Tube Journey

It’s a Wednesday morning and I’m sitting on a tube train reading a book and with half an hour to go until I reach the office. The seat next to mine was the only free one on the carriage until a couple of minutes ago. However, the stature of the guy who has taken it has meant that his buttocks have been forced to make a claim for the seats either side of him too.

Both he and the woman to my right have claimed the arm rests either side of me. The only comfortable position for me therefore, is to lean forward with my elbows on my knees and read that way. I get to the end of my chapter and pause for a moment to take a look at the other passengers. There is a girl standing in front of me holding on to the overhead rail and to her right is a thick set guy with a shaved head and sporting a good four days worth of stubble. He’s got an angry Millwall fan look about him, although he also has the volume on his I-pod turned up and I can hear Mariah Carey singing Hero.

The girl in front of me brushes against my book and I ignore her. She brushes against it again and I inwardly seethe. I can’t sit back because the fat guy and the woman with the elbows are taking all the room. I catch the eye of a lady sitting opposite me who looks like Judi Dench. She sees the look on my face and gives me an empathetic smile before going back to her copy of Howards End. I turn the page as the girl standing in front of me brushes my book yet again. I look up just in time to see that she is falling backwards.

She collapses on the floor between me and the woman next to me with her back against the seat next to my right leg. She’s fainted, or at least I think she’s fainted, as her head tilts back against the seat and her eyes roll into the back of her head. And then there’s an awful noise coming from her mouth. It’s at this stage where everyone around me has a look of ‘is there a doctor in the house’ panic about them. I reach down and untie her scarf. “Undo her coat too” someone says, which I do. “Can someone hit the emergency alarm” I say. The message gets passed back through the carriage from person to person, like gossip spreading through an office “Can someone press the alarm ”, “press the alarm please”, “the guy says hit the alarm”. Someone hits the alarm.

Judi Dench puts her fingers to the girl’s neck to check her pulse. I put my hand in front of the girl’s nose and mouth to see if I can feel her breathing – I can. And then the girl tilts her head back further and her chest moves forward and in a split second I realise what is coming next as I pull my hand back. Judi Dench on the other hand doesn’t and catches the full force of the girl’s morning porridge, to the tune of a collective “Eeewww…” amongst the other passengers.

“I work for London Underground” says a guy, “it’s ok, the driver will know which carriage the alarm went off in and he’ll stop at the next station. Put her in position” People look at him blankly. “The recovery position!” he affirms. There’s a collective ‘Ah yes, of course’. By this time the girl is awake as she is put on her side. People talk to her reassuringly as we pull into the next station. After a couple of minutes the driver pops his head around the carriage door. “Everything alright?” he asks before realising that it clearly isn’t. His colleague is assertive “We need to call the LAS!” The driver looks blank. “LAS?” he asks. The London Ambulance Service!” says his colleague, increasingly frustrated that no one understands him.

After a little while the paramedics arrive and tend to the girl. The platform staff inform us that the tube isn’t going anywhere fast and to go to the opposite platform where another will take us to where we’re going. Judi Dench has been wiping herself down. I hand her an extra tissue and give her an empathetic ‘sorry it was you’ tight mouthed smile. She smiles back in a shoulder shrugging ‘what can you do’ sort of a way.

Checking my watch I realise that I’m now quite late for work and so text my boss to fill him in on the morning’s activities.

“Running a bit late. A woman has collapsed in front of me on the tube and vomited all over herself. The Ambulance is on it’s way but we’re not going anywhere fast.”

Well it’s not a bad thing if I turn up earlier than expected. A few minutes later my phone beeps.

“No worries, we all oversleep sometimes...”