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Friday 5.30pm, and my face was pressed to the armpit of another man, with the leather strap almost cutting off the blood supply to my hand. The groin of a stranger was touching my back every time the carriage cornered. A girl breathed hot chocolate into my ear. It sounds erotic, now I think about it, but it wasn’t. The only way I can cope with that squeeze of people, the second-hand air of three hundred diseased strangers on the Jubilee Line, is by going into myself. I become utterly absorbed in the music on my ipod. Ray Davies is singing only to me. Sometimes I accidentally mouth the words and attract the disinterested but opprobrious glances of bystanders.
There was a wasp in the carriage, battling frantic against the window to escape to the blurring black brick beyond. I watched it for five minutes by sidelong glances before it crossed into the radar of a fellow commuter. She screamed, dropped her briefcase and stood on someone else’s toe. Generalised and polite uproar ensued while the alpha females retreated – not physically, the press of bodies preventing movement, but psychically shrinking - and the alpha males fashioned crude cudgels from the morning’s FT. The wasp was caught by a swipe from a sharp-suited sales-exec just as the tube arrived at a station, the lifeless corpse plummeting into the gap which passengers were exhorted to mind. I minded the dead wasp silently until bodies were emptied and replaced, the underground moved on and the station lights faded. The press around me had eased somewhat. I got out at the next station to go home.
North Greenwich station was busy but felt empty, as it always does, because of the vastness and the newness and the chrome. Each station sign, cushioned in pillars rising diagonally either side, looked to me like a weird alien foetus expelled between blue legs. I queued onto the escalator. There are two up escalators, at North Greenwich, and two down escalators. One of the ups was out of order and so we bottlenecked onto the one while the two down escalators coasted empty. Almost empty. I was thinking about home and not work and wondering whether to stop off for pizza on the way or whether to trust to the contents of my freezer to provide. I was barely present, in other words. Still, there was something about her.
A girl was riding the down escalator next to the up. She was listening to music through novelty headphones in the shape of ladybirds, the red with black dots poking out under her hair. She was so close I could have reached out and touched her (I could have scrambled over the central reservation and joined her but I only thought of that later). Her mouth was moving along with the words of whatever music she was listening to and occasionally a toneless and tuneless syllable escaped from her mouth with some volume. She was utterly absent from North Greenwich underground station and I was totally in love. It's an impulse like someone has joined my torso to hers with frail string. It hurts like tickling. I’m not the loving type, but sometimes I get these feelings for strangers. I normally ignore them and they go away. Usually, I'm left with a weird happy feeling for the rest of the day if they even just catch my eye and smile back. I’d never act on it. But if you’d said to me, come on, it was lust, you’d have been wrong. I didn’t want to sleep with her (I did). I wanted to hold her and enfold her and keep her safe from the big wide world for ever.

So I was looking there at this girl being absent from this place, totally somewhere else, and I was falling in love.

And then the girl was absent. Completely absent. Gone somewhere else. I’m not explaining this very well. She disappeared. Physically and utterly. I’ve already alluded tangentially to my thoughts about the observation skills of the London commuter but let me make it plain this time. The girl completely vanished less than a metre in front of my eyes and nobody – not one single other person on the up escalator – noticed anything.
The up escalator continued its juddering journey and I went with it, the whole time craning my head around to look down the down escalator. At the top I ducked right and ran straight down the steps I’d seen the girl on less than two minutes before.
At the bottom, stuck against the line where the escalator meets the floor and the treads disappear underground to loop round and begin again, was a pair of shoes. They were ebbing against the metal like red shells at the tide line. The laces were still tied.
The flow of commuters up the up escalator had ceased until the next train. The platform was briefly empty and I stood looking at the shoes. Flat. Red and black. Still laced. Not the kind of shoes someone would wear to an office. I've never been one for fashion but I'm not colour blind either and the best way I could describe them is that they were the kind of shoes a girl might wear, I suppose, to co-ordinate with red and black ladybird headphones. I looked around to double check nobody was watching then picked up the shoes and shoved them in the top of my laptop bag. I went home and ate frozen peas and Chicken Kiev.
It was maybe three weeks later when I was riding down the down escalator at North Greenwich underground station to catch the tube to work. I was thinking about the disappeared girl and about work and the pair of red and black shoes in my hall cupboard and about how my future probably wasn’t, after all, in futures. What if, I thought, she'd just ducked out of view, left her shoes for, well, some perfectly good reason, and had come back to find some nutter had nicked them?

My ipod, shuffling, produced Janis Joplin’s Farewell Song and I began to sing along in my head. Maybe the singing spilled out of my head a little. A woman on the up elevator smiled at me, not in a derogatory way and it was nice but I felt no tug of fragile string, no connection. And don't be worried, everything's just fine, I sang to myself.
By the time I reached the bottom of the escalator, I had gone.
The smiling woman on the up escalator rode down again and picked up my briefcase which was causing some consternation among the other passengers, stranded as it was at the bottom of the escalator and bobbing against the metal strip where the steps meet the floor. She was the only one, I think, who’d noticed my disappearance.
I was watching it all, but I wasn’t there. And when I thought I’d never have to catch that tube to work again it was the happiest I’d ever felt. I can’t say all my questions were answered, but I can say I knew the questions didn’t matter anymore.
I could have waited for the smiling woman, I suppose. Maybe two days, maybe a week, she’d have joined me. But I didn’t. I felt a tugging on the fragile string and decided to move on. Let her wait for the next guy.
Now here I am, following that fragile string up the endless escalator. I’m trying to catch up with the girl with ladybird headphones and not even a hint, just the absence, of a pair of red and black shoes.

Description
body div#devskin0 hr { }

Friday 5.30pm, and my face was pressed to the armpit of another man, with the leather strap almost cutting off the blood supply to my hand. The groin of a stranger was touching my back every time the carriage cornered. A girl breathed hot chocolate into my ear. It sounds erotic, now I think about it, but it wasn’t. The only way I can cope with that squeeze of people, the second-hand air of three hundred diseased strangers on the Jubilee Line, is by going into myself. I become utterly absorbed in the music on my ipod. Ray Davies is singing only to me. Sometimes I accidentally mouth the words and attract the disinterested but opprobrious glances of bystanders.
There was a wasp in the carriage, battling frantic against the window to escape to the blurring black brick beyond. I watched it for five minutes by sidelong glances before it crossed into the radar of a fellow commuter. She screamed, dropped her briefcase and stood on someone else’s toe. Generalised and polite uproar ensued while the alpha females retreated – not physically, the press of bodies preventing movement, but psychically shrinking - and the alpha males fashioned crude cudgels from the morning’s FT. The wasp was caught by a swipe from a sharp-suited sales-exec just as the tube arrived at a station, the lifeless corpse plummeting into the gap which passengers were exhorted to mind. I minded the dead wasp silently until bodies were emptied and replaced, the underground moved on and the station lights faded. The press around me had eased somewhat. I got out at the next station to go home.
North Greenwich station was busy but felt empty, as it always does, because of the vastness and the newness and the chrome. Each station sign, cushioned in pillars rising diagonally either side, looked to me like a weird alien foetus expelled between blue legs. I queued onto the escalator. There are two up escalators, at North Greenwich, and two down escalators. One of the ups was out of order and so we bottlenecked onto the one while the two down escalators coasted empty. Almost empty. I was thinking about home and not work and wondering whether to stop off for pizza on the way or whether to trust to the contents of my freezer to provide. I was barely present, in other words. Still, there was something about her.
A girl was riding the down escalator next to the up. She was listening to music through novelty headphones in the shape of ladybirds, the red with black dots poking out under her hair. She was so close I could have reached out and touched her (I could have scrambled over the central reservation and joined her but I only thought of that later). Her mouth was moving along with the words of whatever music she was listening to and occasionally a toneless and tuneless syllable escaped from her mouth with some volume. She was utterly absent from North Greenwich underground station and I was totally in love. It's an impulse like someone has joined my torso to hers with frail string. It hurts like tickling. I’m not the loving type, but sometimes I get these feelings for strangers. I normally ignore them and they go away. Usually, I'm left with a weird happy feeling for the rest of the day if they even just catch my eye and smile back. I’d never act on it. But if you’d said to me, come on, it was lust, you’d have been wrong. I didn’t want to sleep with her (I did). I wanted to hold her and enfold her and keep her safe from the big wide world for ever.

So I was looking there at this girl being absent from this place, totally somewhere else, and I was falling in love.

And then the girl was absent. Completely absent. Gone somewhere else. I’m not explaining this very well. She disappeared. Physically and utterly. I’ve already alluded tangentially to my thoughts about the observation skills of the London commuter but let me make it plain this time. The girl completely vanished less than a metre in front of my eyes and nobody – not one single other person on the up escalator – noticed anything.
The up escalator continued its juddering journey and I went with it, the whole time craning my head around to look down the down escalator. At the top I ducked right and ran straight down the steps I’d seen the girl on less than two minutes before.
At the bottom, stuck against the line where the escalator meets the floor and the treads disappear underground to loop round and begin again, was a pair of shoes. They were ebbing against the metal like red shells at the tide line. The laces were still tied.
The flow of commuters up the up escalator had ceased until the next train. The platform was briefly empty and I stood looking at the shoes. Flat. Red and black. Still laced. Not the kind of shoes someone would wear to an office. I've never been one for fashion but I'm not colour blind either and the best way I could describe them is that they were the kind of shoes a girl might wear, I suppose, to co-ordinate with red and black ladybird headphones. I looked around to double check nobody was watching then picked up the shoes and shoved them in the top of my laptop bag. I went home and ate frozen peas and Chicken Kiev.
It was maybe three weeks later when I was riding down the down escalator at North Greenwich underground station to catch the tube to work. I was thinking about the disappeared girl and about work and the pair of red and black shoes in my hall cupboard and about how my future probably wasn’t, after all, in futures. What if, I thought, she'd just ducked out of view, left her shoes for, well, some perfectly good reason, and had come back to find some nutter had nicked them?

My ipod, shuffling, produced Janis Joplin’s Farewell Song and I began to sing along in my head. Maybe the singing spilled out of my head a little. A woman on the up elevator smiled at me, not in a derogatory way and it was nice but I felt no tug of fragile string, no connection. And don't be worried, everything's just fine, I sang to myself.
By the time I reached the bottom of the escalator, I had gone.
The smiling woman on the up escalator rode down again and picked up my briefcase which was causing some consternation among the other passengers, stranded as it was at the bottom of the escalator and bobbing against the metal strip where the steps meet the floor. She was the only one, I think, who’d noticed my disappearance.
I was watching it all, but I wasn’t there. And when I thought I’d never have to catch that tube to work again it was the happiest I’d ever felt. I can’t say all my questions were answered, but I can say I knew the questions didn’t matter anymore.
I could have waited for the smiling woman, I suppose. Maybe two days, maybe a week, she’d have joined me. But I didn’t. I felt a tugging on the fragile string and decided to move on. Let her wait for the next guy.
Now here I am, following that fragile string up the endless escalator. I’m trying to catch up with the girl with ladybird headphones and not even a hint, just the absence, of a pair of red and black shoes.