Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: train carriage

  • someone else’s rage

    A girl with a most glorious voice started singing as the train took off, she was hidden by a mess of passengers who cleared, instinctively, to give her some room. Playing a tiny ukelele and letting the song free like a bird: her fond little scratchings on the instrument suited the sweet, round spiciness of her voice. She sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and somehow turned it into a kind of confident kvetch. “Don’t know when I’ll be back again ~” or if, babe, if you don’t shape up. Her hair sprang up out of her head like fireworks, fizzing in spiraling coils. She was relaxed, she was vivid. I searched all my pockets: not a single coin. But I could applaud, and the lady sitting opposite, huddled in the shoulder of her stolid-looking husband, sat up and clapped as well. I was about ready for some music, having had a close encounter this morning with somebody else’s pain and bewilderment, a massage therapist who had told me too much of her personal stuff and now retreated behind a wall of rage so sudden as to be rather terrifying. Why are you now so angry with me, I said, and she said, because we keep talking about my stuff. Now just lie down and let me treat you. I had said, when we found ourselves back on That Topic, you need to take action, and she snarled: I’m so sick of your opinions! How did we get ourselves into this? It was my fault, she told me, because on arriving I had asked “How are you.” So I was riding home sore from a non-massage and felt glad of the girl with her spunky round voice and her star-spangled stockings crossed over each other, comfortably loosely, as she leaned against the door. Glad of the blue sky when I came out of the train, its creamy little penguins of cloud. I stepped round nine Australians in the street who were saying to one another, patiently, “I want to do the museum and then the Wall,” “Well, I thought you wanted to do the club park”. I stepped into a bakery and said, “Haben Sie Brezel?” “Alle weg!” she told me, looking up from her scrubbing and then saying, ah, no, look – there’s one more left here. I took my pretzel into a corner store and bought it a beer. Because, fuck it. The girl at the counter was so divinely beautiful I had told her so before I realized I’d opened my mouth. “You! are beautiful as a picture!” Thanks, she said, laughing, perfectly familiar with her personal splendour. It was such a joy to look at her and laugh and to walk home along the slow, clogged, crowded street with bread in one hand and with beer in the other. If I could find the desert here and the beach, if I could find a way to make a living, I would live in Berlin for ever and ever and ever and never sleep.

     

  • the godfather underground

    Riding on the train underground I feel like a caterpillar carving through the belly of the city. The hungry metallic smell of the train’s breath is become familiar as I jog down the steps to Underworld. Sitting and writing and sitting and writing. I glanced up and caught the eye of an elder gentleman standing with his son against the glass doors, watching benignly. He said, across the carriage, “Schoene Schrift!” Lovely handwriting. Oh! I said. Thank you. And he nodded and nodded. I went back to my page. Filled it and turned to another and smoothed it down. Finished what it was I was saying and capped my pen and slipped the book into my bag. The doors opened onto the platform and this man and his son, my age, were standing beside me. He stepped back to let me past. “Alles schoen aufgeschrieben,” everything nicely written up, he said, with great satisfaction. Unintrusive and approving, like a kind of fairy godfather.

     

  • reeky dog

    Such a pretty day. When I came out of the Underground station the sky had filled with these tiny white, flat-bottomed clouds, as though they were puffs of steam that had popped up from the chimney of some hidden machinery. It was a pleasure to reach the outdoors. Jumping onto the train I caught the eye of a raddled punk, crouched over his big brown dog. He was petting and soothing the animal, lovingly. I smiled and he smiled. The doors slid shut. But what was that… awful smell? Oh, god, it’s the hound. A guy in workout gear looked over and made an expression of disgust. I looked about me. People were wrinkling their noses. The smell filled the cabin and was unendurable.

    I got up and slid down the far end of the train carriage. Within seconds that end of the carriage was full, as though the track had tilted: the punk and his dog sat up on a vinyl bench by themselves, unsurrounded on all sides. The dog was emitting these edgy, whining noises. Everyone looked strenuously away, in a body, as though they could dissolve him by pretending he wasn’t there.

    The punk guy shrugged at me, the only person making eye contact. “Der reitet nicht gerne,” he said. He doesn’t like to ride. I said, “Tcha…” I was revolving in my mind the most inoffensive way to mention it to him, trying to translate: dude, your dog really reeks.

    The smell was unbearable, a creature rotting alive, I was breathing in little shallow gasps. We pulled in at the next station and the carriage emptied within seconds. Seven people ran pelting down the platform and leaped into the carriage behind. There they stood doused with disapproval, that righteous German indignation people can excite by basic inconformity. Even in a punk city, even in Berlin. I followed, laughing helplessly. Och, the poor old punk with his mangy, stinking, poor terrified animal. The long-term neglect, the isolation. You know that kind of released and loose laughter that feels like crying, feels almost like sex. It was kind of sad but wonderful and could only happen here. All the way home I was remembering him and the confederacy of perfumed people locking him out of their secret, hidden glances. I remembered and kept glancing out the window and smiling to myself. The poor smelly dog and his misery, the poor old drug-fucked oblivious punk who maybe thinks people reject him because he’s rejected society, thirty years ago, with his haircut and his piercings. Making up his stories to himself of why people can’t bear him and will not come near. An almost unbearable ecstasy of shame pierced me, that I had not spoken, that my German is laborious when it counts, that I couldn’t find the words. Berlin, decorous and louche at once. You big old mess of freaks.

  • boyfriend is bearded

    boyfriend is bearded

    This afternoon riding the Underground (the above-ground Underground, speeding through the trees) I saw a bearded man put up his hand to the steel pole at the end of his bench seat. In doing so he embraced his girlfriend, sitting beside him rather hunched. He said to her, in accented English, “it’s good to be you, my-Sascha.” “Is it?” she said, bleakly, and submitted to his hand dropping round her shoulder and cupping and fondling the bone.

    H2O HoL small dog large man

  • the hurly-berlin

    the hurly-berlin

    Berlin, Berlin. Familiar and overwhelming. On the train back from the airport a girl with an extraordinary voice hopped on and busked. At the end of the song, the guitarist accompanying her took a bow and people burst into applause. “Wow!” she said, opening up her hat. A cute couple jumped off and a guy with his afro razored up the sides leaned after them, silently proferring the phone and wallet the girl had left lying on the seat. Two muscular men slightly running to fat had their dog with them, a pug named Princess Sheba. We got talking. The one holding the dog on his lap obeyed signals from the other one who said, wiping his own eye, she has something near her eye, and so forth. Princess Sheba stood upright on her owner’s sturdy legs, balancing against the train’s movement like a surfer. These trains travel high above the street and at intervals feel like you’re lost in the woods. The cool breeze flooded in every time someone got on or got off. “Mind the gap,” the safety announcement said in English. Later in the evening a guy snarled at me for making eye contact and called my German companion a Nazi. He was walking along spoiling for it, followed us, taunting, through some misery of his own. “Like the black women in Brooklyn say,” he said, bitterly, chasing us, “stay away from white people.” Berliners smoke in cafes and the street is filled with old litter. If you eat out, people beg, and sell newspapers, and beseechingly play the harmonica. At the next table a middle-aged blond woman painted her lips against a little mirror while her boyfriend watched absorbedly. It took both of them to make her beautiful, it was their tradition. She made faces at herself as though she were having a very emotional, silent conversation. We saw two Romany boys whom I’d seen busking last summer, a year ago now, the little one is bigger and wirier and his chubby brother is chubbier. The younger plays the trumpet and has a loud ghetto blaster with which he drives away all the other musicians. But he’s getting better. Last year he was confident but terrible. I told him, your playing has improved! so much! you’re getting good! and for the first time in all the dozen times we have spoken he gave me his slow, curling, lopsided and personal smile.

    H2O HoL browsing piano player

  • strapped down

    strapped down

    On the above-ground train we are travelling through the treetops. Everybody’s head is framed in green. My companion takes a photo, covertly: the flash makes everyone look up. Now I realize that the acetate smell I had noticed is from an open pot of scarlet polish which the groomed boyfriend to my right holds open, absently, for his girlfriend to paint her nails as he browses facebook on his phone. “It just looks so sweet,” my friend tells them. Everybody begins to laugh. The older lady to his left turns to her neighbour and asks her something. Four men with opened beers are standing at the free end of the carriage talking, as though they were in a treetop bar. In the opposite corner a flicker of movement catches my eye. The very very handsome man in his twenties who had taken up his black notebook as we all piled in and sat down is sketching the dog whose head rests on my knee; his eyes flare back and forth, back and forth, gathering information and strapping it down.

    H2O HoL stables