'Oh fuck!'
'What?'
'I left the water downstairs.'
'That's all? No need to be so aggressive and scandalised about it.'
'Yeah, sorry.'
'Do you really need it? Can't you just go to sleep?'
'No, I need to know I can have a sip if I want one.'
'Fine. Fair enough.'
'Back in a minute.'
------
I went down the stairs. It was dark so my feet had to carefully feel themselves over each sharp edge on my wooden stairs. We are the first people to live our this place, so the edges haven't been smoothed by others yet. My feet are doing the smoothing - introducing that eventual bucolic homeliness to the place. My feet go about this work themselves though, they do it by themselves and hardly any thought is necessary from me.
------
I got to thinking of the long, plunging escalators of Moscow's Metro with its serrated edges and imagined stepping down those barefoot in the dark. It was a stupid thought though, so by the third step down it'd gone. Still, I continued to think about the things I've seen there.
A drunk guy fell down them once. Tumbled about fifty metres into a bloody crumple at the bottom. I could see each bone-breaking leap his body made increase in height as he collided with the steps more and more, lolloping further each time. It's strange when someone is moving so fast that the bits you see are the most graphic. I don't really recollect his arse or back getting smacked, but the few skull cracks he took make me wince even now - amazing how fast a neck shudders the head. He landed at the bottom, blood splashed fast and in a neat halo. Then he got up and wandered to the train - maybe a little more wobbly than before.
Sometimes the escalators stopped. No announcement - this was Russian service so anything going wrong was our fault - the customer is always wrong in Russia. I was about halfway up, another fifty metres or so to go, so waited a minute or two. It didn't start streaming up again, so I set off in my layers, fur-lined and sweating. I got to the top and a woman was standing three steps from the top - as still as a summer pond. She looked like a remarkably realistic statue - not budging at all. I wanted to catch her face to somehow say with my eyes 'why don't you just walk it? It's three more steps and it's been stopped for five minutes now.' She didn't see me - hers eyes glassy and uniformly wet. The only thing I think she knew was the exit - a mind so trained on escaping the Metro system that three steps and three hundred had no difference in them. She might still be there now - it wouldn't surprise me entirely.
She reminded me that I once read an average Muscovite spends a total of five years on the Metro. Five fucking years! I used to ask myself, would these people trade these five years piped out of their lives for a year straight in prison. Is a prison really worse than sweating under winter-battling clothes in a tin can with hundreds of others? No seat for most of them, pushing and fighting for a small area to plant two feet. Of course, no one would take the offer - torture is tolerable served in smaller swigs, not in bathfuls. It's what we tend to call modern day inconveniences.
------
'Fuck!'
'What now?'
'I don't believe this.'
'What for crying out loud?'
'Look.'
'Look at what?'
'Me.'
'Just spit it out will you? I want to bloody sleep.'
'I went downstairs and forgot the water.'
'You idiot.'
'I know. I know. Back in a minute. I hope.'
------
I'm hoping to encourage some of you to go to some of my newer and wonderful links at the end of these posts coming up. I introduced some of you to Alcoholic Poet a few weeks back and is always worth a visit - she posts very often and is difficult to keep up with, but a rewarding read.
Another one is In Obscurity who also writes brilliant stuff and doesn't get any where near as many visitors as deserving of - check her place out.
