The Sleeper

He needs more sleep than the average man.   

His eyes are closed and his head leans sideways to rest on the train window.   Between his dark eyebrows the skin of his forehead is buckled into a permanent frown.    His arms are folded uncomfortably across his chest, constrained by his clothing and limited by the size of his chest his arms don’t quite tuck into each other.

Sparse hair lays in baby wisps across the top of his head, and everywhere below this it grows in glorious brown abundance.   As if to make up for the lack on the top he’s chosen to indulge the growth on his face where in shades of brown and ginger it blooms into large pork chop sideburns.  In deference to  the top of his head a mouth width strip from his lower lip down his cleft chin is shaved clean.

He is dressed entirely in black.  Except for the white buttons down the front of his shirt, everything he chose to put on this morning is black.   Black socks into black steel capped work boots,  black jeans too long for his legs, black shirt, black jacket on which a variety of fluff and hair has hitched a ride, and a black day pack containing his lunch and a tatty novel he reads while he eats.  

As the train leaves the last station he stirs and lifting his head from its resting place wipes his large hand from the top of his high forehead down the length of his face as if to gather the sleep from it.    The creases between his eyebrows readjust themselves into a new fold and as consciousness returns he sneaks a peak at the phone of the young woman sitting next to him.

His family have farmed up at Wild Dog Valley south of Trida for a couple of generations.  He couldn’t wait to get out of there and as soon as he was old enough he escaped the farm and the green rolling hills of the valley and made his way to the city where he’s been driving cranes on Melbourne building sites for twenty years.

The Nut Seller

The young man’s face has a puffy just past adolescence look about it, a short ginger blond beard and moustache below longish blond hair, which would probably be lank if not washed often enough.   A large floppy leather satchel in brown and dark grey from which various papers threaten to escape, is draped across his lap.   The dark maroon lining of his well-cut dark grey suit jacket is visible as his elbow rests on the back of the train seat, and matches exactly the colour of his shirt under the soft black jumper he got for his last birthday.   

He is engaged in an animated telephone conversation which reveals a slight under bite and badly stained upper teeth as he speaks.  Pale eyes flick between the train window, his finger nails and the floor; he avoids looking at other train passengers while he chats just a little too loudly with his friend on the phone.

“We can just meet at Sandy, Thursday after work.”  

“Yeah for a drink or something, maybe pizza.”

He rents one small bedroom in the upstairs of a dingy share house in a back street behind the Railway Station at Sandringham.  His room is barely large enough for the king single bed he picked up at a great price from the Salvo’s, and his clothes live on hangers behind the door, or on the floor depending on their state of dirtiness.  The small sash window doesn’t always open, and when it does is usually impossible to close, consequently his room has a boy smell; old socks and overnight farts.  On the weekends he takes his laundry home to his Mum, who feeds him her home cooked love by way of nourishing soup and fruit cake while she washes his shirts and undies. 

He doesn’t mix with the share house people, but prefers the company of a handful of trustworthy young men he’s known since high school, who share the view that they are all just a little above the average bloke.  He studied commerce at Monash, and last January scored a two year contract with a nut wholesaler, he’s working to become a world expert in the niche market of macadamia and pistachio growing in Victoria.

Literary Student

She’s in the last 100 pages of Faulkner’s ‘Light in August’ sitting sideways in the train seat with her thin legs in black fitted pants crossed at the knee, and one small foot clad in a two toned pink suede shoe hangs in the aisle.  She is wearing a forest green denim bomber jacket over several tops including one in pilled turquoise and another in black and grey stripes. Wound loosely around her neck and arrayed in a bright profusion of tropical colours is a summer scarf.  Her only jewellery is a small gold wedding band.

She clasps the worn paperback with her long thin fingers, and her brow furrows as she flips through the dog eared pages without disturbing the numerous torn paper book marks held in its early pages, occasionally she chews her bottom lip and her eyes look tearful.  Her face is small and her skin is freckled but otherwise clear and healthy.  Her short curly hair is pulled back into two tiny pig tails perched on the back of her head.  What happens in the front is a wild profusion of messy ringlets in various lengths which jangle and flop across her face.

A good quality tan leather handbag sits in her lap, the lining of which mimics the colours of her scarf; alongside this is a large bag in heavy calico with a long shoulder strap.   The bag is emblazoned with the logo of the ‘Kids Bookstore’ and is marked and dirty; it has carried many books and seen better days.   Today it contains her course notes, five new books, a muesli snack wrapper and the most recent copy of Meanjin.

The young woman lives happily in a small apartment just south of the Windsor Train Station with her husband who is a physiotherapist, and their two small boys.  Both boys have thoroughly modern names with attitude, like Jasper or Cashel and each is an avid reader, hungrily consuming the books their mother brings home from the big library in the city in her calico bag

Khaki Man

The tall man in various shades of khaki tries to make his legs shorter in the train seat opposite another tall man so as to avoid the embarrassment of their legs touching.   He wears a khaki beanie pulled low to the level of his greying eyebrows and the lobe of his ear, which still bears the mark of the gold earring which had previously resided there.   His sage green hand knitted scarf is knotted under a large clean shaven face on which live two blue eyes each fringed with dark eyelashes, a large nose, and a long mouth held tight in a thin line across its bottom quarter.  The deep sagging skin below each eye and his florid complexion tell of a longish life thus far.

He clutches a faux leather briefcase tightly to his stomach with his large hairy hands, the fingers of which are adorned with an array of silver rings, and from each wrist dangles a bright hand knotted friendship bracelet reminiscent of school girls in some long lost youthful summer.  On his left wrist is a large white strapped watch which he taps every couple of minutes with one neatly manicured finger.    The legs in his faded black jeans jiggle with impatience, and his white sneakers with criss-crossed laces are keen to go.

He used to be a long distance truck driver hauling freight overnight between Melbourne and where ever else it needed to be by dawn.   He had been a man’s man back then, booze and birds and late nights in truck stops.  He’d had a fight in a pub up at Gonn Crossing sometime in the mid 90’s, when a fierce ugly bastard had punched his face and broke a couple of his teeth.   The local dentist had repaired his chipped incisor with gold the following day. 

 Now he works for the Government as youth services counsellor.  He’s gay, and was always gay but it took a while to figure that out. He’d had a couple of kids with a woman who lived in a dusty little town just across the border in SA but he never married her.  Hasn’t seen the kids for more than a decade, they didn’t want to know him when they found out he’d turned gay.

Lisa, Mona Lisa

I saw her this morning tucked into a corner by the doors of the 4th carriage just in behind a lanky school boy. A tiny woman with her eyes closed and a perpetual half smile that suggested she knew something we didn't.

   

Her skin is smooth, so incredibly smooth.  None of those fine lines most women of a certain age contend with.   I reckon she moisturises every day, maybe twice a day, maybe her whole body twice a day, and has done for years.   Her hair is soft; its blond disguising the grey is swept up into a loose arrangement in various shades of honey and fair baby, secured with pale pins at the back of her head.  You know she's thought about this, practiced this.

  

She has that look about her which says she's not originally from here, her face looks like it came from Holland, or Sweden, but not from Melbourne, here amid a vast genealogical melting pot where skin is brown and gold and porcelain, where faces come in round and wide or flat, pointy, puffy, thin or angular, hers looks Dutch. 

She wears a winter coat with a soft black lining, black at the cuffs and pockets all outlining the green, turquoise and gold of its hound’s-tooth check.  It has been living with her 40 winters and it knows where to go and how fit around her, how to be her coat.  Around her throat with the softest skin she wears a knitted scarf in peach pink that matches exactly the lipstick she has carefully applied to her ever smiling lips.   Her tiny hands tucked into the best quality black leather gloves and her feet in stylish leather boots.

She's a student of philosophy and she loves it.  She loves this end of her life with its room to explore who she is, to indulge her own passions.  The years of responsibility for the lives and doings of everybody else are done.  Now it's her time to be who she really is, who she has been all along.