Having mentioned that I don’t like being groped by people, I should probably point out that this isn’t an occurrence I deal with all that often. On the Tube, I’m sure the odd menopausal lady may have brushed my buttock more than was necessary but that doesn’t really bother me. Ever since a friend’s drunken birthday party at a raucous Greek restaurant in Hersham where a hen party of older ladies left my sixteen-year-old bottom bruised after some over-enthusiastic pinching, it would take a great deal for me to associate the words ‘sexual’ and ‘assault’ with any covert crowded Tube shenanigans. Nevertheless, one particular incident alerted me to the fact that it was probably time to head above ground for my daily commute.
My ratrun took me through Camden Town station, where I would watch skinny-jeaned teens and excessively pierced skinheads head off to live their alternative lives from my vantage point within the carriage. After several weeks, I had worked out the best place to stand in order to be nearest the exit to the lifts on arrival at Belsize Park and thereby reduce my journey time further. So everyday around six, I could be found near the doors at the back of the second carriage from the front. On a particularly busy day earlier this year, the train pulls into a slightly emptier than usual Camden Town station, juddering to a halt as the doors lurch open. Everyone breathes in and steps aside to allow one more passenger to board, and from behind my earphones and novel, I notice the space assigned is more than one might usually inspect. Looking up I see a common or garden tramp, the smell of booze emanating from his brownish clothes setting multiple noses wrinkling throughout the area. They may have banned drinking beyond the barriers, but that doesn’t stop tanked-up vagrants descending the escalators and inflicting their rotting livers on your average battery-farmed commuter.
Everyone returns their attention to free paper or eye-contact evasion when I begin to notice a youngish girl next to me I sort of leaning into my space. Then I realise the tramp is reading over her shoulder but in such a way as to be quite aggressively pressing onto her. She must be getting the full frontal of his booze-breath and nobody seems to be doing anything. I wonder if this counts as assault and without looking up, I step to my left, opening some space between me and the divider, and allow her to retreat into my wake with her free paper. At this point, I cannot hear anything but the music in my headphones and my eyes are firmly on my page. The tramp is right in front of me but this is London and I live here and have done for several months now and tramps don’t scare me and I’m an adult and I’ll give him what for if he tries anything anyway.
Then I feel a hand stroke my face, coming down from above, through my hair and down one side over my cheek to my chin. In one movement, I have pulled out my earphones and grabbed this old boy by the wrist with a pretty firm grip, surprising even myself.
“Don’t touch me,” I say firmly, only then relinquishing his arm and becoming aware that people are looking. He chuckles.
“That’s what I like to see,” he begins to slur, “a man of learning, actually reading a book.” I decline to point out that I am in fact reading a bestseller aimed at children and looking at him, decide that he is harmless and smile in response. “But you shouldn’t be having these,” he mumbles on, pointing at my earphones.
“I can do what I like,” I point out patiently, enjoying the exchange of opinions.
“You gotta be aware of your surroundings,” he says before making a hand into a gun shape and holding it to the centre of my forehead. “I could have a gun to your head and you wouldn’t even realise,” he says, and I twig that the hand is illustration of this. I’m not sure if this is my real life or some scene from an obscure art house film. I consider the situation.
“Do you have a gun?” I ask.
“Well, no,” he says, bringing his hand down.
“Well then,” I say, noticing we are pulling into Belsize Park, yelping ‘bye’ and slipping out the doors the moment they gape open. I am a bit shaken up but also proud I came back with decent answers and possibly even entertained fellow passengers with my tramp chat.
Headphones back in, I’m at the front of the lift, waiting for it to fill up and for the doors to close us in. By the tenth time I hear “Please do not obstruct the doors” over my music I finally deign to turn around, and through the crowd of heads, I see old trampy standing exactly where the doors are trying to close, externalizing the fact that he’s “not gonna be crammed in there like sardines!” Everyone looks peeved and I’m on the verge of shouting over to him, as if we were old friends, and telling him to behave. Luckily a more seasoned commuter spells out the tramp’s options in no uncertain terms and he eventually gets in the lift and out of the way of the doors. By this point, my pride in my performance has turned into panic that he is now following me home after my conversation with him, and living above the shops next to the tube station, I speculate that it wouldn’t be hard to track down my address and to wait for me and then to do whatever it is tramps do to the people they hunt down at night…
I’m out of there like a whippet after a speeding sausage and I don’t look back till the flat door is closed behind me. Thousands of people get on the tube every day. But of all the doors on the train, of all the trains going through the station at that time, this character chanced to encounter me and I him.
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