Excerpt from Chapter 7 of mystery-comedy novel, 'The Investigations of the Para-Usual':
He had attempted to fill what he perceived as a space the exact shape as the one he had assumed jumping into the carriage. His bulk, however, had accommodated itself instead via the seismic reconfiguration of bodies. Somebody was heard to tut in protest, but that was that. That is the Tube. An ordeal that cannot be borne with interaction between fellow travellers.
Professor Breville O’Singh panted heavily. Back on track, he hoped, he prayed. Distractedly, the professor found himself surveying the carriage-scape, the human tableau, through the thicket of standing bodies. ‘Pompeii!’ he exclaimed to a studiously impervious audience. The passengers called to O’Singh’s mind residents of the Roman city petrified instantly by volcanic ash issuing from neighbourly Mount Vesuvius. Frozen, they were, in every imaginable form of human activity – queuing at the baker’s, stroking dogs, touching custard. And likewise, here they were, London commuters crouched under armpits, hanging from safety rails; while others sat rigidly, heads buried in the pages of their newspapers.
‘Open or wrapped, luv?’ chirped O’Singh, in a falsetto, Cockney accent. The academic was assuming the guise of a fish and chip shop assistant offering the customer, as they do, input into the way they would like their fishy repast packaged in newspaper. Professor Breville O’Singh was a man for making connections and making them verbal.
‘Aha! Here is something. How about a trade magazine for opticians?’ said O’Singh. He plucked a biro from his haversack and a mangled notepad, which he laid on top of his newspaper and scrawled away, head bowed, until he had finished: ‘The opticians’ trade magazine could format the lay-out of its articles similar to the way the letters are arranged on the eye test charts, starting with the biggest, most easily discernible letters on the first line; subsequent letters decreasing in size and legibility as they progress further down the page.’
O’Singh capped his pen and turned to the passenger on his left. ‘I knew of a man who visited an optician’s once,’ he said, as freely and easily as if he had known this travel companion all his life, ‘who had such poor eyesight that he started reading the eye chart before he had even stepped into the surgery.’
O’Singh stared intently at his fellow passenger, who was slowly recoiling into his seat.
‘“But how?” you might ask,’ continued O’Singh, anticipating the passenger’s incredulity.
‘“I” this man had said confidently, reading what he thought was the first letter on the chart. How could he have had such bad vision if he was able to read the sign from so far away, from outside the room?
‘“Mr Hoskins,” said the receptionist, to the man entering the surgery, “we’re going to have to see about fitting you with some stronger lenses – that’s not an ‘I’ you just read. That was the shape of the doorway.”’