Byron Easy Read Free

seats thirty-seven to forty-two. He looks oddly familiar. He looks gross. And he certainly hasn’t noticed that he’s injured a fellow human. Pain, like thumb-pressure to the actual brain itself, enters the right side of my face and vibrates along the lines of my jaw and skull. In clinical close-up I watch the man’s T-shirt reveal a vast, pubicly forested space-hopper belly as he berths his case. Then, with a burp, he rejoins his two incredibly bolshy and stupid-looking children further down the aisle, pausing only to clip one of them over the crown.
    I huff and I puff and feel a prickling in my nuts. Oh, you shithouse! Oh you clumsy—If it wasn’t Christmas (and he wasn’t bigger, badder, exponentially more than me) I would’ve definitely called him a …
    ‘Kant!’
    The man turns in full movie slow-mo to face me. Again that familiar snarl. Oh dear. I’ve done it now. The word, as a word so often will when you’re drunk, just slipped out.
    ‘What did you call me?’
    I see at once that his face—lopsided with venom and ovoid under a lawn of bristle—has murder written across it. As he advances, I become aware of the Accountant Couple, now crimson with shame and stress, physically diminishing in their seats; probably wishing they’d cabbed it or chartered a helicopter to Leeds instead. With a burger-waft of bad armpits, the big man is once again back in my personal force field, closer (if that were humanly possible without him actually penetrating me) than before. His deceptive height really is something of a phenomenon: taller at a distance, up close he is Danny DeVito as Napoleon. I see that his eyes are deranged with afternoon alcohol. I note the mottled blue of a swift tattooed on his grilled neck. Then my voice appears from nowhere.
    ‘I didn’t call you anything. I said don’t! ’
    The man’s children watch this terrible, thrilling scene like two orphans on a sinking ship. It is surely something they have witnessed before. Just daddy doing his stuff.
    ‘That’s not what you said …’ The big man’s voice is graphically deep, an Essex gravel pit of menace and harm. Our stares are now locked like antlers.
    ‘I meant don’t hit him. The kid. I was hit when I was a child …’ (I think the pale woman opposite coughs at this sentence, shifting her weight to the other bony buttock) ‘… and look how I turned out.’ He remains impassive. For some reason he doesn’t seem impressed by this. I try another tack. ‘Okay, I’m lying. I’ve got Tourette’s, which makes me shout out the names of dead German philosophers.’
    Hopeless, I know.
    An electric pause. Then he leans forward, the tracksuit scrunching in the bends of his limbs. Poking an oil-stained finger at my third eye (almost touching it) he says this to me:
    ‘You—fuck nuts— you , I never want to see again. Capiche ?’
    I nod vigorously, hypnotised by how long these moments always seem to take. Then he’s off, down the carriage to corral his children; a thousand eyes feasting on my face. Glancing up at the Accountant Couple, I give them my best, my largest smile. They look down instantly at the scratched Formica, as if it held information of great importance.
    Ah, well. At least it’s taken my mind off the past for a moment and forced me to focus on the journey. And that can only be a good thing. As with any journey, one begins at Point A, things occur (and the really significant things are always thoughts, memories, insights, terrors—not the quotidian narrative of events), and eventually one arrives, some time later, at Point B; usually with fizzing limbs and hospitalising indigestion. The mental journey is always richer, for it contains recollection, fascination; though not much tranquillity in which to contemplate them. Despite the much-vaunted psychopathic state known as ‘living in the present’, one doesn’t want to lose the precious stones of the past. One doesn’t want to forget them, to see them drop away through