Dating : Metro Martyr

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They made a musical about the Metro and its place within the local community. It was filled with kids who do performing arts and sing for their grandparents at Christmas.

Internal breakthroughs emerge as blurring trees escape your peripheries and you struggle for truth ahead of deflated footballs and overgrown woodland. What exactly is that graffitied chimney thing near Felling? It reminds me of a location where the animals of Farthing Wood succumb to injury and are left to die.

Your seat on the metro is another factor weighing in on the overall experience. No other seat in the world possesses as much subtext as the ones you’ll find on these black and yellow chariots. A vacant window seat is good for business, while a vacant window seat in-front of a priority seat provides a footrest. But the best seat in the house is at the front and back, revered by kids and adults across the globe. Feel free to put your foot on the window ledge and take your pick from one of two windows of observation. This is luxury travel. When the bitter rains have soaked your hood, the front of the metro becomes a beacon of hope, allowing you to focus on those internal breakthroughs without distraction, in complete solitude.

Most of the time the metro takes us to work while the inevitability of the daily routine interrupts thoughts of eating peaches on beaches in Croatia. Long escalators are good for introspection, people who run up them need shot. You rub your key fob against the electronic door system and begin another day of work.

It’s easy to assume you’ve become a philosopher once you’ve spent a few months on the carriages, but at the end of the day you’re just a people watcher using your imagination to pass the time, making the same judgements as everyone else. The same faces sit in the same seats, adopting a regimented understanding of the order we will enter the carriage. Not one word is spoken between you and the old man you’ve sat next to every day for two years. One person presses the button on the door, while a man with Cerebral palsy slowly makes his way to his favoured seat and sleeps.

There’s a man wearing a bag with seven zips who stares at the floor; not a single thought in his brain. It looks like one bought from the middle aisle of ALDI; purpose built for finance documents and crumpled water bottles. His anonymous life and cum-coloured skin reminds me of shell-shock. He looks like he’s been exposed to mustard gas prior to watching every single one of his mates die in a trench. A face of sheer hopelessness crafted through years of inactivity, cowardice and a failure to live up to who you really are. Who really knows what inhabits the bag of the man with seven zips? He seems like the type to have a well-paying job in the finance department of local council while simultaneously possessing a demeanour that suggests long-term awareness of his wife’s five year affair. One day this man will die; die in the actual sense, and the only evidence that he ever existed will be found on a P60 or utility bill.

There’s a woman with blue hair and a denim jacket bought in 1997 sitting with her handbag on her knees wearing an insecure expression. She’s owning the charade of performed optimism that middle-aged women seem to enjoy. The blue hair suggests she was once a punk, and her quick acknowledgement of other male passengers facilitates her search for midlife romance. The metro is her last hope, but conversation is short-lived. She stares out the window with her headphones in, probably thinking the same things as me and listening to Enya — Only Time. It feels beneficial to imagine everyone inaudibly listening to Enya as the darkness of the tunnel consumes the carriage. Like the final scene of a depressing public information film about pensioners dying of hypothermia in their own homes.

You enjoy an out of body experience as the carriage moves in slow motion onto the bridge over the Tyne. Staring down at yourself like a judgemental celestial body from an angle that makes your hair look funny. You question whether you’re really a person at all.

A camera pans through the windows of the carriage similar to the immersive scene where the robot submarine glides through the lower decks of the Titanic before colourising and zooming in on Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson. The cinematic gods of your psyche have managed to charge their drones in time to record your ultimate demise between Gateshead and Newcastle.

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National Government fails to recognise the importance of adequate investment into regional public transport, preferring to focus on more pressing matters like punishing the poor and disabled. Because of this, the Tyne and Wear Metro Service’s engine and internal riveting has not seen upgrade since 1985. Aesthetic modernisation are a good facade for real progress, but the archaic yellow and black paintwork feels like watching Grange Hill in 2001.

A broken wheel and rusted track joins forces to derail the metro, causing the train to buckle under the weight of its forced decline, plummeting into the Tyne below. A man of at least 25-stone falls from one end of the carriage to the other, hitting those yellow indented railings as he goes, before crushing the man with Cerebral Palsy in his sleep. 63-year-old women wearing broaches and flowery perfume scream as the carriages arrow towards the water.

You wish they’d stop over-reacting and accept that they are passengers to more than just the metro, but their imminent death may be just the medicine for a nation’s weird obsession with symbolic military conflicts. Their flowery perfume is the last odour you smell while coming to terms with your own decline. The carriage is submerged, leading to a short-period of serenity as it slowly fills with the murky Tyne Water. Pressure created by the weight of the water causes the windows to concave and smash, providing an opportunity for escape. Maybe the old ladies don’t know how to swim and one day their corpses will be excavated by divers 1000 years from now.

If you’ve ever watched a programme about diving, you’ll be well-versed in the perils of rising to the surface too fast. Air embolism takes many victims, but I’m the last man on earth willing to entertain bubbles in my blood, even if the waters of the Tyne are only 13 metres deep. I nod in satisfaction, grateful for my prior knowledge of air embolism, relaxing like an emotionally resilient monk moments before self-immolation. Once again, my comfort is disturbed by the underwater scrambling of my metro comrades and the piercing screams of one of the old ladies trapped in an air pocket.

I stare out the window somehow still firmly seated despite the surrounding waters that engulf me and notice a common eel staring back. We share a moment of symbolic connection between fish and mammal as the eel kinetically communicates a certain level of empathy for my situation. The crash had disturbed the relative inertia of the Tyne waters, disrupting the eel from his daily errands but he didn’t seem to mind. The eel nodded and I nodded back, acting as a gesture of unity between two indifferent species. I will never forget the look in his eye as he turned and swam way.

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I died on December 23rd, 2019, two days before Christmas, along with 47 other unfortunate passengers of the Tyne and Wear Metro. Local Council held a vigil for the deceased on the grass outside the Civic Centre that was attended by over 70,000 mourners. Local singer Joe McElderry performed a rendition of Amazing Grace that was received with genial applause and tears. Joe nodded to the crowd with a modest gesture of thanks. People who never even knew me were heard expressing that ‘this is what he would’ve wanted’. I wanted to be a martyr for positive change. Does being involved in a regional metro disaster qualify for that? I don’t know.

Friends left pints of Carling out for me every time they drank, and every time they done this the pint was mineswept by a 17-year-old with bad posture. This was the respect I deserved.

*

30 years later, newspapers in Moscow were running a small piece on the anniversary of the crash. If Soviet Communism can be respected for one thing, it would probably be their passion for fully-functioning, luxury metro systems. Public transport that represented a utopian image of Bolshevik optimism, now used for monotony and the same cultural boredom mirrored by the passengers of the Tyne and Wear Metro.

The piece included some small profiles of some of the deceased, one of which was me. My Marxist leanings were revered by the Moscow public and a GoFundMe page was set up in my name. Over 30 million Roubles were raised for my cause. A year later the money was used to erect a 15ft cast iron statue in the Mayakovskaya Metro Station, surrounded by beautiful futurist architecture, communist decadence, and a small plaque with my name.

The road of excess led to the palace of wisdom. I had finally became the Metro Martyr.