The first train out of London in the morning is not a busy service, which means I can almost always sit in my favourite seat. I walk past the two carriages nearest the barriers as they are First Class and also past the next carriage which contains the buffet car, but has some seats for Standard Class passengers. The buffet car is closed on this, the train’s first journey of the day because the staff live in Norwich and it is naturally impossible for Greater Anglia to employ people who live in London to man the bar. Anyway, who wants a cup of tea first thing in the morning? So I get in the nearest regular Standard carriage. Then I make my way to the middle of it and sit in one of the aeroplane-style seats, facing forwards and with the perspex partition immediately behind me. I always sit here, whenever I can. The doors between the carriages are often faulty and this causes draughts and the lavatories are in the vestibules by the doors and these can smell of every human frailty. The middle is best. There are partitions in every carriage; the seats in front of them face forwards and those behind face backwards; where you are going, or where you have already been, although I have always already been where I am going. 

       I sit next to the window and put my bag and denim jacket on the seat beside me. I pull down the little flaps that serve as mini-tables from the backs of both seats in front of me. On the mini-table in front of the aisle seat I put my notebook, my pen and my ticket. My ticket is in a little blue folder also containing my photo-card. I slip this just under the edge of my notebook, opened, so that the conductor can see it without asking for it or interacting with me in any way. On the mini-table in front of me I put my iPod, my book and sometimes a handkerchief, if it is the hay fever season. I could sit at a proper table, because there are four of these in each carriage, but I feel it is selfish to take all of that for me alone when there are people who might want to sit together. I despise, a little bit, singles who take a whole table. I admit that there was a time, years ago, when I used to do it. It is more comfortable, more leg-room. But I did get some evil looks. 

There are occasions when someone will get on the train before me and sit right in my favourite seat. This is disappointing, but I don’t resent them. I understand. They have chosen correctly. When that happens I sit immediately behind them, which is not intrusive as the partition is still between us. I am now on the other side of that. I have my back to the engine, but I don’t care. Sick of travel, but not travel sick. Having to sit here is somewhat annoying. Not too much. I am not so obsessive and it does not happen often. I should also say that when I talk about this seat being my favourite seat I need to qualify that, because I hate being on this train. 

I don’t like trains any more. There was a time, when I was really not very young, that I knew for sure the exact number of trains I had ever travelled on. Travelling by train was a treat for me then, a necessity now. On my days off, I might sit on the platform of a rural railway station, some place with Market in the name where I have gone to wander about, for no actual purpose and I will see a heron fly over the line and hear buzzards mewing too far away to be seen, then the track begins to vibrate and soon the express roars through that station, hundreds of tons of filthy metal ripping up the air like the mouth of Hell had opened. My seat shakes. They frighten me then, those express trains, even though I know that I am supposedly perfectly safe.

So, this Spanish-looking bloke sometimes gets into my carriage, not every day, and he always sits in the same seat. I can’t fathom what he is thinking, because he sits on the other side of the aisle and two rows ahead of me. Now what is the attraction of sitting there? What does he get out of that? Can’t see it. This man has irritated me in the past because he has this fancy phone which he sets up on its little stand and then he watches some television programme in some incomprehensible language, almost certainly not Spanish, and he doesn’t put his headphones in the jack properly, so the sound leaks for the entire journey. That can’t even sound good to him. I don’t say anything, obviously. 

I don’t know why I say he is Spanish. Perhaps he does look like some alternative world Picasso but with a little more hair and without the stare. Gertrude Stein said Picasso’s eyes were dark pools. Ordinarily he does not have a problem with his headphones. Today he does, briefly, and I am worried, but he blows into the jack and sorts it out. He is quite a neat person, in fact. He has a plastic carrier bag from which he takes a big black flask and drinks an odourless drink from that. He’s not a rich man. A lot of people have those phones. They rent them, I believe. He always takes off his jacket. Not everyone does that; some people find all air-conditioning always too cold. 

I drift off into my book. Sometimes I just stare out of the window. This is the fast train, but it is still possible to identify birds (owls and a sparrowhawk), even flowers (valerian and evening primrose) and the sunrise can be genuinely Turneresque, purple and gold, especially in the Autumn. I don’t notice him again, the pseudo-Spaniard, until I see that he is standing up and quite close to me in an invasion-of-space way that does not seem normal. I look at him, at his face, which is also in breach of train etiquette, but he doesn’t see me, as if I am not there, as though he were standing next to an empty seat. I suppose he must have been to the lavatory. So why doesn’t he sit down? I think he may be going to speak to me. I resolve, instantly, that I will grant him no favours. Then he leaves the carriage. So maybe he is going to the lavatory. Then he re-enters the carriage, walks right past his seat and out again at the other end. Can he not have noticed his place? People do do that, civilians, not real commuters, on more crowded trains, if they have had to walk the length of the train to get to the buffet. But he cannot have failed to recognise his favourite seat. He doesn’t seem to have dementia. I don’t know why I think I can diagnose that suddenly. Then I think of what he might be doing. I surprise myself by thinking of this.

He might be leaving his old life behind. Starting by abandoning his gear and sitting somewhere else. Becoming the kind of person who would sit somewhere else. Does this mean I can have his gear? That’s the first thing that occurs to me. Even before I think, Can this be true? From where I am sitting I cannot quite see if he has left his phone. But I can see he has left his jacket, his carrier bag and his flask. The bag could be full of rubbish. I do think about stealing his stuff, if stealing is what this is. Picasso said, If there is something to steal, I steal it. Then I think about just sitting in his seat and becoming like him. Even, simply becoming him. Smoking? Earlier I had noticed him rolling a cigarette which I had not seen him do before, but I don’t look at him unless he is noisy. Watching his incomprehensible show? It could be a Brazilian soap opera, or a Mexican sitcom. Not reading. He does not look like the kind of person who reads. 

This would mean leaving my things; the book I’m not really enjoying/can’t understand, all of the music I am completely fed up of, this bag full of stuff I cart to work and back every day and never even look at. The book is alright, actually. Not a game changer. I get through these things, these books. We stop at Chelmsford. It is possible that he, Picasso, usually gets off here, but I can’t remember for sure. I look out of the window in case he walks alongside the train. If I see him outside I can definitely have his bag. 

I notice the station clock, hanging over the platform, a digital affair of course in a burly box. They are replacing these things gradually. It is broken. Not just stopped, although also that. The strips of yellow plastic that fall into place, or which are covered by black strips, to make the numbers (this is a digital clock, but the display is not electronic, rather entirely mechanical, these coloured strips appearing and disappearing in a pleasingly arthritic ballet) these strips have got stuck in awkward and nonsensical postures. One strip has fallen too early, or too late, or in the wrong place and after that nothing can be right. The square numbers are like alien glyphs, ideograms, reversed, upside down, incomplete. What you might find inscribed on a wall deep inside a pyramid on another planet. I find this disconcerting. Everything but the clock looks normal, but that is so abnormal that I know even the familiar things must be different; they no longer mean what they have always meant. This world is my world but for one detail and that mutated detail undercuts the reality, the reliability, of everything else. If Picasso has not got off at his usual stop, I wonder if I need to get off at mine. He has changed everything again. What would become of the man who could look at this ancient, alien clock and tell the time by it? What might not become of me now? I have deposed the favourite within myself. A king has been toppled from his throne. 

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