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Lust
and Intrigue
(on the Bakerloo Line)
David Oldman
Aren’t women’s shoes ridiculous?
Not all of them. There are some very nice shoes about: elegant, classy,
fit to go with decent clothes. But so often, you see a woman on her way to work,
wearing a really smart suit, everything just right, and then you look at the shoes:
ghastly! All that trashy metallic trimming, mostly gold, ha ha.
Of course, there was a time when these awful shoes tended to match the
equally cheap-and-nasty-looking handbags which many women carried. The bags have improved,
on the whole, but the shoes have lagged behind, clinging on to their alloy bits and
pieces. Someone should tell them how much their shoes are letting them down.
She was different. She had really smart shoes. Black, shiny (but not
too shiny) leather, with elegant but sensibly-high heels and simple… classical lines,
entirely in keeping with the rest of her outfit.
I don’t spend all my time on the tube looking at women: no,
really, I don’t. As soon as I have found a seat or a corner in which to wedge myself,
I bury my head in a book until it’s time to get off. At my "home" station,
at the time I travel to work, there is rarely very much of a wait between trains for
ogling the female travellers (or the males, come to that, if I was that way inclined,
which I’m not, not that I’m ag- oh crikey, what have I got into now?) Where was
I? Oh yes: the girl on the tube.
She was a stunner. Not pretty or beautiful or attractive - I mean, yes,
she was all of those, but so much more. Without being taller or broader or more garishly
dressed, and without any apparent artifice, she stood out - far, far out - from the crowd
of people on the platform. I tried not to stare. I failed.
She was, I suppose, about five feet and not many inches tall, with
shortish dark hair which seemed to have been sculptured rather than merely cut: it
gleamed, and yet it seemed so very natural. Her figure was perfect, and perfectly
accentuated, without being exaggerated, by her white blouse (in one of those deliciously
sleek, expensive looking materials,) and dark blue skirt.
It was a warm day so she neither wore nor carried a jacket. Her tights
were dark blue to go (how they went!) with the skirt, and as for the shoes - well, I may
have mentioned them before. She had a black shoulder bag with - obviously - no nasty
gimcrack trimmings.
As the train approached, she turned towards it and away from me,
allowing me to unlock my gaze from her wonderful bust, and leer instead at her bottom. Did
I mention that it was a Monday morning, and that I had a hangover? No? Well it was, and I
had and, until this vision appeared before me, lust was well down the list of prospective
emotions. But nausea and headache and all the other disgusting components of the
"morning after", were sidelined by this nymph. Not a nymphet, of course: she was
too old for that, although I was probably just about the right age for Humbert Humbert!
The train arrived, I ripped my eyes from her posterior, and staggered
on board, deliberately turning away from the doorway which she was using, and found a
seat. But as I reached into my briefcase for my book, wondering whether I would be able to
concentrate on a single word, she passed in front of me, having walked almost the
length of the carriage and ignored several empty seats, and sat down next to me.
I almost wet myself
I felt exhilarated, excited, stupidly flattered that she had chosen to
sit next to me, but also very frightened. I clung to my book as though it were a lifebelt,
trying to focus my eyes on the meaningless black squiggles. I remember telling myself not
to forget to turn the page occasionally, in case she thought I was not really reading
(which I wasn’t) and that I was looking at her (which I was).
As she had sat down, her skirt had quite naturally ridden a few inches
up her thighs, those lovely, shiny, Lycra thighs which glimmered and sparkled in the
corner of my eye as I so unconvincingly mimed "middle-aged man nonchalantly reading
middlebrow novel on train".
This was completely and utterly ridiculous. This sort of thing did not
happen to me, and certainly not on a Monday morning. But I was powerless to do anything
about it. I couldn’t change seats: it would look most odd. I could have pretended to
leave the train at the next station, and change carriages. But what if she followed me off
the train? What - oh God! - if she followed me back on again? Anyway, I seriously doubted
whether I could ever move again. I would probably be found in the early hours, glued to
the seat by sweat, my face having "set" in a lecherous expression.
If so, would she be found still sitting next to me?
Oh, this was ridiculous (I’ve already said that, I know, I know),
and yet it was horribly fascinating.
Turn the page. Is the book the right way up? Will I remember where I
really got to when - if - I ever get back to reading as a real rather than a pantomimic
activity?
She shifted on her seat, and her arm pressed into mine as she pulled
her bag from its resting position against her calves on to her entrancing thighs, catching
at the hem of the skirt stretched across them. Leaving her arm just the thickness of a
blouse and shirt away from mine (why hadn’t I rolled up my sleeves? Why hadn’t
she?), she reached into the bag with her other hand. What would she pull out? A book? A
magazine? Her make-up? No, please, not that. I always find it a turn-on to watch a woman
putting on her make-up on the tube and, really, I didn’t need any extra
stimulation just at present.
Let it be something really, really tedious: a shopping list, say, or
Exchange & Mart. It was nothing immediately threatening to any composure I yet
retained: it was a folded piece of paper, perhaps indeed a shopping list. When she
unfolded it, though, it seemed to be directions to somewhere: there was a sketched
street-plan, with wording scrawled all around it. As I struggled to restrain myself from
leaning over to see the paper more clearly, she tilted it. No - not away from me
but towards me, as if inviting me to read it. I gulped, tried to stop my book
quivering like a divining rod, and had no more success in reading the directions on the
sheet than I had had with my book. (I know they say it makes you go blind, but illiterate?
Where’s the sense in that?)
After a few seconds, as though she had gauged the time sufficient for
me to digest the information, she returned the paper to her bag, let it fall from her lap,
and snuggled even closer to me on the arm-rest.
I considered leaping to my feet and grabbing at the emergency handle. I
could always claim it was an accident, and at least it would free me from physical contact
with her. Of course, I lacked the will to do anything of the sort. Had she thrown herself
across me and started to stroke my hair, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger to stop her.
She, however, appeared to be reading the adverts for travel insurance and energy-enhancing
vitamins which formed a frieze along the top of the carriage wall opposite.
Two stops to go. Should I get up now, straighten myself out, and
generally prepare myself for a tolerably dignified exit? I sat just where I was. Next
stop. Get a grip of yourself: you have to get off the train, you have to go to work, no
arguments. But... but - no excuses: get off the train.
As I continued my interior dialogue, the train pulled into the station
and, before I could stir, she got up from her seat. I sat still, waited for her to
leave the carriage, then threw myself between the doors just as they were closing. Rubbing
my bruised arms, I followed her along the platform towards the "exit" notice.
She walked quite slowly, so I had to indulge in some serious dawdling in order to avoid
catching her up.
She turned through an arch, climbed some stairs, and walked along a
corridor towards the escalator, with me padding along behind her like a faithful
dog.
I usually like to stride up the escalator, mentally sneering at the
laggards standing on the right. But she stood, and so did I. She fed her Gold Card into
the slot in the exit gate, and so did I (mine, I mean, not hers).
Now there was a choice, right or left: my place of work lay to the
right. She turned right, freeing me of any immediate dilemma as to whether I should follow
her.
Follow her? How could there be any question of that? She didn’t
know me from Adam and had, I must assume, no wish to rectify that situation. By
coincidence, she had sat next to me, and had carelessly held a piece of paper so that I
could see it. None of this was grounds for tailing her around London, courting ridicule or
arrest.
Anyway, I didn’t have to decide yet. When we left the station, she
set off in the direction I usually took to the office. As I followed her, I looked about
me in a highly unconvincing show of examining the architecture of the neighbourhood, the
patterns formed by the cracks in the pavement, and the markings of the disgusting London
pigeons.
Still she was walking towards my office, not looking around or
hurrying. Then she turned to the left. I usually carried straight on, but I could justify
a slight leftward detour as long as I almost immediately turned right again. Would she
comply? She would not. She turned left again, into a narrow street with which I was only
vaguely familiar. But I knew that I could walk straight along it, continue on through an
alleyway at the end, and finish up back near the tube station. I slowed, hesitated, and
plunged down the street after her.
As I spotted the freshly-painted hoarding and the "Passage
Closed" sign, I broke out once again into a muck sweat. But surely she must turn into
one of the doorways, allowing me to saunter past, wait for her to disappear, and then
retrace my steps to the open end of the street.
She carried on, eschewing all side attractions until she was within a
few feet of the blockage, with me a few more feet behind her. Then she stopped, and
so did I. She turned, looking not at me but past me, apparently scanning the horizon for -
for what?
I stood still: it was now far too late to pretend that I was visiting
one of the premises leading off the street, or that I was suddenly pulled up short by the
blockage. I looked at her as she carried out her survey and, eventually, her eyes locked
on to me.
She eyed me for longer than could be explained away as a casual glance
(it seemed like about four hours longer), but she showed no apprehension or fear. The
slight tension in her wonderful face owed, I was sure, nothing to my presence. But I was
wrong.
Suddenly, she closed the gap of two or three yards between us. Again
she was shoulder to shoulder with me, but this time she was pointing in one direction, I
in the opposite direction.
"Wilkinson?" she asked.
"What? I mean, I beg your pardon?"
"Are you Wilkinson?"
"Wilkinson? Oh, no. Sorry."
She looked nonplussed. then embarrassed, then angry She seemed to be
deciding whether I was to blame for not being Wilkinson. She spoke: "Bugger. I
thought.... Naturally I thought. .. Oh shit!" She started to stride away, checked,
and then returned to my side, placing a hand on my shoulder. "Forget here." Now
she was shaking me, hard. "Most of all, forget me. OK?"
"Right, yes, sure... no problem."
She let slip her grasp, and this time she maintained her stride until,
at the end of the street, she turned to the left. I followed meekly behind, turned right,
and crept unwillingly to work, trying to put my finger on what it was I had to forget.
Apart from the gleaming hair, that was, or the magnificent face, or the breasts, the
bottom, the lovely, lovely legs .. and of course, the sensible shoes.
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