Found In A Notebook

Found this in a workbook at the bottom of my bag. One can only imagine what the hen party got up to next.

The day ended much as it had begun, with a rush of bags, coats, passes, beeps and doors, people and half-shouts, “excuse mes” and platform alterations. Finally, Morton Glennister and his assorted baggage – a rucksack containing dirty washing and a small laptop bag he picked at of the corners of when he was waiting on platforms, and contain at least a pound of assorted stationary, tobacco and other detritus sure to clog the sockets of his iphone and ruin anytyhng that had the misfortune to find itself trapped in its murky depths.

Slumping into the nearest empty table seat, Mort – 28, nondescript brown hair, browner eyes – exhaled and gazed out of the window for a few seconds, and with a little affirmative nod, reached into the smaller of the two bags, fishing out a typically unkempt copy of JD Salinger’s overrated student stable The Catcher in the Rye. Mort had several hours of rain-based monotony to blot out before his train eventually limped into the small provincial station that was close enough to his parent’s modest cottage for you to smell dinner from the platform if the evening breeze was so minded.

Engrossed in Holdens brush with the law after the business with the hooker, Mort ignoed the landscape’s judder past his window, featuring increasingly decrepit stations. The cast of faces and pasts around him shifted, too. He did look up and sigh outwardly when the hen party from Tredegar at the end of his carriage, emboldened by pints of Asti...

And then it tails off. You can almost smell the Berkeley menthols they’ve been cadging in the train’s disabled loo-cupboard, can’t you?

This is actually a draft of a draft of the real-life story of when a strange man on a train appeared to either (a) be a version of me from the future or (b) be a relative of mine from a different universe. Really perceptive old guy, seemed to know me really well, had a very strange, oddly timeless look in his old blue eyes. I like to think of him as a time-traveller. In fact, The Book is based on there being a load of people like him among us, if you must know. Quite how it will differ from all of the other time-travel books in the world is beyond me at present. Then again, the main reason it’ll differ from the other time-travel books is that I’ll have written it. I’m reading some Gael Garcia Marquez to get my head around this Magical Realism thing and hopefully some of his beautiful imagery and wordplay will rub off.

There are more snippets of stories I found in notebooks, too. Maybe I should put them all here, and then interlink them in some way.