In the summer the commute becomes agonising. The etiquette in London in midsummer feels different, the actions of strangers upon underground trains attempting to battle the rising temperatures are desperate and the humidity is depleting. We are cut off from any cycle of new air, suffocating under the oppressive restraints of the fulminating weather. I can’t focus, my eyes are dense and my body feels heavy covered in small beads of sweat.
To distract myself, I watch the woman opposite me desperately grapple with a book in her bag, breaking the back as she does so attempting to fan herself with the creased folded pages. A sheet of torn paper, with a note scrawn across the lines, slips off of the back page and flutters through the oxygen-less air until it eventually finds its place at my feet. I brace myself to bend down to pick it up for her.
The action is simple. Yet the feverish behaviour of the air around me makes the movements feel overtly languid, I wrestle to grab onto the railing for support whilst the train takes its prolonged turn into the next station. When I meet the rugged edges of the note lying on the floor, the inevitable dizziness hits. My ears begin to ring the monotonous dull beating of the train against the tracks scurrying from platform to platform, carrying it’s passengers like prisoners; who are trapped in compact apartments until they are expelled from their cells into the calmer outside air.
I lift the note off of the floor resisting the heat and pulling myself up too, my eyes all the while following the scribbled message.
“Anna, I hope you love it as much as I do
Love Harry ”
I pass her the paper, she offers me a sympathetic smile and a soft
“Thank you” accompanied by a squeeze of the hand. I worry that my pause to read the note would seem invasive, rude. She seems not to notice, appearing branded by her youthfulness, her rounded face flushed from the torrid heat. Burying the note into a plastic supermarket bag and going on using the book as a fan.
The scuttling of the train against the tracks blocks out my reality and I slip into a daydream thinking about the note. I picture Harry scribbling the note and slipping it inside the book, the book he loves so much. I imagine him standing in front of her, chuffed at his purchase watching her eyes glow before she breaks into laughter, he was finally forcing her to read the book he had groaned on about for months.
“Ta Da” he says his arms extending out,
She walks to him instinctively, still laughing. He wraps his arms around her, laughing too now.
I think maybe she’ll return home tonight to her and Harry’s quaint and dimly lit apartment, somewhere just off of West London. They’ll speak of nothing for a while, both tired and timid from their days in battle in the heat, then about their friends who had gotten engaged the night before. I imagine they’ll drink champagne “on their behalf” snapping a picture to send their congratulations. Eventually she’ll remember the story of almost losing his note on her way home, and she’ll recount the generous stranger who returned it to her. I become a background character in her story, just like she is another in mine. I think of them laughing over dinner, Anna joyfully expressing a joke that his beloved book finally came in useful for depleting the heat, whilst he moans that it gets better towards the end, still not breaking his grin. The image plays over and over in my head like a film reel which is stuck on loop. I am struck by a twang of jealousy from the image I have created for them. I am jealous of their contentment.
The train reaches the next station, I jolt my eyes open awoken from my daydreaming. Anna pulls herself up exiting the sliding doors, never to be seen again. To me she is just a stranger who’s life crossed over with mine for one moment. A life which I will never be aware of.