Train Journeys

I don't keep a diary. I couldn't possibly risk my private thoughts and feelings being read one day. But I'm very tempted to keep a log of my train journeys from Leicester to St Pancras and back.

Entering a carriage is like entering a theatre to watch a play that you know nothing about. The mobile phone has added an extra dimension to the drama. I get into carriage ‘A' at the very end of the train, where the despised smokers are now corralled. A small girl is wailing in pain and holding her ear. Her mother is trying to comfort her. They look frightened; both are thin and pale and skimpily dressed, considering it's below freezing outside and the countryside is covered in sparkling frost.

The ticket collector comes along and the girl's mother asks him if he has any painkillers. She tells him that her daughter has an earache. He is sympathetic, but explains that he is not allowed to give drugs to passengers. After he has gone, the mother takes out her mobile phone and calls somebody named Rose. Over the sound of the little girl's crying, she tells Rose that she's on a train to London, and asks Rose to go round to her house and remove her clothes and furniture, ‘while 'e's at work’. She tells Rose that she has not paid the rent on her council house for four months and that, when Dave finds out, he will kill her. She then starts to cry.

From the ensuing conversation I find out that Dave is Rose's brother, and that both women are afraid of him. I can't bear the misery of it and prepare to get up and sit with the pair, but another woman slides into the seat opposite them and offers the girl a pack of Polos and gives the mother a tissue.

When we arrive at St Pancras I'm alarmed to see that the little girl has no gloves or scarf, and is bare-legged. The mother struggles along the platform with a heavy suitcase and a pile of carrier bags. I try to take a few of the bags, but the mother refuses. I fear for both of them as they walk out of the station into London. They are on my mind all day as I try to write jokes.

I catch the 8.25 back to Leicester that night, and am happily settled with a take-away cappuccino. Diagonally opposite me, across the aisle, is a middle-aged man with a bad haircut and unfortunate glasses. He is reading the Evening Standard. As the train leaves the station, his mobile rings. He listens to the person on the end of the line for a few seconds, then says: ‘Oh my God!’

I look across, but my lousy sight prevents me from seeing the expression on his face. He then says: ‘It said: “Hello sweetheart, it's me. I love you, and I miss you.”’ Apparently this was the text message that he'd left earlier in the day on his lover's mobile phone. Her husband had found it and was demanding to know who ‘me' was.

The train goes through three tunnels as it leaves London and communication between the lovers was cut off. I waited impatiently for them to reconnect. She, it transpired, was in a public phone box with a pile of pound coins, and her husband was in the marital home with the children, her mobile phone and the incriminating message.

A story was concocted. Bad Haircut urged his lover to stay calm. ‘Tell him it must be a wrong number,’ he said. ‘And keep to the story… Don't, for Christ's sake, tell him about me.’

As the train passed Luton, the lover left the phone box to get more pound coins. At Bedford his phone rang yet again. He asked his lover: ‘Can you trace who sends a text message?’ They discussed this; neither of them knew how the technology worked. Their paranoia increased.

The man had completely forgotten that he was in a railway carriage with at least thirty other people, all of whom must have been as transfixed as I was by his conversation. He was immersed in the psychodrama of his life.

At one point he broke from speaking to his lover and phoned his wife. The line was engaged. Was his wife being informed of her husband's deception? At Kettering, Bad Haircut said to his mobile: ‘You know I love you, don't be a prat.’

Infuriatingly, it was impossible to tell whether he was speaking to his lover or his wife.