The train dragged itself into motion and, although Victoria’s rage had little abated, she had at least stopped glaring at the lunatic who had already ruined her day when it had barely started, and had turned her attention to the glossy pages in her hands.

Joe, likewise, had also escaped, to an extent, from his immediate surroundings. Yet, headphones in, he could still contemplate visually and guard against his bugbear: complacency. The complacency that was so grievous and so rife as to have gained a foothold in society, both within this moving carriage and outside it. Its own diligence was specifically designed to make a mockery of the atrophy of spirit it caused.

He started with one of his old favourites. His eyes traced deliberately along the lines indicating the joins between the various metal plates which between them formed the inner shell of the car now hurtling northwards towards the centre of this great metropolis, and he marvelled.

Each one of those pieces sat in its designated place for a specific reason. What convoluted chain of events, Joe wondered, had led to the exact tessellated configuration of constituent parts enveloping him right now? The efficiency and utilitarianism rising out of a spectacular web of sheer creativity. Such workaday genius. Was this confined to the design of Northern Line trains? He thought probably not: it was hard to believe that there was anything more than an exclusive core of such elite brains bringing to life their masterpieces of these flat-headed human-laden bullets; their fingerprints must be all over the network. But Joe couldn’t afford to waste time considering other lines; they weren’t his concern.

So there, he was still distant from the larger world around him, but far from unappreciative. He didn’t feel as if he was missing anything particularly, even inside the earphones. Besides, he cherished the sense of innocent freedom he could only get from Marrakech Express as the prohibitive signs massed around him: don’t pull the alarm; don’t sit here unless you’re almost dead; don’t put parts of yourself between the doors; don’t smoke; don’t drink; don’t talk; don’t think; don’t eat; don’t slouch; don’t flirt; don’t indulge in any form of what might otherwise be recognised as natural human activity. He needed White Riot when he appraised the parade of cocooned faces all around him, neither a riotous nor a dissenting thought amongst them. And he longed for Neil Young’s cowgirl when not a soul in sight had any intention of rising out of the throng to put on a ten-gallon hat and lasso a frisky young ox calf. Yeee-hah!

His gaze fell squarely once more on Victoria, the vanquished antagonist of Morden. Yes, there was a young woman who was right now mulishly hidden inside an opaque bubble. She was surely well aware of her aesthetic assets, and the way she was presented did seem to confirm that this was one part of herself she didn’t neglect. Joe had no doubt that she was tenacious and bright: she was having none of the spillage from Eddie’s seat, stubbornly holding her own despite her visible displeasure in that venture, and rendering the big man pretty uncomfortable for the most part. Her concentration and apparently critical appreciation of the printed matter in her hands forced a guilty Joe to reappraise its intellectual value. So; sexy, competitive, unyielding, strong, smart, young, she had everything going for her it seemed. But there had to be something else, under that self-protective bubble. What was it that she wasn’t showing to this unchosen public of hers?

Complacency traps were everywhere. There was something defiantly soporific about the design of the carriage’s interior. Joe didn’t know what you would call the exact shade – his wife would probably hazard a decent guess – but if any colour could legally be described as clinically dead, this flat cream-substitute was the one. The lifeless sheets had spewed out of their production line in the West Midlands in 1995, so they were over 10 years old, but that wouldn’t have been relevant. They were born, leached of vitality, and age could not wither them nor custom increase their innate blandness. The rounded angles seemed specifically designed to cast the maximum possible umbrage over the surface area. Great tracts were in shadow to a greater or lesser extent. It was a masterclass in optics.

As with every member of her race, a sizeable part of Victoria was hidden from idle onlookers, and she was efficiently vain enough to conceal much from even the non-idle, such as Joe. But some things were more difficult to hide. For example, her eyes were different colours – one being almost blue and the other more like a sea-green. For some this would have been an asset, or at least a favoured quirk of nature, but to Victoria it was an imperfection she barely tolerated. Joe didn’t know it, but some months ago, in preparation for a new product brochure photoshoot at work, she had invested in some tinted lenses to equalise them in a kind of baby-blue. The result was miraculous – the symmetrical features she had always sought – and now she always kept a supply for important occasions. This morning, though, was not one of those. Or so she thought.

The temper that bubbled under her couldn’t be masked even with coloured lenses. Joe had seen the signs of it when he boarded, and he imagined it was all she could do to neutralise it during her everyday routine. Surely, he thought, such a temper could only be a highly toxic asset. To justify it as a lovable foible, there to heighten the intensity of her more lustrous attributes, was to drink hungrily from the shit-filled spa of denial. A violence of spirit that lively and naked needed to be aligned with a much deeper understanding of its potential uses than could ever be possessed by someone whose pages were that glossy.

Joe looked slowly and respectfully upwards, thinking about illumination and shadow. The fluorescent lights themselves were the greatest tour de force. Although mostly uniform in intensity, there was regularly an individual strip which had its own idea about standing out from the crowd. Depending on the nature of the failure and the properties of the plastic sheath, Joe supposed, the hue of the failed bulb could range from a deep green to a juicy crimson. Today’s lay most directly over the far end of the row opposite him and could best be described as a burnt orange. Surrounded as it was by two fully functional neighbours, its lack of volume was of little consequence. But the imperfection wasn’t the best thing about the lighting banks. Far from it. What Joe most loved about them was that they made no effort at all to fit in with the geometry of the other components of the carriage. A single strip didn’t finish in line with the rows of seating, or where the doors met, or at the border between any other two pre-fabricated sheets. Oh no. They simply did their own thing, and Joe considered it almost a coincidence that it needed a whole number of them to fill an entire carriage. It was the crowning glory of a creation that stood at the pinnacle of human achievement, and the sort of thing that Joe would have given much to have been responsible for. How many people were in on it, he would wonder as he stared contentedly at the proud row?

Her temper had already today had an adverse effect on her, physically. She had scuffed her left heel coming down those metal stairs too quickly. Ordinarily that sort of minor blemish would go mostly unnoticed, but on Victoria it was a throbbing sore crying out for attention. Her rose-tinted mouth turned down in a definite scowl and her cheeks were just a touch flushed, all hinting at less than perfect equanimity. Joe could see her most obvious failing and it drew her a little bit closer to him.

Was it fear, and, if so, of what? Looking about, she certainly held the thickest shield of those on view, and he wanted to know more. He stared at her mysterious physiognomy a touch more intently than was really advisable, removed the buds from his ears, as a sign of respect, pulled a small lined index card from his pocket and wrote on it.

Notitiam primosque gradus vicinia fecit;
Tempore crevit amor.

It was the only Latin quotation he knew fully, and he was delighted he finally had a chance to use it. She’d understand when the time came.

The creative process could only be brought to life at such a scale by removing all inspiration, all non-repeatable, non-programmable inputs. You could bet that the men working the machines responsible for the physical production of these elements of the perfect whole carriage would have absolutely zero appreciation of how that perfection was born or how it would finally manifest itself. In other words, the manufacturers of such beauty could only fulfil their roles in complete ignorance. Joe was daily almost tearful in admiration.

He took the opportunity to tune into the other masterpiece of sound available for free to anybody travelling by tube: the symphonic rattle of wheels on rail. Not like the settled rhythm you would find under a mainline train, the syncopated timbre of the Northern Line backing track would send Joe somewhere else entirely. At times he would be stretched out in a cave behind a tropical waterfall: just enough consistency of rhythm to know that it would last for as long as you had, and longer, but at the mercy of enough variable natural elements to develop each bar into a subtly different experience. Constantly growing and contracting, speeding up and taking breath, fighting against and cosying up to its backdrop. If not a waterfall then he would be wandering through a thick forest and tuning into the myriad birdcalls, the repeating themes only serving to highlight the continually changing overdubbed melody as they worked their way through whatever it is that birds of paradise discuss before lunch. But most often he’d be back at school flailing around inside an irrational number. An endless, non-recurring pattern of decimal places being beaten out by metal against sparking metal, moving smoothly from right ear to left as they hurtled north under an oblivious capital. And always the soft hum of the electric engine. Even when the track noise took a break, the uninterruptable whirr of the power plant drove the train forward. Drowned out in the mayhem of points and joins approaching a major station, it came to a rest, along with the irrational clackings, as the beast pulled in and the perfectly conceived doors slid perfectly apart to allow for a recycling of souls. Just like it was doing today. Contented once more, he plugged himself back in.

 

Victoria was not the only other occupant of the carriage, of course, and Joe needed to turn his attention elsewhere. To her right, and upwards a touch, in the friction-charged airspace above the dank Eddie, a face was reflected, almost sunken into the glass. Joe slouched, for a better view. The face was rounder than most, although its small eyes and thin nose might have given the more casual observer a false sense of elongation. Small eyes they might have been, but benevolent and fiercely intent: they seemed, wandering around the carriage in a semidetached manner, to look, inquisitively and seriously, maybe even to understand, but never to pass judgement. The hairline was high, considering the relative youth of the face, on a reasonably prominent forehead, given balance by gently creeping sideburns warming the upper jowls. But all the gravity and earnestness of the face were turned in a moment to irony by its mouth, set off centre within a strong, if not truly square, jaw and seemingly only a second away from curling up in a prankish snigger or a great generous grin. What came out of that mouth was surely worth listening to.

These were observations Joe could only make at intervals, as the face spent a good deal of its time dipped into a book with the power to consume it completely, despite whatever was coming from the unmissably large externally-mounted headphones. Sometimes as little as 20 seconds, sometimes several minutes at a time the owner of this head would turn it towards the pages. Each session would end in the same way, with a disturbing flash of frustration bordering on anguish, as if yet another soufflé had failed to rise.

Then, those diminutive eyes would spend some time idly scanning the rushing dark beyond the opposite window or taking in its neighbours, maybe considering their own difficulties and worries awhile, before reverting to the magnetic words below, to follow the same pantomime once more.

‘Whoa there…’ Joe thought excitedly, having watched for longer than he wanted to, ‘this fella is completely bonkers! I want to know what he’s reading, for a start, and then I want to know everything else about him too. I might have to stand up, get closer. It must be worth the sacrifice of this seat I fought so hard for.’ Of course he had no intention of moving, but it’s one of the techniques many Northern Line commuters use to diminish their sense of slavishness. He knew that, and deliberately turned away now, to change the subject.

From the joyous animated feast he’d been contemplating, Joe’s eyes now fed him a large helping of bathos in the form of the dressed flesh directly opposite. She was a great round ball of a thing, save for the oddly sunken cheeks giving her face an unsettling vase shape. That must have made her angry, because it appeared she had been scowling for a number of years. Frown lines were chased into her hapless features, etching a Zapata moustache of bottomless furrows against the deep ebony of her skin. She wore blue from head to toe. Her right hand was a cluster of yellow gold rings, the majority set with dull blue stones. Around her concertina neck a gold pendant dangled a large blue rock which jostled for space on the copious chest with its neighbour, a golden letter ‘S’. Joe didn’t even need to know about the genuine gemstone set in a pre-molar to guess her name. She was a one-woman theme park and she scared him witless. He couldn’t imagine how he could start a conversation with her if he had to. He supposed he could ask her what made her feel compelled to carry such an enormous handbag and two supermarket plastic bags as well, but he would have been afraid of the answer. They were as alien to each other as if they had been launched into space by their respective societies and crash landed together on a third, neutral, planet. What was there outside this carriage that could bridge their two worlds?

Once he realised that Sapphire had been returning his incredulous stare for quite some time, Joe hustled his eyes along the line, past the vacant and bewildered young foreigner next door, a recent arrival from Eastern Europe if his newspaper was anything to go by, past Eddie and Victoria, past the still empty space on her left, past a heavily tattooed man who was a bit too much for Joe to take on, and settling on a well-tended mop of black hair crowning and partly obscuring an unremarkable face, save for the misshapen nose and a suspiciously clean shave, all dressed up in a charcoal pinstripe that probably had a usable life of about four months and looked well into middle age.

There was a sheen about this one, and not just his suit, that anaconded Joe and would not allow his gaze any further. If he screwed up his eyes and squinted slightly, nothing at all out of the ordinary. But look carefully and linger and the surface peels away somehow. His eyes were bright enough, but strangely exposed to the outside world and vulnerable. He had almost no eyelashes – that was it. Despite his abundant jet black mop, his eyes were left irresponsibly unguarded and gave out a kind of twilight. But it wasn’t just that holding Joe in such thrall. His scarred nose had clearly been broken at least once, but even that wasn’t the fascination – so what was it?

He was wearing make-up. Of course that was it, and it explained the preternaturally smooth skin. Why would he do a thing like that? The emerald green lining to his suit jacket was probably a mistake, but at least one could understand why a certain type might choose it; but foundation on a man? And if Joe could discern it from this distance, his co-travellers wouldn’t be able to miss it. Make-up??? Emerald green socks, to match the jacket lining. Move along.

Hey. Tooting Bec already. The understated, gladdening grandeur of Tooting Bec. What happened to the rest? Lost once again in the melee of sensory and anthropological discovery. The naïve playfulness of South Wimbledon, the grungy dishonesty of Colliers Wood and the out-and-out bare-knuckle aggression of Tooting Broadway. Gone forever. The train only goes one way on this track. This outer arm of the Northern Line was relatively unknown to Joe, and would apparently remain so, but now he was re-entering more familiar territory. Nobody else in the carriage realised that.