Thoughts on the 131 to Kingston.

“Donne seemed to be advocating a response that is deeper and more consistent: Any man’s death makes me smaller, less than I was before I learned of that death, because the world is a map of interconnections. As the world decreases in size, so must each of its parts.”

— Roger Rosenblatt, Time essay, “Do You Feel the Deaths of Strangers?”

It happens every so often in London. And no, I’m not referring to the unseasonably warm weather we had today.

I’m talking about the “Ladies and gentlemen, we apologise for the delay. Services are postponed due to a person having been struck by a train today at X Station,” chilling in its very sanitization. Sometimes the wording is different–maybe they’ll refer to it as a “customer incident” or a “person falling under a train.” But what they’re really trying to say is, someone died today. And you can’t help but wonder why.

There’s so much I want to know when I hear those words. I want to know about the life they led and I want to know what made them end it in such a way (presuming it was a suicide). I want to know how they wake up one morning and decide, today is the day. Or maybe no such thought crosses their mind. Maybe it’s something that occurs to them in the split-second before the train pulls into the station.

As a writer, we’re told often to think of the ‘inciting incident’ in the lives of our characters (or ourselves, for the non-fiction writers of the world), the first domino that gets tipped and sets the rest of it off. What was the incident in that person’s life?

But when your own transport gets thrown off by someone else’s untimely death, you don’t think about these things. When the electronic timetables of Waterloo Station are suddenly, disturbingly wiped clean, you’re only angry that you can’t get home.

Instead of grieving for a lost life, you yell at the attendants in the station who are merely doing their best to control an uncontrollable situation. You yell at the random man who hip-checks you as you collide mid-sprint for the same carriage that’s already packed more densely than a cattle car. And you yell at family or friends on the phone when they can’t instantly drop whatever they’re doing and pick you up at whatever station the train’s been diverted to.

We cope in those situations, though, don’t we? Running through the crowds of Waterloo tonight had been surreal, like I was caught up in a scene from a doomsday movie, sirens wailing and evacuation in full swing.

But once on the train, everyone started to breathe easier. The girl in front of me texted and Facebooked her way through the crisis (even nosy me had no choice but to “eavesdrop” over her shoulder, so close were we jammed together), whilst another woman whispered to someone on the phone: “The trains are absolute carnage.” And then a short, middle-aged man called a friend and began speaking–or should I say yelling?–absolute jibberish. It was English…but not. Some kind of strange code full of strange words–“Aw, yeah, mate, he’s like a Muslim running towards a Muslim temple. You’ve worn out the prayer mat on that one, haven’t you mate?”

His Jabberwock-y speech had one effect: he got us smiling again. I wasn’t the only person who couldn’t keep back a laugh as he carried on like he was the only one in the train. We passed through Wimbledon and he kept yelling: “Mate, I wish I was there! I’m on a train full of people!” When we stopped at the next station, a woman next to me said: “Happy people. A train full of happy people.”

In due time we arrived at Raynes Park, where I managed to catch the 131 bus to Kingston, thanks to the efforts of a good friend who “kept me company” through texts during the ordeal. I settled into a seat upstairs with my notebook out while a man behind me talked into his phone, keeping his own loved ones updated on the drama: “We’re making fair progress, just by the Homebase now.”

And as the sun set over London and left a cool blue sky in its place, I let the poetry of the man’s words sink in a little deeper, remembering this: Life isn’t always easy. Disruptions happen, trains stop running, we can’t get where we need to be.

Sometimes the best we can do is to make fair progress.