More monkeys, no buttons

Inspired by Mikey’s magnanimous opus and every tube journey ever.

So one day, I start sitting nearer the guy who sits in the same seat every day to move. I had to, he was pushing me perilously close to homicide. Me in twenty years’ time, hunched over the same book, forgotten long before it was finished. Masking cut-price binge with fly-repellant aftershave, ignoring expectatant mothers and buckled pensioners because sitting somewhere else for 15 minutes was presumably the end of his semi-detached suburbun birthright.

I takes me two months, working incrementally until I could sit opposite him. I make a point of giving up my seat, staring at him when the carriage gets busy. No reaction.

It goes on for a week before I get this idea.

It comes to me as I walk towards the station: get on before him, get there first, see what happens. Not: follow him home, caress him stubble and beat his insides onto curtains with my rail pass. Just take his self-appointed commuter throne from him.

Next morning and I’m washed with the sweat of low-level anxiety. I get on the stop before him and get out a book that I’ll probably finish one day. I question whether my actions are legal, though passive agressive stalking is a lot like inaction. Lack of dreams, unprofitable relationships, shitty day job, poor hand jobs? Whatever. At the time I couldn’t think in retrospect.

His eyes meet mine. We go really still. He stares at me and fills my eyes with the unimaginable horror of truth and my legs move involuntarily, raising me to my feet to square up to him.

‘Excuse me’ croaks my chicken liver voice.

I had to start getting a different train.