the curse
I was listening to my music on the tube this morning and looking at nothing in particular when a woman sat alongside me and took out a small blue exercise book from her bag. My gaze, having nothing else on which to rest, naturally wandered over to see what she was reading. At first I could only see stacks of numbers written in red biro; my first thought was that she was a teacher catching up on her marking, not only because of the exercise book, but also because she seemed to fit my own idea of what a schoolmarm ought to look like: older, frizzy of hair and spare of tyre, with a slight stoop to her walk, though presumably she remained vigorous enough to subdue an unruly class of teenagers.
By chance the paper was so angled that I could look down upon it without turning my head too much, and in drooping my eyelids low I felt I could effectively disguise my curiosity lest it become apparent to the passengers sitting opposite. As I looked and looked, I saw that there were other layers to the writing in the book. There were words written in pencil, in a cursive script which was all long loops and curves. I did not think I could have read them, even without the numbers.
The numbers were written in red biro and they covered almost all the white space, scattered apparently at random, as if she had picked up a handful and dropped them across the page. They were grouped as either four or six characters together, the figures split into pairs with dashes so as to resemble dates; but if they were dates, they matched no calendar I could discern. Some were within brackets, but I saw no other mathematical symbols suggesting equations. Some of the numbers had been marked with an orange or yellow highlighter pen, while others had been hastily scribbled out in rabid streaks of red biro. And she was reading this as if it were a novel.
As I looked on, I saw something move across the page. At first I thought it was something in my eye so I turned my head briefly away, blinked a few times, made a show of rubbing my eyes and yawning; but when I returned to my former position, I was sure that not only had she further opened the pages of her book to me, but that I had not been previously mistaken when I saw the figure ’00-00-00’ wriggling slowly across the lines of the page as if it were a little jointed creature.
I did not look away or say a word. This is not the way one behaves on the London Underground. To be a resident of this city is to learn to tolerate the extraordinary in various degrees. To be a resident of this city is to learn to watch without being seen to feel. And that is what I did. I watched as the numerical absence made its way across the page. I saw that as it did so, the other numbers seemed to tilt themselves towards it, or to shift aside almost imperceptibly slowly so as not to be in its path.
At first I did not notice that the numbers were forming a shape. A circle within an oval: an orb on the page, the numerical absence forming the keystone of a curving iris. The open eye lay quivering, focusing itself upon me. And it was then that I realised I could read that faint cursive writing on the page behind the figures. And it said: ’I was listening to my music on the tube this morning and looking at nothing in particular when a woman sat alongside me and took out a small blue exercise book from her bag…’
