Traindreams- A short story.

Good morning, my name is Adrian Rivers and you’re on the 9:30 train to London St Pancras. I am sitting in carriage C, staring blankly at the laptop in front of me whilst outside, the world wakes up in a misty haze. In twenty minutes, we will come speeding into that dreamy greenhouse of the capital, filled with expensive shops and framed by the two bronze lovers, locked in an eternal embrace. In another twenty minutes, I will be locked in the glittering towers of Canary Wharf, surrounded by the sound of typing and serious people in suits.
For now, I sit in the warmth and comfort of my carriage, watching back gardens fly by. The train pauses at a concrete block of a station with an unmemorable name, and a woman enters the carriage and sits opposite me. She wears her red coat well, her long dark hair in a bandanna. As I watch her, she takes out a book, I know it’s not some holiday murder mystery, oh no. She is reading an old forgotten classic and you can almost smell the second hand bookshop where it came from.
My mind begins to wander as I watch her peel the battered bookmark out of the pages and lie it on the grey table; in my mind I’m not just watching her. In my mind I lean over and smile.
“What are you reading?” She looks up at me, for a second she’s slightly affronted and then answers suspiciously.
“…Catcher in the Rye, but why does it matter to you?”
“No reason really, I was just interested.”
A pause.
“So where are you headed?” I ask, grasping at the rapidly disintegrating conversation, she smiles at me. “You do realise that there’s only one stop left?”
Inwardly I curse my awkwardness and busy myself in packing my laptop away to hide my embarrassment, I’m about to get off when she taps me on the back, “Do you want to go for a coffee?” Her sudden intensity shocks me and, for a moment I’m speechless. I think for a second about my supervisor’s anger in twenty minutes when I don’t turn up, my co-workers wondering where I am. “Yeah,” I answer, “why not?”
I’m sitting on the train, watching the woman turn a page. But in my daydream we’re in a busy coffee shop full of commuters, staring into our cups.
“They’re like soup bowls.”
“What?”
“These cups. Look how big they are.”
She smiles “Well, this is a French place, I understand it’s a cultural thing.”
I like how she understands it’s a cultural thing. I tell her so, and she tells me about herself. Her name is Lucy Davis; she runs a shop in Camden Town, selling artsy utensils; novelty spoons and decorative cheese graters. She laughs when I tell her I’m in accounting.
“Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“It can wait.”
I spend the day with her. And the night too. I wake up next to her in an airy room with the sound of traffic coming through the open window; she is asleep beside me, her hair frizzy and her breathing loud and even. I think I love her. When she wakes up we chat and she goes down to the shop, I stay in bed and pick a book from her shelf, it’s the first book I’ve read in years and I savour every moment. In the next few weeks that pass, I am no longer Adrian Rivers the Canary Wharf accountant. I am Adrian Rivers: property of Lucy Davis. She does own me; she is more alive than anyone I have ever met before, she brings me into a land of colour and life. I think of my flat, miles away, everything as I left it before I met her. My old life gathering dust.
“Tickets please.” I emerge from the dream and fumble for my wallet, handing the day-glo orange card to the sombre faced man. Lucy does the same, and then goes back to her book. Looking at her, I realise I’m being stupid. I’m imagining a perfect, bizarre world between me and a stranger. It would never be like that in real life. Something, somewhere would go wrong.
I see myself walking into the shop where I have grown so accustomed to living, I see myself going into her bedroom, I see her and another man.
“What the hell is this?”
Her eyes widen, and her mouth trying to stifle a giggle. “Adrian… this? It’s nothing!”
“I better go.” Mumbles the stranger, grabbing his discarded shirt and hurriedly putting on his shoes, Lucy looks regretfully at him and then turns to me. I stare through her and her excuses fall unheard upon my ears. “I…need some air.” I mumble and run down the steps, through the ridiculous shop, out onto the street. I walk without registering where I’m going, Adrian Rivers is gone. Now I am no one; I sold my identity to her that day on the train. I pace through London, past gardens and groups of drunks and businessmen who would no longer recognise me. I walk until the sky turns red. Eventually I return to the shop. Lucy is there waiting for me.
“Adrian, what you saw… it wasn’t what it looked like.”
“What the hell was it then?”
“It was… it was….” I see her glance around desperately, and then she turns on me. “Look, you can’t tell me what to do! You don’t own me! Mark’s just a friend.”
“Oh, a friend?” Suddenly I’m angrier than I’ve ever felt, “So that’s what friends do? Tell me Lucy, are we just friends? Is that all this ever was?”
“God, you see that’s your problem Adrian, you’ve turned a molehill into a mountain!” Suddenly, impulsively, she picks up one of her decorative cheese graters and flings it at me. I duck, but it still glances off my cheek and I feel warm blood. There is a silence as she seems to realise what she has done, but it’s already been done, she can’t take it back.
“You know Lucy,” I say shakily, “You’ve always been too free for me.”
I imagine that the next day would pass in a grey blur. I would take my stuff, what stuff I have anyway. My briefcase, the clothes I bought. And then, I’d go and Lucy Davis would become only a memory.
“This stop is... Kings Cross St Pancras.” The slowing down of the train and the sudden rush of activity brings me back to reality. The girl I called Lucy puts her book in her bag and stands up. I do the same and together, silently, we join the queue leaving the train. Suddenly, I have an urge to reach out to her, ask her for a coffee in a French café, live and love with her, and have my heart broken. But, like everything, the urge passes. I begin to think of the day ahead, as I step onto the platform, but almost subconsciously I think about Lucy too, I watch her as she gets lost in the crowd. A splash of red in a grey sea.

My Wishes

Exams and school have drawn to a close, what now stretches ahead of me is a long summer of indecisiveness and bittersweet last events. If all goes to plan, this September I’ll be living in a strange city, for better or for worst. If all doesn’t go to plan, then I have some more planning to do.
Here are a few of the things I wish to do with my summer months.

1. Finish the Count of Monte Cristo
2. Practice the Clarinet
3. Take more photographs
4. Have more picnics
5. Paint
6. Write more
7. Re-read Harry Potter 1-7
8. Do some sewing
9. Find my University reading list
10. Cycle some more

72% Water

I saw this a while ago and had to draw my own response. 72%'s nothing, we can work through it.

My Cave.

This is my favourite place in the world. This cave is on a secluded beach in Wales with paintings on the rocks, when I go there, I lose myself. This cave is a cathedral of eternity, the eternal dripping of water, the eternally cool sand, I lean my head on the rust coloured rocks and I can hear forever echoing in the walls. It feels strong, like it hasn’t changed in millennia and never will, it doesn’t go back very far and yet I imagine endless tunnels beyond. When you leave, you renter the world of sun and sea and shouting, but my cave is always there, a bubble of soft living silence.

White Paint

This week I had an art exam. Whilst I worked one of the art technicians was preparing old canvasses for repainting, whitewashing over whatever was pictured on them before so that they could be recycled. It was quite a melancholy sight, each painting seemed to reflect the years each student had put into studying art: the stress, the relief, the feelings and emotions, quickly and mechanically erased. I wondered how many layers of paintings lay on those canvasses, how far they stretched back and how many dreams and disappointments had already been painted over. After my exam had finished, I piled up my own paintings and wondered how long it would be before they would disappear to make room for a new student’s work, only to be covered again in white emulsion.

Abandoned (my)spaces.

Recently, whilst browsing the internet late at night, I came across my old bebo account. It was an unpleasant surprise, rather like opening a bag only to discover that sandwich from six months ago. I looked back into my past, I stared at my fourteen year old self’s profile with a crippling feeling of self loathing. Was I really like that? As I’ve gotten older, I looked back on my past self with endearment, I was young, but I was still mature for my age and not too much of a social mess. But here was my entire awkward teenage-hood plastered on my computer screen, and not only that, but anyone in the world could see my obsession with text speak, capital letters in the middle of words and cringe-worthy inside jokes that defined those years. I stared with a mixture of horror and surprise at the persona I had projected on the world. What’s worse is that I know that was what I was actually like.

I cautiously explored the rest of my page, and came across all the abandoned profiles of friends. Some of them I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years, and yet here remained the shadows of five years ago, fragments of their teenage selves. The conversations we had are still on the comments wall, questions unanswered. It feels unsettlingly like climbing aboard a virtual Mary Celeste, there was a similar eeriness as I browsed the profiles people had hastily left in exchange for MySpace or Facebook. I noticed all the different types of profile people had, there were the emo profiles, full of melancholy posts and icons saying things like ‘don’t try to fix me, I’m not broken’, the vanity profiles filled entirely with pictures of said person and the profiles that act as shrines to a significant other. At first I explored with interest, but I soon felt drawn to leave, maybe it was the overtiredness but it all started to feel a little eerie.

I considered briefly deleting the old profile, but I decided against it and left it as a tiny monument to the past.

For the Birthday Bard

Happy early Birthday Shakespere. Here's your present. I drew this after a conversation which concluded that to make Shakespere more appealing to the youth, he should have an obsession with extreme sport. I would have liked to put skis in but didn't have enough room.

Happy Birthday from a fan who loves you whether or not you liked to rock climb.