Steve_Bamlett_blog

‘When I think it through, this wasn’t a random encounter’. James’ thinking had a tendency to be spoken aloud and that could be embarrassing. He checked around him. No-one seems to have heard. The boy with ear-plugs, who was sitting next to him on the train, still nodded his head to the same beat, his leg still slightly pressed against James’ own. He thought he heard the monotony of what the boy heard in that unchanging motion of the head alone, though in truth, he heard nothing. A straight couple opposite him were still demonstrating how ‘into each other’ they were and, noticing again the tepid giggles of both he felt as if there was undoubtedly more to that boy than they, though he dare not look more closely. ‘Boy’ was the word in his thought though this young man seemed to speak through his muscular legs.

The more James tensed, the more obvious was it to Jane’s  that the young man had obviously misunderstood his leg to be some firm piece of the seating furniture of this train. The boy probably would jump nervously if James expressed life by some muscular dance within his own leg. He was thus holding it now in an increasingly uncomfortable muscular contraction. Suddenly, as the trolley with beverages pulled next to him and a fruity and rather camp accent whispered (it wasn’t much more in volume), ‘Drinks, sir’, he knew what to do. He overacted a bodily turn to the trolley that would, to any judge of body motion who noticed it, inevitably involve a leg movement further towards the boy’s leg. He registered mock – shock and caught the boy’s eye and apologised for such an intrusion, expecting him to recoil pulling that fine leg with him, further into his window seat with an embarrassed smile and a gentle: ‘No trouble’.

Instead the boy seemed to make the very muscles of his leg so communicate with James that they felt as if they moved as limbs of one body. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the boy turned and said with a smile that seemed more articulate than his words and as muscularly pleasing as the feel of his leg was against James own, ‘Never apologise for doing no harm. People have touched each other so little these days since Covid, I think, and I was rather enjoying it’.

How could he say that, with so much potential publicity? James had a very overactive imagination when it came to thinking how much interest he might arouse in judgemental and disapproving others. Nevertheless, his face must have performed several leaps of expressive communication, ending with a wry smile after a hint of shock somewhere in there, for the boy said as if in response to his shock. ‘Oh, I am sorry! I didn’t want to embarrass you. I have no filters, you see’. 

Then that radiant smile again, which once seen, felt as if  his face was almost touching James’ own, just because it mimed his reaction so refectively and caringly.

There was a giggle again from each of the couple opposite them. They had both let it implode within their coupling behaviour, and James and the boy looked over the table of the four-seater compartment; James with a little concern and caution in his gaze. But they were, as before, giggling at each other. James’ eyes returned to the boy. The young man’s signature smile was so frank; wider than previously, and somewhat ‘knowing’ James thought. It disarmed Him.

‘I’m Frank’, said the boy, almost as if he had read that word in James’ point of view, and evaluation of his smile. ‘Frank, with the frank smile’, James said, rather alarmed at the boldness of his translation of internal and external language straight out and in public to the boy.

‘Let me guess, you’re James’, the boy responded, with his gaze directing James’ own to the fact that he had paperwork open in front of him, that he had barely read through the journey, but bearing his name. ‘Dr. James Protheroe, Department of English, Queen Mary,s College, London”,  was the legend on its bold letterhead.

‘Rather a give-away’, James laughed. And they were silent, though those same legs of each still preesed together, as if testing out each other’s intention and bravery. ‘I am sorry to have tricked you like that’, Frank said. ‘But at least we can talk now’ – and, on first name terms, thought James, who too often hid behind Dr. Protheroe.

Frank began to talk, and James noticed that somehow he no longer wore those earphones, though James had not noticed their removal. Frank was between jobs, he said, with a smile that recognised the cliché.  Once an actor, he had spent too long ‘resting’, too little confronting the pressure of making a role work so people believed it. 

Frank was on the way north to an interview, aimed at  training as a tertiary sector teacher in English and Drama, and to make something of his degree in Theatre Arts, because you know, it seemed a waste not to use what you had … Frank’s enthusiasm was huge. The substance of his comments, however, rather tired James, like the stretched burble of his learners in two-hour seminars that always seemed an juat an hour too long. The learners had not really seriously read the text they supposedly discussed but acted as if they genuinely  had something to say in there.

James was tired, and his eyes, it seems, had gone blank,  for Frank suddenly had suddenly stopped talking before James registered the change. The young man had withdrawn his legs, tucked them under his seat, from that continued contact before, and was for a minute or two silent. It was probably the leg movement that made James notice, so effectively habitual was his ability to cut out the auditory channels of communication.

The contrast in the atmosphere of sociability was marked over that table. Even the giggling pair in the opposed seats seemed to notice it and looked at James as if he had hurt the dignity of that lovely boy, James thought.  Everyone seemed to notice that Frank was an extremely good-looking young man. James felt himself compromised in noticing that and making himself conscious of it. That awareness filled the silent space between the men. Their looks at each other changed, charged now, but with what? Mutual desire or something radically unequal between them: perhaps, desire and revolted disgust on Frank’s part.

‘I fear I have bored you, James’, the young man said, ‘Sorry!’ There was no bitterness or hurt pride in the voice, only a kindness undeserved by James.

‘NO, don’t  be sorry’. And he paused. ‘I become too easily tired, too incapable of seeing the good in beautiful young men and turning it into self-efficacy as a good teacher should’.

Frank’ s eyes reflected some inner visible grace arising. ‘That’s the kind of teacher I want to be!’. He wanted, he explained, to see young people, younger than he though his youth was hyacinthine in Protheroe’ Apollonian gaze, feel their way into a more comprehensive way of exploring their embodied selves in language and forms of interacting; to see, invent and feel the landscape of emotive intellectual being  which they didn’t beforevknow to have existed within mere words arranged in lines of poetry or passsges of prose. Because the language is of the body in origin, Frank said, or something like it: you make it as you breathe through it, sing from and into it.

James fell into a pauae that sermed a hole with high sides. ‘God. You are lovely!’, he said. ‘Inside and out’. The couple opposite had changed from giggles to disassociation over separate mobile phones, possibly narrating the event to distant others to assuage their separate discomfort. Now, they looked up, a little unsure how to react.

Frank, though, seemed to shine. ‘I will remember what you said, James. Because, just before you spoke, you listened. I felt heard, worth being heard’.

‘The train is now approaching York. Passengers for Dewsbury and Leeds alight here’.

It was as if that voice spoke to all four sat around it from some depth in the intervening table. The young couple assembled their possessions, pulling enormous weights from the luggage racks. Frank indicated he was leaving, struggling with a puffer jacket. As he passed by James, he leaned into him, and his lips brushed those of the squat academic. James vould havecsworn that was so. He whispered something, but it could not be heard, as the train pulled in to York, and many people moved noisily to the exits, scrambling over those who survived that stop for another destination.

‘Survived! That’s the word to use’. James spoke that out loud as the train moved on, and he sat now in his compartment, alone but for the noise of others settling down in proximate compartments. He planned his return, imagining a cold flat unhoused by love awaiting him. He always romanticised some existential aloneness.

His wife was waiting for him at the station at Durham. It was her Bridge night. He could invite Jim over. They would have fun in the bed that saw little between he and she. And then, frankly, he saw that there still was no love. There was nothing there with Jim, he had noticed over the last year. Just mutual release of empty talk over body friction. Frankly, that’s so, he thought, just no imagination, no frank encounter.

Love Steven xxxxxx