It was one of those sticky nights, when the cool side of the pillow dissipates as soon as you turn it over. St Pancras station at 1 am on one of these Saturday nights is a strange place. Colourful drunks lounge haphazardly over seats as Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Your Type” blares uncomfortably loudly from the jukebox in the food court; it’s only occupants are a tramp and a pigeon wrestling for control of a half eaten burger.
Down on the subterranean platforms a smartly dressed man buzzes a razor over his stubble, smoothing his face. A jittery youth taps and mumbles along to the bass bleeding from his cheap headphones as he paces up and down the platform. Across the tracks, a middle aged couple bicker about their day, each blaming the other for some perceived slight against them that “ruined a lovely day until then”. A man in a fashionably aged black t-shirt promoting a 1970s rock band sits down between me and Razor Reg, down one end of the platform. A few lone women loiter near the relative safety of the platform entrance, in easy reach of a staff member should their night get uncomfortable.
The youth in the headphones continues jitterbugging up and down our platform, the steady thud from his bass rising and falling as he passes and recedes. The smart man accidentally squeaks out a fart; he looks round hoping nobody heard over the sound of his razor, but Rocker Billy and I have already shared a quiet smile together. The train is ten minutes away, and I am still two hours from my bed and sleep.
The couple on the litter strewn northbound platform have resolved their differences and are demonstrating this with a sloppy snogging session. It’s touch and go whether this is better than the argument or not. The downside of platforms buried under concrete, earth and fashionable boutiques is a complete lack of phone signal - not that my provider covered themselves in glory in medium sized Buckinghamshire towns on the previous journey, anyway - so no distractions with social media or music. The allure of a downloaded podcast tugs gently at me, but in my current state sleep would quickly follow and I’d wake up in a depot somewhere, or knowing my luck, somewhere even worse, like Swindon.
Mac and Megan Makeout have been joined on their side by Jitterbug. He stops his pacing and proclaims across the tracks to us, “they is coming, you know!” devoid of context. I ponder whether he’s referring to the Spice Girls reunion, the advertised train services (still ten minutes away!) or something even more sinister. Briefly I consider sharing this with Rocker Billy but I decide against it - it could provoke further conversation and I just want the train to be here so I can put my headphones on and curl up with my book.
The chimes of an announcement interrupt our various thoughts, and as one we turn our faces to the ceiling, despite the loudspeakers being installed at waist height as part of a government scheme to aid accessibility (or funnel extra cash to suppliers to replace the inevitably vandalised one speaker in three, you decide). The monotonous drone of the voice is barely audible over the cracking from the speakers but it seems to imply my train will call additionally at somewhere in east Kent before a south London station. Bemused, I keep my eye on the screen for clarification, and the update on the display shows a much more geographically sensible additional stop.
The train is only ten minutes away. The display proclaims that it’s between a station that never opened and one that sounds Swedish. I don’t trust it. I check to see if Hårga station is actually served by trains, any trains, and isn’t just an IKEA dinner set but my phone mockingly displays no signal. At least when it did this earlier I had cows to look at out the window! My smartwatch is two minutes faster than the time displayed on the train departure board above Razor Reg, but as my watch also thinks it’s 1970 I’m not inclined to trust that either. Perhaps Rocker Billy’s gravitational pull has affected it. I tut to myself the disappointment that he’s not wearing a different band’s shirt, with him affecting time like a black hole, and it technically being the Sabbath after all!
I compose a tweet musing on how it never really feels like tomorrow until you’ve slept, no matter what the clocks say, and delete it from my drafts. None of my followers that are awake at this time are going to find it funny - take away those under the influence of drink, drugs or music and my feed right now is probably just baseball updates and that weird group Tetris twitter. Perhaps I should institute a delay in tweeting more often. Like the delay to this train, an infinite ten minutes. Maybe I should follow Jitterbug in his pacing, stop my muscles atrophying. There are barely a dozen of us down here. Is civilisation still there above? Are we all that’s left of the human race? Mac and Meg seem to be well on their way to repopulating the earth by themselves, judging by their frenzied roaming all over each other while each attempts to devour the other. Suddenly the repeated automated announcements about CCTV coverage of the station make sense, they’re not usually played on a perpetual loop and I suspect they’ve been manually prompted to try and stop the couple progressing further.
Jitterbug has sped up his pacing, almost sprinting up and down the other platform. I don’t blame you mate, I wouldn’t want to hang around those two either, they might try and drag you in! He’s moving fast enough that his pupils seem to make up the whole of his eyes… That, or whatever has made him so jittery. A crystal clear tannoy announcement interrupts the CCTV one to let us know that our train is now only ten minutes away. It’s only after it fades away and the CCTV announcements return, at the behest of someone in a control room somewhere being put off their mid shift meal by arcane meeting rituals on platform B, that it occurs to me how odd the tannoy was. There’s a fair few international passengers at this station so announcing it in French first must be something new being introduced, but they don’t tend to address me by name.
Reg moves his razor up and over the thinning grey of his temples. Billy taps out a drum rhythm almost, but not entirely unlike a Rolling Stones song. I wonder if I really need to save my two remaining cans of Danish lager from the cheap off licence round the corner for the train, or if I should open one now. The train is only ten minutes away though, I can wait. My watch is now an hour fast, if it hasn’t fixed itself when I get mobile signal I’ll reset it at home tomorrow. Today. After sleep, at any rate.
A trio of women squeezed into too tight clothes tottering on high heels have joined us on our platform. One says something that sounds hilarious to all three; the acoustics of the concrete box make the laughs sound like cackles. I realise that buried beneath the earth, surrounded by concrete, we’re effectively sharing a Mausoleum. A pigeon breaks that thought by fluttering in from the outside, through the same tunnel my train will arrive in ten minutes. It turns to head back out, revealing a burnt featherless side to its head. Suddenly I regret my fried chicken for dinner earlier. The trio find this, or something unrelated, even more hilarious, their cackles booming around the station box.
Mac whispers something to Meg, which makes them both chuckle. Jitterbug grins at their mirth, which they find funnier, a feedback loop of laughs on the other platform. Reg nicks himself with his razor. As the blood trickles down his neck he brushes a hand over it, and finds the smear on his fingers funny. He shows Billy, who shares in the joke, the pair howling with laughter, tears falling from their eyes. The three on the other platform all have their arms around each other, heads thrown back, laughing uproariously. The lone women have departed, if they ever really were there to begin with. Laughs of various pitches and volume echo around the tomb of a station, drowning out announcements which now appear to be in Old English.
My train is only ten minutes away.
