Bubble Invasion

Not to hark on about the tube but I need this.

Having had my earphones yanked from my ears by a clumsy fat bitch climbing laboriously down the 6 inches from the tube to the platform, interrupting my necessary sensory deprivation, this shitbird in winkle pickers (for I was looking only at the floor all the way home) insists on putting his hands in the pockets of his waist length jacket, thereby bringing his arms into an acute angle and sharply poking me in the back.

Now, I’m sure this is on purpose. He’s pissed off that I’m standing so close to him. Sure, pal, I’m happy about this too, but if my rage is in check yours surely should. And after one rather rocky part of the track I’m sure. I sway with the movement of the train like everyone else and after one particular judder to the left I feel two sharp pokes of his elbow into the small of my back. I feel raped. I sense that he’s glaring at me out of the corner of his eyes and rolling them for the anonymous audience he hopes are on his side. So I stay where I am and pretend he’s not there. I think, "Yeah, this’ll show him how silly and small he is being." At each stop I politely get off to allow people on and then reclaim my irritating spot right my his protruding elbow.
And then there are more pokes.

"Do you mind?" he says, in my head, that over confident public school-boy, I got my homosexuality out of the way with the school chaplain and am now married to a fur coat wearing cow with cheeks as rosy as mine look on his face.
"Sorry?" I imagine.
"I said" he replies, dragging out the "ai" into a lilting song of pure anger fuel, "Do you mind?"
"Oh, that was on purpose, the whole back rape thing?" I cleverly retort, feigning surprise, "See, it’s like this, Paul McCartney, (winkle pickers – he didn’t get this in my head because he’s a retard) you get so banged about and brushed off and breathed on and poked on the tube, you give up so much of your dignity and personal space that I can ignore it most of the time. I just enclose myself in a bubble of music and fiction and pretend none of it is happening and try not to annoy anyone else. So, everytime some aggressive fucking ape elbows me in the back I assume it’s an accident. Sorry."

It’s my stop and I get off. In my head some passengers giggle at my witty remarks and he takes his hands finally from his pockets and hangs his head.

At home I throw a courgette at the floor and scream and scream and scream.