The voice was both monstrous and fey.
It asked: “Do you want anything from the trolley?”
Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do. You. Want. Anything. From the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Doyouwantanythingfromthetrolley? Do you want anything from the trolley. Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley?! Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley, do you want anything from the trolley do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley?
The voice was asking us if we wanted anything from the trolley. It and the trolley were attached to a fat middle-aged man.
Not a single passenger in Coach F of the 16:42 from Aberdeen to Glasgow wanted anything from the trolley.
There was only about twenty-five minutes of the journey left. Humans can survive without sustenance for that long. Food was not required by anyone. He may as well have been selling scuba gear: there was no market here for egg sandwiches.
There was something disconcerting about seeing a middle-aged Ricky-Tomlinson-looking fat man selling sandwiches for ScotRail. Why was he in this situation? Like many of my father’s post-war dad-generation, he resembled one of those instant disguises you can buy in joke shops: a pair of lensless spectacles with a strawberry nose and a plastic moustache attached.
Rotund, gasping, largely extinguished; how had he got to be fifty-something without figuring out how to avoid jobs like this one? He should have been at home with a pipe and a dachshund or at the very worst, shuffling paperwork for an air conditioning company.
How did he even get this job?
Train Company guy: I don’t know, Mister Creosote. We normally only hire healthy young women for this role.
Fat Guy: Please. I’m at the end of my tether. A lifetime career in the yogurt industry has come tumbling around my ears. Everyone wants that actimel stuff now. We can’t manufacture probiotics!
Train Company guy: Hmm. Maybe we can come to some arrangement. [Produces an oversized baby romper and bonnet]. Put these on for me and dance.
I expect the interview went something like that.
He was too fat to comfortably move down the gangway. He looked like he might get stuck. The father of a kid sitting opposite me had stowed a skateboard in the overhead luggage rack. In an emergency, could we use it as a shoe horn?
As he trudged along, hips unavoidably rubbing against our shoulders (“Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley?”), I noticed something hanging by a string from his arse.
Looking closely, I saw that it was the plastic packaging rings from a six-pack of canned lager. It dangled pointlessly, a limp tail, from his pinafore strings.
It was the finishing touch on a spectre of shame. It was the jaunty hat grudgingly worn by teenage workers in a fast food kitchen. It was the insulting tip left to a Starbucks server. It was the wise-ass alligator puppet with whom the Shakespearian actor is forced to work after his stumble into television presenting.
I’d like to make it clear that I’m not taking the piss out of this unfortunate character. I filled with love for him and wanted more than anything to invite him to work in the easy-going and well-paid capacity as my personal assistant for life. But I don’t have the money. A year ago I was pouring coffee myself.
For the rest of the journey, he stood in the vestibule with a drunk woman, sharing her bottle of Budweiser. Complaining he said, “I’ve been doing this job since Birth”.
Or maybe he said “Perth”.
***
On our arrival into Central, the boy sitting opposite me began exploring the undersides of the seats. “Dad, where’s my skateboard?”
The boy’s dad, a handsome young Samuel Beckett who had been reading a lengthy article about Captain Beefheart in a music magazine for the duration of the journey, began looking around similarly low locations.
“I think I saw you put it up top,” I said helpfully to Beckett.
Beckett looked at me with dagger-eyes. “Oh, did you?” he said.
His tone trod a border between suspicion and irritation. I think he had tried to lose the skateboard and I’d ruined his plan. I sure hope it wasn’t the bane of his existence or anything.