn’t see any of them again.

Comments

[Robbie]

Was the train not joined together at its front and back, thus giving an actual 'Loop' shape?

[Carlton]

You might have something there, Robbie. At least that would explain why the journey home takes so long...

c