Someone died as I arrived in London.
I was standing at East Croydon train station, the hub where you can change to a lot of places if you travel by train from Gatwick airport, or come from Brighton, or Reading, and I was waiting for the train to the stop I was heading for, when everything stopped. Not all the trains at once, but they slowed, stopped, stayed, then were reined in like sniffer dogs getting pulled back from a scent.
”Due to a train hitting a person in Purley, all traffic is delayed for the moment. We apologise for the inconvenience.”
Autumn sunlight on faces, on sighs, on a flurry of raised mobile phones. The train heading to Brighton stops on the adjacent platform and the doors open. A drunk starts singing about a football-team then starts delightedly bantering with his sudden audience.
The delay turns into all traffic cancelled until further notice; people scurry to the one train that goes into central London, others leave for local buses. There is an oriental platform conductor that gets a polite layer of people around him; no news, no news, only all of us standing around here in the sunlight, alive, while someone died five minutes ago on the tracks in the dreary suburb of Purley.
I arrive in London with the reminder of death, and golden sunlight in the autumn air. The Metal Element, in so many ways.
