The Conveyer Belt

[spencer_broughton]

I never noticed before but sitting on a train is a little like being stuck on a conveyer belt. You move; things stay still. The train chundles past the scenery without caring to slow down for you to even see it properly. It’s all a big green and grey blur; cities, fields, trees. They all merge together like the painting of a two year old spoiled by a misplaced glass of water.

And I really don’t know why I’m here with my head on the glass pane, I don’t know where I’m going with my hand on the ugly Formica table. I’m opposite a young woman in a suit who has been reading the same page of the newspaper for an hour now. She looks up and makes some brief eye-contact with tired brown eyes. I avoid it as I avoid everything. Nevertheless she offers a smile, and I note the faint shade of sympathy in her features. I must look how I feel.

But how do I feel? Do I even know? The train was a whim I decided to obey, but I forgot about the reflective hours of lonely journeys. The events of the past unfold in my minds-eye like a badly folded napkin. All I know is that once again I am escaping my own life and it makes me wonder if I’m ever going to live it.

The old lady next to me begins to offer me her pearls of wisdom on the annoyance of trains and other topics that couldn’t have any less meaning. It is as English as watching TV programmes you don’t really enjoy just to shout at the screen and then ring up Points of View to complain. Typical English conversations with strangers are like small, but polite, pieces of nothing wrapped in indifference. We make up for our insecure feelings of discomfort with the random ramblings of inanity.

My fag-stained fingers drum the Formica and I wonder when I should get off the train. She’s chattering about her son now; like the lonely do. They have no one so they tell strangers. I know this because I often do the same thing. No not really out of loneliness, although sometimes I am, but out of this demanding, dissident feeling that I need to tell someone. Barriers prevent me telling everyone I should. It is much easier with unfamiliar faces, you can’t disappoint someone who doesn’t know you; it doesn’t matter if they judge you. The transaction is flawless, they listen with morbid curiosity and you exhale with catharsis.

Perhaps that is loneliness. The inability to tell the ones you love what really bothers you. The inability to let the people closest to you really see you. Intimacy is much easier with a stranger, it is fearless and meaningless. It puzzles me again just how much meaning I let into my life, and it worries me that there isn’t enough.

“What’s your name love?” asked the old lady in kind Yorkshire vernacular.

“Lucy”

“Lovely!” she leaned a little closer and patted my arm, “If I’d had daughter I was gonna name ‘er Lucy. But it turned out to be a boy.” She smiled at her memories “Wouldn’t change it for the world duck. But mind you, I think a daughter would’ve been nice.”

“Did you ever try for another child? For a daughter?”

“No, Percy, me husband died a few years after John was born.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Not your fault, love, not your fault.” She sighed and clutched her tan leather handbag with tenacity. “Those cancer sticks that did ‘im in. But, aye, you couldn’t get ‘im to give ‘em up. Ooooohhh no, he never would. Selfish man.”

“Men can be so stubborn.” I muttered, glancing at the lingering yellow stains on my own finger tips. Life on a conveyer belt, I thought. I was about to ask more about her husband but she was lost now, in memories, painful and long-lasting. I examined her old face with affection. Age had creased her flesh but intelligence and wit remained in her eyes. The shape of her face revealed a lost beauty in the folds of time. It was saddening, and forced my consciousness to look into the future with a harsh realism that hadn’t properly struck me before. Life on a conveyer belt, yellowing fingers, the traces of time around the eyes. I looked to the future with dread and despair.

The old-lady with her amiable Yorkshire voice left the train at the next stop, but didn’t forget to leave me with a comforting smile and soft “Take care pet.” I watched her move her frail body down the aisle tentatively and apologetically. It is a disturbing wake up call to finally notice the elderly. The young can only avoid it for so long but reality is as inevitable as showers over Sheffield in April. I averted my eyes back to the woman in the suit and sympathetic smile, eager to return to an internal sense of equilibrium.

Her thoughts were obviously troubling her. Eyes remained focussed on the same page of the broadsheet whilst her mind wandered another world and creased her forehead with the mental exertion. At times like these I can’t help but speculate the possible worries of the other person. It stops you thinking about your own troubles. I think she has work troubles. Boyfriend trouble would darken her face with anger, but it was just concern clouding her skin.

She fidgeted a little, silver bangles singing in soft jingling tones as she did. Her hair was scraped back without care, tendrils trailing the collar of her imperfect, modern suit. There was a celtic band wrapped round her left thumb like a snake at rest. Instead of a briefcase, a canvas shoulder bag nestled in her lap with the corner of her CD player poking out of the opening.

She dislikes her job, I thought to myself, and she is into her music. She is a graduate who started in this job temporarily, and 5 years down the line she is still there. The ease of settling for the familiar has gripped her like a sponge and drained out motivation and ambition. I bet she is a PA or in admin. Some kind of dressed up secretarial position with a comfortable wage and decent level of security. Perhaps in a trendy company in London, in an up-and-coming area like advertising. She is visiting up north to asses the new companies emerging on the instructions of her boss.

Looking at her I realise we all line the conveyer belt. We all watch things pass us by. Outside we pass another gigantic oak tree, bark gnarled like the face of the old lady who had been sat next to me. I want to grab it and make the conveyer belt stop. Looking round, there is life on the train we so easily let slip by. Canoodling teenagers entwined in arms and ear phones from their ipods; young parents giggle with their children spinning loving webs of affection around their squirming bodies; cliques of school kids create a racket with their mobiles, annoying a whole generation of seriousness.

I never know what experiencing life really is. Is it the observation of all these things? The absorption of the society you live in based on the intricate tales of the human behaviour that surrounds you? I realise that it’s meant to be about your own life. But then why is the nation glued to performing monkeys in a box? People make out that experiencing life means to experience your own experiences. But this just confuses me. My own experiences are my thoughts, my feelings, and they come and go, they have minor impact, they change nothing, they are rarely remembered. The events in my life I let them pass by, they come and they go. Is that so bad? Is it wrong to look around, to empathise with the masses and not myself?

True experience, maybe it is observation. The diffusion and influence of what you see around you. This reflection is drowning me, where is life? Life is the Yorkshire woman with a son and dead husband and the woman with the tendrils and sympathetic smile lost amongst business and no motivation. Life is remembering the strangers you meet on the street and on the train. But is it my life? And it is this doubt that niggles in the cognitions of my mind everyday. Am I letting it all merge?

I’m on this conveyer belt looking out, desperately trying to grasp that tree and slow it down so I can have a proper look. I’m absorbing all this too fast, too much. It’s not my own, it’s not real. It’s not real. Repeat. It’s. Not. Real. Escapism. I spend most of my life there, and here and everywhere but nowhere. I need to get off this train and get back on in the opposite direction to start again. Of course it is impossible to start again. Nothing can be repeated, we have only one chance, one moment in time at any given time. Once a second has past it never comes back, we can never start again, it is the curse of human mortality. But we can try.


I'd appreciate your thoughts, thanks!

[spencer_broughton]

It's very quiet in here....

[pseud]

yes, it is quiet due to the amount of reading it takes to get through one of these works.

Honestly, I thought the work would be more powerful without the first, third, and the last three paragraphs. They felt too much like a sermon - not religious, mind you, but full of things that people already know. I read those paragraphs with the same feeling one gets when a joke needs explaining.

One the positive side, I liked the rest. I thought you did a good job of giving depth to the old and young woman through dialogue and observations. Rich observations. More of the personality of the narrator comes out in those passages than in the philosophical ones.

- Caleb

[spencer_broughton]

Thanks for that it's really helpful. A lot of that story is me just musing about things, and just writing for the sake of it. But I have to learn to write thing with an audience in mind and with a proper short story structure because I tend to just write whatever comes into my head.

By the way I wasn't having a dig.. But when you post something quite personal I get extremely impatient amount someone saying something!

Sarah

[pseud]

By the way I wasn't having a dig.. But when you post something quite personal I get extremely impatient amount someone saying something!

Not a problem, I can relate totally.

Keep this stuff up you have a talent for it, and no I don't say that to everyone.

- Caleb

[Leslie]

Interesting exchange. Spence’s cry, ‘It’s quiet in here’ ref. the lack of feed-back. Pseud’s comment that part of the problem is the amount of reading involved before a valid comment can be made. Both remarks justified.
Difficult for the writer to attain the balance on a site such as this.
Keep it short, but consequently restrict the amount of description and characterisation, or expand on description and character and make it too long for people to take the time to read the piece.
Congrats anyway, Spence on giving us the insights through dialogue.
I have read that writing is a lonely job. Leslie.

[spencer_broughton]

It is difficult to write reviews for short stories. Most don't hold my attention for the full story, so I respect people who do post comments in here. I fully intend to help out as much as possible.

There may be some more stuff to put up later, but it needs a bit of work first.

Thanks all.

[barrie]

It's a difficult task indeed trying to explain in words what life means, or what you think it means, how you feel and why - I think you made a good attempt here. I can see Caleb's point concerning the last three paragraphs, but all they need is a final polish - I read them as reflections not as a sermon.

The first paragraph could go - You could start with

'I really don’t know why I’m here with my head on the glass pane....'

One thing that niggled (just me) - 'fag-stained', the alliterative 'cigarette-stained' is much smoother.

I missed this post first time around.

I remember train journeys to Sheffield - times past.

Barrie

[twoleftfeet]

Hi,

I rarely visit this Section, but I'm glad I chanced upon this piece - I always enjoy a bit of introspecion and philosophy and for some reason
it made me think of Reggie Perrin.

The second paragraph is very effective - I agree with Barrie that it would
make a good opening.

I think Pseud has a point about the last three paragraphs - perhaps you could break them up with more dialogue so that the philosophising is
less noticeable, as you did earlier with the old lady.

My only quibble is:
She is visiting up north to asses the new companies emerging on the instructions of her boss.
- it needs a comma after emerging, or re-structuring IMHO.

Thanks for the read
Geoff

[Wabznasm]

It's hard to begin criticising prose, so I'll start with the good:

The shining line for me was I’m on this conveyer belt looking out, desperately trying to grasp that tree and slow it down so I can have a proper look. I’m absorbing all this too fast, too much The idea of grasping out for the tree is a superb image.

There are a lot of nice observations too; your attention to detail, but the detail that creates the person and not just the irrelevant nouns is well done.

The mood is good too and suits the writing.

But, the dialogue was where I stumbled. It's well written and is suitably colloquial which gives it a great feeling of realism, but the way it's constructed appears a little awkward to me. It just doesn't feel natural. " “Did you ever try for another child? For a daughter?” " seems too rushed, and is too much of a jump in the conversation. Then the dialogue eventually ends with "“Men can be so stubborn.”" which I don't just see as natural. It reads, to me, as a composite of phrases that don't quite sit together. The topic is the same, but the progression isn't organic. It feels forced.

The philosophising is good (I love that sort of writing), but it is very hard to pull off. At times you do, like with "The train chundles past the scenery without caring to slow down for you to even see it properly. It’s all a big green and grey blur; cities, fields, trees. They all merge together like the painting of a two year old spoiled by a misplaced glass of water." . But at other times the ideas and the conceits used don't feel particularly fresh; questions raised like " I never know what experiencing life really is. Is it the observation of all these things?" are questions that have already been attacked by hundreds. I think the philosophy (and I agree with pseud here) would have been better inferred than spoken - it's a more subtle way of dealing with questions concerning yourself. Still though, the actual writing of these philosophy parts is well done. And you have a talent for it. Keep writing, because this sort of writing can only be perfected after exhausting it.

Sorry if that criticism seems a little brutal! I enjoyed the piece and have a great interest in this sort of writing. The only problem is that I haven't read many authors who can actually pull it off perfectly (Henry Miller rings a bell). Persist with it, because when this is pulled off, it's bloody marvellous. "desperately trying to grasp that tree and slow it down so I can have a proper look." is one of the best lines of prose I've read in a while.

I hope all of that helps,
Dave

[spencer_broughton]

That wasn't brutal. In fact you made me smile, thanks Dave.