As I sit on the train with a pleased wiggle (I have managed to bag a seat) in rush hour … I look around me at the teeming many in our everyday ordinariness... and my eyes are drawn again and again to a couple who stand apart ... Why? … at first I look away … as do all the others ... it is one of the unwritten rules of travelling … no one wants to make eye contact …to avoid it if at all possible … and staring is so rude … after a few minutes of idle contemplation in which I have noticed everything possible … the sneezing elderly man … the fidgety young child … the exhausted mother… the bored glazed look of a teenager … the young girl whose head jerkily moves to the drowned out sounds on her mobile … the grey haired woman who is reading and yet looks around and sniffs periodically … the made-up dancer … the blind man and his dog … a Golden Retriever … aware… more than anyone … and yet my gaze falls time and again on this couple …perhaps simply because they look more miserable than the rest ... he is tall and gaunt and hunched up ... his head is touching the ceiling and he is visibly uncomfortable ... his feet are splayed apart to make room for him to manoeuvre and yet he has an air of aloofness as if contact with another human were sacrilege and invitation to some unspeakable disease. He looks tired and glum in keeping with the dark dense mood in the train.

His woman stands close next to him. She is wraith thin and sways towards him every time the train jerks to a stop... in her cheap short skirt and black frayed tights, she is tightly wound and held together by sheer necessity... He doesn’t look at her but she is looking at him with smudged black rimmed eyes that speak of bone-weary enervation... as the train rolls by each station she visibly wilts ...eventually a seat becomes vacant... he sits without thinking, without looking at her... an automatic reflex ... with a smothered half sigh she sits on his lap to which he neither invites nor rebuffs ... In indifference, their agonisingly slow journey continues on the tracks ... I look on in pity.

As I sit on the train with a pleased wiggle (I have managed to bag a seat) in rush hour … I look around me at the teeming many in our everyday ordinariness... and my eyes are drawn again and again to a couple who stand apart. Why? … at first I look away … as do all the others ... it is one of the unwritten rules of travelling … no one wants to make eye contact …to avoid it if at all possible … and staring is so rude … after a few minutes of idle contemplation in which I have noticed everything possible … the sneezing elderly man … the fidgety young child … the exhausted mother… the bored glazed look of a teenager … the young girl whose head jerkily moves to the drowned out sounds on her mobile … the grey haired woman who is reading and yet looks around and sniffs periodically … the made-up dancer … the blind man and his dog … a Golden Retriever … aware… more than anyone … and yet my gaze falls time and again on this couple … perhaps simply because they seem so present, so alive. He is neither hunched nor quietly detached like the rest of the travellers but with a vitality that is incongruous to the rest... his tall physique is relaxed into a virtuosic half bend that is obviously uncomfortable but with feet splayed apart and talking loudly he is a picture of vigour and confidence … of being in charge … in a train that shuttles between darkened tunnels.

His woman ... and make no mistake ...it is his woman ... his stamp is written all over her... as his hand rests surely on her waist ... his eyes a wealth of suggestion ... fairly eating her up ...stands in between his legs in her black tights and short skirt …undulating … insouciant and cool ... unaware of those watching surreptitiously .... with eyes only for him. A seat becomes available ... and he pulls her down with him ... they both laugh as the train jerkily starts again before they are both seated ... the tangle is warm, intimate and loving ... her skirt rides up her thigh and his hand is on her breast ... for a moment the louche picture is arresting and my eyes and everyone else’s feast on the barely concealed suggestiveness. They present a picture of vital sexual animation ... That risqué moment invigorates us …  the brief picture envelopes us … and indolently … enters the fecund imagination of the weary … I envy them this boldness, this ability to cut out the superfluous and focus on their private world … on what is and what can be ... In that moment I covet them ...