[easyrazors]

NOWHERE GIRL part 2

The door at the rear end of the carriage opened. The ticket collector. A mundane job, but like in the world of rule-making, somebody has to do it, Hugo thought. “Tickets please..” he uttered in the monotonous tone of a man whose only pleasure at work came from timing the monotony. Hugo fished into his pocket and pulled out his ticket, which was duly franked. “Miss…?” he said to the girl, not brave enough to notice the feet on the seats, or brave enough to notice, but not to mention it. He was too busy killing time to interrupt it with something to expediate the murder of the chronology. The girl in purple boots shrugged. “ No ticket, eh? Where did you come from?”. “Home”. “Where are you going?”.”Nowhere”. The ticket collector shrugged. “But what is your destination, your final destination?”. “Home”, she replied. In effect, she was right, she was going nowhere. How could she buy a ticket to nowhere? The ticket collector mumbled and moved off. He wasn’t paid to think. Thinking was done by the people who made the rules, they got paid for that. If he had to interpret their rules, he should be paid for that too, and he wasn’t. He left the carriage slightly less enthusiastic about the mundanity that he had grown to love.
“So where are you really going?, asked Hugo, interested. He hadn’t met anybody interesting for quite a while, he thought, and this girl seemed, well, kind of interesting. “To the city, where do you think? It’s where this train goes”. “What do you do there?”. “Lots of things. Well, it’s quite mundane really, same old routine, but I enjoy it nonetheless. There’s a lot to be said for routine, you know. You can never break out of a routine unless you have one”. “Yes, yes, but what are you going to do? Today, for example?”. “Hmm. I’ll watch people, imagine their lives from their faces. Oh, I collect stuff, too. I go to the flea market and buy old stuff”. “I thought you said you collected the soundtracks of peoples’ lives?”. “Oh, I do…. but the same songs come up again and again. I figure that if I buy old shit, games, toys, books, comics, magazines, clothes etc, I’ll have the things that were around when those people were influenced to write that music”. “What music?”. “ The soundtracks to peoples’ lives, I told you”. Four minutes passed.
“You know”, said Hugo, “I lived a life just like yours, really. I don’t mean that in a condescending patronising way, I just did. Exactly. Collecting old stuff – records, comics, books, games, watching old tv – but I never stopped to think why I did it. Maybe it’s not important at all, but it seems interesting to me right now, at this moment. Perhaps, and I hadn’t even considered it before, I was looking for inspiration in the inspiration of others. I mean, intrinsically, the stuff from the past is inferior and irrelevant, unless you’re looking from a purely nostalgic point of view, but I wasn’t old enough for that to be true. The only things that count are things from the present, although, of course, they are only fleetingly in the present, and then become the past, or inspiration for a future generation of culture of which we can only imagine”. A minute passed.
“So, are purple Dms back in fashion now?”. Hugo immediately cursed himself for what he self-regarded as his biggest fault (although there were certainly more, and worse) – feeling the need to punctuate a perfectly comfortable period of comfortable silence with staccato bullshit like the DM boots comment. Girl from nowhere said nothing, and he silently assumed that she had treated the question with the contempt it deserved.
The train crashes. Two passengers, a ticket collector and a driver are killed.