In train

‘Don’t you get sick of dealing with pussies?’ giggles the middle age lady with frosted hair. I’m guessing she means wimps. ‘You big girls’ she says in a fake tough voice.
There are four women, they are moving their suitcases and arranging themselves. They have lollies. They are talking about their elderly mothers and the absence of home visits from doctors these days.

Guess whose got the biggest bag? Coral
Guess whose got the second biggest bag?
Yes but yours is fat and ours is narrow.
I thought I had a bigger one too but I couldn’t find it and I thought ‘oh bugger it’
Maybe we can have coffee at central

Have you heard about the new trains they have planned for the central coast?
You get a carriage, you put it on the line, you join it to a carriage and it goes!
Why don’t they just get the same thing?
Because they’re idiots!

Mine usually lives in my bag.
Mine lives on the kitchen table.
Yes mine always lives in my bag – because we don’t have any reception inside the house.
Well how would I get hold of you if I need you?

Is it hot in here?
Ooh, I’m going to have to take my blouse off! (I have a singlet on underneath)

They look like their faces have seen some serious things, but that this is tempered by a dry sense of humour. Firey, determined women, who will swear if annoyed – call people dickhead. Who will be indignant and ask people ‘what’s going on?’ here in the middle of a delay. Women with short hair and big bottoms in sensible jeans. Women with a touch of pink lippy to match a pink jumper. A pursed mouth sucking on a sweet ball of fruit flavoured sugar.

In the café
The waiter is distracting. He is muscular and pierced, has smooth brown skin and the tiniest, rudest tuft of hair just beneath his bottom lip. He looks like he has Slavic, maybe Russian ancestors. He has disarming brown eyes. A nice ear tunnel, maybe some other metal, I have not taken exhaustive stock take. He wears a few hints at music, of drug culture, of being part of a tight group of men – a design on his black top, a hood, a certain way of walking swiftly with confidence. He squats to take out order. He comes across as grounded and relaxed, easy going, competent. He comes across all this, but maybe, just maybe, with a high frequency buzz behind all this – a buzz of potential energy, like he is also capable of great movement. This is distracting.


In train
There is a delay. Electrical problems on a carriage. We stop, and they call in an electrician. The announcements in the carriage are muffled and only just grammatically correct. They are vague. An elderly woman starts to talk slowly and bitterly about missing her specialist appointment. The girl with a weak chin sitting next to her says ‘and I will probably be late for work’.