Chapter 2

by Luciana Akerlund

London at rush hour. Most people’s nightmare and yet this was the time of day that she looked forward to the most. When she had first moved to the city, she had made a point of only travelling on buses. Not only was this form of transport cheaper, but it gave her the chance of seeing the capital and learning the relationship between the different locations she was travelling between. Her very first trip on the London underground had come two months after her arrival in the ‘Big Smoke’. She had been running late for work, as usual, and had decided to brave the crowds and her claustrophobic fears in order to venture down into the rat-infested belly of the city. The escalators had felt as if they were never-ending and she had been quickly swallowed into the rushing crowd, soon finding herself packed in like a sardine into one of the overfilled carriages.

Her nostrils had been overcome with the smell of coffee, toothpaste and cologne that was emanating from her fellow travellers. Unlike the outside views she was used to from her bus trips, the windows in the underground carriage only gave way to dark tunnels and she had been forced to acknowledge the unfamiliar faces, pressing bodies, and unsolicited contact that made up her surroundings. Her American colleagues had often remarked on the unfriendliness of Londoners on the tube, where the norm was to ignore your fellow passengers and avoid eye contact like the plague. This behaviour exacerbated the surrealness of the moment and intensified the feeling that one was merely like an ant in a city of bustling workers.

Loneliness, the most terrible of human emotions, suddenly overwhelmed her. All the walls she had built over the last few months swiftly crumbled, and she silently began to cry. Being surrounded by countless strangers who routinely ignored one another made her realise how isolated she really was, and not only in the faceless mass of people in her carriage, but in this city as a whole.

Abruptly, in the midst of her sadness, she had become acutely aware of her physical body and as quickly as they had appeared, her tears had suddenly stopped. For there was something unexpectedly comforting about the tactile contact she was sharing with the people around her. She had welcomed the warmth and softness of a woman’s arm to her left and felt safe in the crook of a businessman’s back to her right. She had closed her eyes and savoured what she now referred to as ‘armless hugs’, and when she finally reached her stop she had found it hard to leave behind the coziness of the crowded carriage.

Flash forward 11 months and she is now probably the most content rush hour passenger to ever grace the London underground. There was nothing sexual about her craving for contact with strangers, but rather a naïve need for a familial replacement. The last traces of her hangover disappear as she arrives the entrance of the tube station. She straightens her skirt, takes out her Oyster and scans in through the barriers, the faint hint of a smile playing on her lips as she is engulfed by the rushing crowd.