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Part two of the thoughts and musings on commuter-land of author Richard Aronowitz, whose latest novel It's Just the Beating of My Heart was written entirely on the train.
The man in the wheelchair, parked in the space that the unused clapdown seat opposite mine had left empty, took a large gulp of my takeaway coffee.
It was an unusual start to the day.
The man in the wheelchair, with an upmarket chortle, apologised for the MacTakeaway mistaken gulp from identical styrofoam cups. His and my coffees, inches but miles apart.
People on train journeys fascinate me, but I do everything that I can to avoid speaking to them. The man in the wheelchair waited to watch me sip from my cup. What else could I do? It got us talking, that gulp. He was a bloodstock agent from Newmarket, back broken when younger in a riding accident. Nice chortle, friendly chap, invested here and there. He asked me what I was typing; I told him a novel.
It turned out that he liked reading novels as much as drinking coffee, the man in the wheelchair.
Short Story - Escape From The Sun
By A.J. Duggan on 08 March 2010 at 18:18:43
The statue stood guard on the canal side, hunched at the shoulders. The driver inched closer. Closer. Until he was only a matter of feet away. Without alarm, soundless, the statue became a heron spreading its wings, lifting its legs beneath its belly and cruising in a steady flat glide to take up station a few yards further down the bank.
The driver looked back at where he had come from. A quick fag break, that had been the idea, before he'd stumbled through a line of trees, craving only shade, and chanced upon this different world, an explorer emerging from a desert with the last of his water exhausted. He'd been delivering all day with the Transit door slid right back, but the air that came washing into the cab was still furnace hot. The whole country was burning up, the radio reporting tarmac melting, tyres getting stuck in the resulting treacle. Rails buckling, shops cleared out of sunscreen, even the nights were too hot to allow any respite. People going slowly mad.
He kept hearing what he thought was a cat calling, but the sound came from overhead. He figured the heat must be getting to him, until he saw a bird swirling upwards in circles over woodland off to the left. It was joined by a second, rising in a concentric pattern. He thought they were crows at first, but knew that crows don't soar like that; they keep a steady course with loose lazy wingbeats. Making a visor with his hands, he tried to keep track. Were they eagles?
The driver looked back at where he had come from. The heron took off again, skimming the water and then nonchalantly easing itself up over the brickwork of a humpback bridge. Still falling from the sky, the Siren call of the creatures he thought might be eagles. Sweat was stinging his eyes. I'll go as far as that bridge, the driver decided. When he got there he could see down over the land dropping away from the canal, land marked by a network of paths stretching off towards the horizon. Only the occasional house, a silent tractor with an escort of gulls moving in the far distance.
The driver looked back at where he had come from, through the trees to the van in the lay-by. He checked his watch, only forty minutes to get to the next drop-off. Another half hour to the one after that, and so on and so on.
A life of deadlines.
Forever.
The driver looked back at where he had come from and he began to walk.
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TRAIN OF THOUGHT by Richard Aronowitz
To celebrate the launch of Richard Aronowitz's second novel, It's Just the Beating of My Heart, we are lucky enough to have the author himself here on the Inpress blog. And while most authors might prefer the peace and quiet of a gloomy study or a woodland sanctuary, both this and his critically acclaimed debut, Five Amber Beads, were written almost entirely in the glare and bustle aboard commuter trains between London and his Cambridgeshire home. To mark this incredible feat of concentration and human endurance, here is the man himself and the first part of his Train of Thought.
I have written both of my novels on my regular commute between my home in Cambridge and my place of work in London. I wrote them both longhand and then typed them up on my laptop, and if I was at the word-processing stage I always chose one of the single seats by the electric-doored lavatory, so that my fellow passengers would not rubber-neck as I typed. You would be surprised at how openly and keenly they will do that, as if you are a channel for the words of God, Paris Hilton or Ryan Giggs.
Sitting directly outside the door of the lavatory affords you an insight into man at his most exposed. Recently, I was composing a sentence when a pretty girl walked up to the electric door of the cubicle and asked another single-seater whether anyone was using the facilities. When answered with a 'yes', she pressed 'open' anyway and exposed the bare buttocks of a Chinese male tourist who was, so to speak, jockeying the horse. Unflustered, he continued and the door slid slowly shut again at her giggling prompting. He had forgotten to press 'lock'. Another of the dangers of leaving the analogue age.
You will notice that both main protagonists of my novels to-date are commuters. They sit well away from the loos.
Carrying Poems around Edinburgh
Nestled in neatly behind Canongate Street in Edinburgh is the Scottish Poetry Library, central hub to the "Carry a Poem" movement that has been sweeping through the world's first ever UNESCO City of Literature.
Walking round the city, you could find poetry from all walks of life and schools of literary thinking: Robert Burns, G.K. Chesterton, Douglas Dunn and Edward Lear were just some of the names I spotted. And in all kinds of places, shapes and forms, too: on business cards, blown up in the windows of office blocks, projected onto the Castle Rock come nightfall, even tied to trees and bushes in St. Andrew's Square.
There was also plenty of opportunity for audience participation: a few such shrubs had blank cards for your own poetic input - one already filled out in schoolboy handwriting with the chorus to Edwin Starr's 'War', with all the 'HUH's provided for good measure. For a genre that too often suffers from the need to be high-brow, it was great to see an initiative wanting to be edifying, inclusive and fun all at the same time.
And if you found a line you liked, you could take it along to the Poetry Library and the staff would point you in the direction of the whole poem or collection it was taken from. Brilliant. More brilliant was their stack of free poetry-based postcards, including a photo of that most illustrious piece of graffiti, "Hip Hop / Chip Shop". Now that's what I call poetry.