A green light at the end of the tunnel – the night tube is coming.
1am A knackered city clerk makes her way back to Ealing. She applied her make-up on the commuter train to work; she removes it on the way home with a blousy sigh. With the night tube comes the night passengers, night conversations, night litter, all of a quality quite different from day. Kebab wrappers, phone numbers, face wipes, discarded by those getting ready for bed. The night tube is one of the most intimate places in Britain, second only after shopping-centre beauty counters where women get their moustaches waxed in their lunch break.
2am A man sits alone. This is not new – he was born this way. Tonight he left his office, where he works with eight people, six of whom think his name is Ahmed, one of whom calls him Smaug on account of the only thing she knows about him coming from the team-building exercise where he expressed an interest in dragons. He left his office with the intention of changing his life and that, he decided, would start with a visit to a place called Wetherspoons. It wasn’t unfun – you could clearly see the cornicing and plaster details of the church, painted over, which he liked – but the drinks were too sweet, it was too loud, and the only person who spoke to him also tried to steal his phone. It was with some relief that he allowed himself to leave the bar stool with the knowledge that no lives could be changed in a room that noisy, and walk towards the station, where the novelty of the ticket machines remaining alight tickled him. He boarded a train, and he sits alone. As the doors start to close, a person slips between them with a sigh. They slump across from him, and from their pocket, gratefully remove a book. On its cover, a monster breathes red fire. The man is not alone.
3am Ravers are debriefing with strangers, the recently divorced are finding themselves as they miss their stops. The poets, between inspirations. Insomniacs are riding off their coffees. Like montage sequences from happier times, the front pages of yesterday’s free papers fly past tired faces in platform winds; a housing crisis, a doctor’s strike, the most adorable little murder. The night tube becomes more than just a train. The night does that to a place.
4am Much has been lost. You are holding the pole and mourning minicab karaoke, Magic FM supplying the romance and beauty that was lacking at the party due to the host insisting the lights were kept on throughout. You are mourning lost excuses – no more opportunities to leave before the last train. No, thanks to the night tube you leant on that fridge and kept on nodding until this man whose features seem to have all slipped into the very centre of his face, as if rushing toward a plughole, until he had finished telling you exactly what it means to be an analogue thinker in a digital world. No excuses. You see a series of long nights ahead. You will lie in that friend-of-a-friend’s bed long after you’ve stopped enjoying the smell of them, long after you have realised they are very much not “the one”. Long after you have dismissed the concept itself, and long after, too, you have had a heated conversation with yourself about the poison and pain within the very concept. This while the friend-of-a-friend is pissing loudly in the sink. Before, you would have been on the midnight train, flushed and dozy, and still a believer in love.
5am The tube map is being pinned with life experience. In four years’ time a great novel will be published, having been written right now on the Circle line. In three years’ time night passengers will witness a wedding in carriage four, a couple who fell on to each other when the tube lurched forward at five past five – she caught him. Which is what he will say in his speech as they pass Ladbroke Grove. In one year’s time, a newborn baby will be named Angel after its place of conception. Its parents were lying, of course, but Elephant & Castle was a bit of a mouthful, and besides, the only person who could potentially point out the error had been asleep under a big coat.
The lure of a night tube is not just the getting home. Apart from the odd fighty lout, it is a place where guards are down and minds are open, and the past-bedtime-ness allows for all the possibilities of a night underground.
6am Day.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
