Getting Around the City

Story · all 20 words

The 7:40

For four months I caught the 7:40 into the city, and I learned more about that place from those journeys than I had in six years of living in it.

At first I drove. That lasted eleven days. The traffic jam started before the second roundabout and did not really end until the office, and I spent the whole of rush hour looking at the back of the same white van. Then I discovered that the car park near my building filled up by eight and cost more per week than the train, and that petrol was quietly taking a fifth of what the job paid me.

So I switched to public transport and became, within about a fortnight, one of those people with opinions about it.

The first thing I learned was to buy the right ticket. I had been buying two single tickets every day like an amateur. A return ticket was cheaper than two singles, and a weekly travel card paid for itself by Wednesday afternoon and then simply carried on being free for two days. Nobody tells you this. You have to work it out or be told by a stranger, which is what happened to me.

The journey itself was two trains. I would get on at my local station, change at the main one, and get off four stops later. The platform at the interchange was the interesting part – the same forty people every morning, in the same positions along it, none of us ever speaking, all of us silently furious if somebody new stood in our place.

When the trains failed, which was roughly one morning in nine, I took the underground instead, or the tram if it was raining, because the tram route is slower but it goes above ground past the river and it is a much better way to be late.

The fare went up twice while I was doing it. Everybody complained, including me, and everybody carried on paying, including me.

What I actually remember is smaller than any of this. A man who played chess against himself on a folding board every Tuesday and Thursday. A woman who got off one stop early in good weather so she could walk. The particular crossing outside the station where four hundred pedestrians would wait for the green man in complete silence, and then all move at once, and where I once saw a driver stop, wind down his window, and apologise to a stranger for going through the traffic lights too late.

I do that journey twice a year now, and I am always surprised by how short it is. It was never really forty minutes. It was the only forty minutes of the day when nobody could reach me, and I did not understand that until I stopped needing it.