Two men, two suits and a fox

A woman sits in a London train. It is Friday night, and the frenetic energy, the chaotic distillation of a world that has been waiting for the weekend rages around her. Somehow, she is sitting with no one near her in a cluster of four seats. She, like so many others around her, is dressed exquisitely - normally, the narrative eye would need not dwell on such aesthetic triviality, but in this case, it is relevant. She wears a tight black dress that stands out against her blonde hair and red lips. Everything about her is manicured, from her nails to the carefully applied makeup on her face that accentuates her rounded features. She is young, vivacious and her pale blue eyes are full of irrepressible energy. Though the train is waiting to leave Victoria, her eyes look out the window, perhaps considering where her night is going.

Her destination is unknown - a date? A night out with friends? Her lips curl into a smile as she glances at her phone and reads something - she has an alluring smile, one that invites interest but maintains a certain air of refined dignity.

The train doors open and a man walks in. In the name of equality, the narrative eye shall hover here, as well. He is tall and wears a loose-fitting grey sweatsuit. He has on scruffy trainers and carries a can of nondescript beer that he swigs from as he sits across from the woman. The man has harsh features, worn rough by days working outside, and the stubble on his face is like iron wool. The man places the beer by his feet and looks around him. His eyes settle on the woman. They narrow as they take in her features - the cross of her legs and the slit in her skirt - and take on the qualities of an appraiser after being handed something potentially valuable. Having properly placed her into the right ‘category’, he leans forward.

‘You alright, love?’ His voice, like the rest of him, is coarse and unrefined, overflowing with tones of South-London. The woman gives a polite smile, her eyes darting quickly to his before they go back to her phone. He chuckles, familiar with this game - there must be some pressure applied, he would say. He needs to catch her attention somehow. He continues to look at her, his eyes lingering, tracing an outline from her head to her toes.

The woman picks up her phone and starts talking. Her voice is, like her, refined and smooth, all sounds enunciated clearly. The train lurches forward and his eyes are still on her. No one in the train would have noticed anything - why would they? They are all so immersed in their own world, their own plans: the couple in the seats across from them are having a heated discussion, a bearded man is staring at his phone behind them, a group of girls that had just made it before the doors closed are standing, talking excitedly.

In one smooth motion, the man stands and moves beside her. He knocks over the beer can and it rolls on the floor. She glances at him quickly before looking out of the window again.

‘Hot date tonight?’ he says with a smirk. The woman continues talking, asking questions to the person on the other end of her phone.

‘Ah, c’mon love. Tell em’ you’ll call em’ back. Don’t be rude.’

The woman looks around the train with increasingly frantic eyes. The couple haven’t noticed, the man with the beard is still on his phone and the girls behind them are laughing at something. She is alone, but she doesn’t hang up.

He is looking at her now - his face turned to hers, hers facing the window. He waits, a patient teacher waiting for a petulant student to pay attention, to understand that she is missing out on something important.

‘Go on, love. Hang up. At least tell me your name.’ His voice has shifted slightly - it is lower now as he speaks into her ear. He can smell the perfume she wears, something floral, and there is a whiff of hairspray. She continues talking. The only sign that she is distressed is her fingers holding her phone tightly.

He scoffs, shaking his head. He is about to reach for her phone so that he can hang it up for her, give her a chance to meet a real man, let her apologise for being so rude, when the door between carriages opens with a pneumatic hiss. He is distracted for a second by the man that walks through the door. (It would be unfair now not to hover.)

He wears a suit, a three-piece charcoal number that is tailored to perfection around his slight frame. His face is strange - in some ways, it is rather feminine. In others, it is masculine. This peculiar androgyny seems to play in the light; it is as if the man himself is entirely made up of light and shadow and if one were to look too hard at him, he might disappear.

The man in the tracksuit looks back to the woman on the phone who is still talking. He is about to say something when the man in the suit speaks:

‘Excuse me, sir, do you happen to know if this train goes to Penge East?’

At first, the man in the tracksuit doesn’t reply. Eventually, he realises he is being spoken to and looks at the man in the suit again: ‘Ya, mate, it does. Just after Sydenham Hill.’ He is about to look away when the man in the suit flashes him a smile of perfectly straight teeth. Tracksuit man feels something electric run through him and shrugs it off.

He turns back to the woman and is about to speak again but as the thought is about to materialise, as the synapses are starting to fire, he is interrupted again:

‘I’m so sorry to bother you again, kind sir. I may have misspoken before. I meant Shortlands. Does this train stop at Shortlands?”

The man in the charcoal suit is still smiling and his voice is smooth, breathy, somehow full of texture and lightness and darkness. The train is pulling into Brixton and the man in the tracksuit wants to help but he can’t remember - he is a good man, after all, so he asks the well-dressed man to wait. The brakes squeal and the doors open, and the man in the tracksuit sticks his head outside the train to check the sign for next stops. The woman stands quickly and bolts for the door to the next carriage.

As she is leaving, she places a hand on the man in the charcoal suit’s shoulder to say thank you. In that instant, she feels something radiate from him - a unity of spirit, an understanding, a coalescence of elements. He smiles at her and she is gone, into the next carriage and beyond.

The man in the tracksuit sits back down: ‘Ya, mate. It goes to Shortlands. Six stops. Hey, where’d she go?’ He gestures to the seat beside him. The well-dressed man shrugs his shoulders.

Tracksuit scoffs again: ‘Ah well. She was a tease anyway. Wher’you off to anyway, all dressed up like that?’

‘Oh, just meeting a few friends later. For a meal.’

He smiles a wispy smile, for he is a wispy man; it is as if he isn’t coloured in completely, like if he was breathed on he might just float away.

‘Sound. Always nice to see some mates. Same thing I’m doing. Guess it’s just me and you for now then, lad. What do you do for work, then?’

‘Oh, a little of this. A little of that. I work in… futures.’ The man in the suit smiles again as he sits down and smoothes the creases from his trousers. ‘And you, kind sir: what do you do?’

Tracksuit starts and he doesn’t finish until they arrive at Shortlands. The beer must have caught up to him and so his response meanders from him work (he puts up hoarding on construction sites), to his family (I love me mum, she’s a gem), to what it’s like being a single man in London (in the old days, all it took was some ‘ard graft, a little attention and the birds would be falling in me lap. But these days? Forget it.)

At Shortlands, they both stand up.

‘What a coincidence! Only as fate would allow.’

The man in the tracksuit: ‘Ah, sure. I just couldn’t remember how many stops it was. I’ve had a few, y’know.’

They step off the train and walk together. The man in the tracksuit doesn’t go far - he is heading to the pub on the corner and he invites the well-dressed man inside.

‘Ah, you’re too kind, good sir. But I need to meet my friends.’ He giggles. ‘You enjoy your evening and I do hope you encounter some ‘birds’ that are more to your liking.’

With that, the man in the charcoal suit, the wispy man, with the wispy eyes that are made from light and shadows walks away and the man in the tracksuit watches him go. He feels strange, like he isn’t sure what has just happened, but he shrugs and reaches for the door handle. He looks back towards the street but the man in the suit is gone.

*

A few hours pass and the man in the tracksuit leaves the pub. He is thoroughly drunk, having met a few of his mates to watch the football. There were women in the pub and he tried it on with a few of them, but it didn’t work. He even got one of them as she was coming out of the toilet away from her friends - he knew it worked best if he could get them alone - but just as he was getting her defenses down, her friend came around the corner.

He sways as he walks down the road and kicks a stone, cursing his luck, cursing the women in this god-forsaken city that were so far up their own asses they couldn’t see what was good for them. He is about to turn towards the train station when he hears something. It is a thin sound, a crying or even a wailing and it comes from the forest that surrounds the station.

He looks, shaking the booze from his mind, and here, dear reader, we may wonder what is going through his mind. A charitable view of this man’s mind might be that if there was a woman who was in trouble he would have wanted to help. Or… well, it isn’t for us to know. The narrative lens shall not hover, for the answer is unknowable, even to me.

Alas, he finds the source of the sound. There is dim light from not far into the forest and he follows it. The closer he gets, the louder the voice is. It is plaintive, crying out in pained tones, not words, but cries.

He sees the light now and it is coming from a figure huddled at the base of a tree. It is a woman, but as he steps closer, she stands and changes. It happens gradually but before he can rub his eyes and slap himself on the face to make sure he isn’t dreaming, he is facing the man in the charcoal suit. He looks like he did before except for thin waves of light that dance from the edges of him.

‘Fancy running into you, kind sir! How charitable of you to come to the aid of a maiden in need.’

The man in the tracksuit clears his throat but before he can say anything, the new man in the charcoal suit speaks:

‘How much do you know about Greek mythology, kind sir?’

‘Uh, I -’

‘You see, it’s funny. Throughout history, there have always been powerful men. Gods, they used to call them. And these gods, boy oh boy, did they like women. Did you know that Zeus used to take the form of animals to rape women? A bull? A swan? Isn’t that something?’

The man in the tracksuit looks around him and it seems as if he is deeper into the forest than he had noticed. There are sounds around him now - scuffling, skittering sounds and squeaks, twigs snapping and the soft dragging of something against the forest floor.

‘And do you know what the funniest part about all of the rape is? Well, I guess it depends on your sense of humour.’ The man of wispy light laughs now, a single, halting laugh.

‘The funny thing was that the women were punished. Can you believe it?’

The man in the tracksuit starts to back away slowly. He has a feeling that something is wrong and the sounds around him are getting closer. He looks around him and thinks he can see eyes that stand out in the darkness like yellow diamonds.

‘Imagine that. Being punished for something that was done to them. That took away their humanity. Imagine that.’ He pauses and breathes slowly. ‘I like to imagine things, too. Like what if Leda fought back against the swan. What if Demeter hadn’t accepted her fate so willingly? How would that have changed the course of mythology? How would that have changed how we view things?’

The man in the tracksuit turns to run - it’s instinctual, at this point. He doesn’t need to reason, he just runs. As he turns, something low and agile snaps at his ankle and tears his Achilles tendon. The man in the tracksuit crumples to the ground. He looks back to the tree but the wispy man of light (that used to be wearing a charcoal suit) is gone.

In his place is a fox. Just a typical London fox, its red fur warm in the darkness. It purrs as it moves towards him. Tracksuit tries to stand up but cannot; another fox is there to take out his other heel. He can feel their tails now as they slither around him, nipping at his face, clawing at his clothing, ripping an ear, snapping a finger with dagger teeth.

He screams. It echoes. They converge and there is frenzy but soon they stop. Silence. Soft steps slide towards them. He looks up, lifts his head. The blood dripping from the wounds clouds his vision. He sees a fox with eyes that are pale blue. It stares at him as it approaches and stops by his groin. Without sound, without warning, it swoops down and bites. The man screams again, a guttural scream of an essence being wrenched from him. The fox lifts its jaws and dangling from them is his flaccid penis. A phallus, as the Greeks would say. The fox spits it out. The other foxes look at it with disgust before converging on the man once again.

By the time they are done, only bones remain. Bones, and a flaccid penis that sits covered in leaves under a watchful moon.

**

A dark bedroom.

Two shoes - high heels - are in a pile by the foot of the bed. A black dress lays crumpled beside them.

The woman from the train sits up in bed. She has been dreaming. It was not a nice dream. It was dark and there was a man, and blood and pain. She looks beside her, expecting to see him there, his callous, iron eyes and cruel lips. But she is alone.

She breathes slowly, feeling the memories from the evening to come back to her. The stain of her encounter with the man on the train, how she felt tainted by his eyes, how she felt so used. But she was able to shake it off, chalk it up to men being jerks and forget. It let her enjoy dancing with her girls, shots of tequila, a few guys who tried it on but to no avail. They didn’t need a one night stand, they would always say. Wasn’t worth it. A burger after the club and an Uber. And bed.

But then that dream. It was so... vivid. So real. But, she thinks to herself as she pads her way to the toilet, that’s what dreams are like sometimes. She turns on the light and gasps.

Her face in the mirror. Her face, her eyes, her lips. The dried crust of blood around her lips. The blood on her lips.