We walk quickly and in silence to the station. The platform is packed with the usual East London human pick ‘n’ mix of racial and social categories, though there are a lot more people in sharp suits and cutaway collars sprinkled around these days. The train is, of course, completely packed. The doors slide open and V elbows her way in, taking no prisoners, paving the way for me to step gracefully aboard.
I’m quietly dealing with the fact that my right hand is going to be pressed against an outsize, middle-aged man’s bottom for the next fifteen minutes when the carriage doors next to me begin to slide shut but are jammed half-open by the front end of a pram being rammed inside. I look down and see a baby girl in a pink babygro staring up at me from the seat. She looks afraid. I pull a funny face to cheer her up. Somewhat inevitably, she starts to scream. People tut and adopt pained expressions.
“Excuse me!” comes a voice through the doors. A rangy woman in brown suede jeans and a rugby shirt and red gilet combo is standing on the platform. She’s holding on to the other end of the pram and has a wicker basket over her shoulder.
“Somebody open the doors for God's sake.”
I would love to oblige but can’t move. A young guy in a baggy suit listening to something with annoyingly loud, tinny beats on his mp3 player sees what is happening and leans forward to prize the doors apart. The woman smiles at him. He nods back, blankly. She rams the pram inside, hitting me hard on the ankle. She smiles at the guy and is about to ask him something. She starts to speak and he turns away from her. She instead turns to address me.
“Would you mind terribly holding her while I collapse the pram?” she says, smiling thinly and pointing at her child with her index finger.
Before I can answer, she crouches down, hauls it by the oxters from the three-wheeler pram and passes it to me.
“Ida,” she says, by way of explanation, before returning her attention to the pram. I hold the child with the Victorian name half over my shoulder, like a small, angry sandbag that cries. She generates an awful lot of heat and noise and wriggles with surprising force. I grip her very tightly, fearful that she’s going to slip over my shoulder and on to the floor.
Ten minutes pass and the woman is showing no sign of taking her baby back. I am fairly annoyed by this point. How dare she be so recklessly trusting of a stranger? The baby pulls at my hair and my ear. Then she ratchets the screaming up a notch. The noise is deafening. My cheeks start to burn as heavy sighs and tuts emanate from all parts of the carriage. Free newspapers are rustled with excess force. I feel the urge to scream myself.
It’s not my fault! She’s a bloody baby, what do you expect? Half of you lot probably want to scream out loud, doing this journey every day! But she doesn’t have control over anything, let alone the fucking 9.19 to Liverpool Street arriving on time! So cut us a bit of slack here, eh? Or actually get brave and say something rather than huffing and tutting. You miserable bunch of repressed twats. Although having said that, I’ve done exactly the same thing numerous times. And having had a taste of life on the other side of the fence, I can assure you, you’re better off where you are. You’re still twats though.
Of course, I say nothing.
I look over and see V staring at me with a gloopy expression – the Baby Look to the power of infinity. I need to get this child back to its mother, fast. This tableau is doing me no favours. The train stops at Bethnal Green and a man in a suit squeezes in next to me. He smiles at Ida – still screaming, still generating a lot of heat – then nods at me.
“Terrible twos?” he asks sympathetically. I respond neutrally with what may be an entirely new bodily expression – the combined nod, shrug and head shake.
“Ahh yes… you’ll look back on this fondly when she’s a teenager, trust me mate.”
I do the shrug-nod thing again. I feel a warm, damp spot spread across my chest.
“Nice choice by the way.”
“Sorry?” I ask. The man nods down at the pram, which is still being tussled with by the woman, who is making small grunting noises and repeatedly saying “buggeration!” as she tries in vain to fold it up.
“Only way to cope with Hackney pavements innit.”
“Oh, that. I’m not a huge fan of those actually – I mean, no offence. They seem a bit over the top.
The man looks disgruntled, then slightly puzzled. It appears to him that I hate my own pram.
V is stifling her laughter. Suddenly, Ida’s mum is wrestling her baby off my chest (revealing a patch of urine that resembles a map of Tasmania) and tutting at me. I’ve committed a cardinal sin and insulted her expensive pram. Unable to work out the dynamic of this scene, the man turns his back on me and stares out the window.
The train creaks and trundles into Liverpool Street. I swear the woman deliberately bangs my shin – hard – with her folded up pram/weapon as she gets off.
“Well, you handled that well,” V says to me as we walk towards the barrier.
“No-one respects personal boundaries in this city. And they are stupid, those prams.”
“Seriously though, imagine doing that every day? Commuting with a screaming brat in London? No thanks. When we have kids, we’re moving to the country. No question. And we’re not buying a stupidly expensive, wanky status symbol pram.”
I manage to contain the urge to scream Kids? The COUNTRY?
Before we bid adieu – V is going to Brixton, while I am heading for Great Portland Street – we have a little hug and a kiss.
“So, are you coming down after work?” she asks.
“Yeah, definitely. Why was I coming down again?”
V sighs as she wipes spit from the shoulders of my jacket. “That leaving do. Frida.”
“Is she the one who says she knows a lot about a range of political and historical topics but when engaged in conversation turns out to know very little about anything, and so always makes stuff up, basically, before changing the subject to her and her twin sister’s appearance on Jim’ll Fix It when they were ten?”
“The same.”
“Is Old Dead Eyes mixing with the galley slaves tonight?”
“Fraid so.”
“Hmm. I’ll be there about 7. Probably drinking heavily from around quarter past.”
“Cool.”
“Get me some crack cocaine, heroin and perhaps some glue to sniff.”
“Wilco.”
“And some absinthe and a crash helmet and a pair of ear plugs.”
“They’re not that bad.”
“Your prolonged exposure to them has compromised your freak-appraising faculties.”
V studies me for a second and smiles.
“What?”
“You looked good with that kid on your shoulder.”
We go our separate ways.
“Love the wet patch!” she shouts over her shoulder.
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