Under Siege.

Next to the homeless girl trying unsuccessfully to sell me sex in the train station toilets this stands out as one of my strangest public transport experiences.


It happened about three months ago whilst waiting for the train at a nondescript underground suburban train station which is lost somewhere in the middle of the line on which I live beyond the end up in the surrounding hills. It was a Sunday night, the end of a weekend that marked a new low for outer suburban public transport services. Three quarters of the line was undergoing track works and as a result a bus replacement service had been deployed to ferry people from the city to this nowhere location; a bus trip which clocked in at just under two hours, which I had spent spent standing pressed hip to hip with some very drunk yobs from the roughneck lumber town of Milgrove who spent the time knocking back beers and harassing a man with a broken leg and strange pattern baldness that seemed to be creeping up over the side of his scalp. The smell of stale beer, puke and stupidity rife in the stagnant air.


So I was standing on the train platform enjoying the peace, thankful that the Milgrove drunks having shot off on their own strange trajectory. Whilst I stood, I smoked and I listened to a middle aged Fijian woman complain to her daughter about how no one cares if people out here never get home when all of a sudden there was has deafening crash. An empty beer bottle sailed through the air thrown from the top of the escalator and exploded at our feet, followed by a teenage girl, who with her mascara running dark lines down her flushed cheeks, clutching a half full wine cask bladder marched passed us all the way across the platform and over the edge as she howled tears and screamed random expletives. She sat herself down on the tracks and called back to us 'What the fuck are youse looking at?!'


The Fijian and I looked at one another, then up at the arrivals clock when we realised that there were two minutes till this girl was a smear of red on the tracks. The woman shot off after the girl and I bolted up the escalator to find a station guard; moments later we were reunited on the platform with a rather befuddled station guard and a group of similarly foul mouthed and drunken teenagers locked into what was fast becoming a very strange standoff. The train was stuck halfway in the tunnel having stopped about five meters short of the girl and she was not moving, it was obvious that she had no idea how to end her now defunct suicide attempt so she sat on the tracks crying and screaming abuse at her boyfriend who was struggling to get free of the arms holding him back and run out after her. He was frothing at the mouth... spraying us with spit and foul language... kicking in frustration... the cords stood out along his neck and every vein in his forehead pumped its way to the surface and then in an instant he was gone, disappeared into the dark train tunnel followed closely by his friends.


The whole train station came under siege as the drunk teenagers spread into all three tunnels delaying every outbound service, the entire underground held hostage with the screams of teenage melodrama. The station guard sat defeated and helpless on the sidelines slumped against the barrier railing staring at his watch whilst we stood around him waiting to see what would happen next aware that any sense of normalcy had ground to a halt with the trains.

ME: Shouldn't you call for reinforcements or something?
GUARD [sighing]: No point, we can't set foot on the tracks till the police arrive.
ME: Oh, so are they coming.
GUARD: Yeah... oh... worst thing we could have done is stop all the trains. Now that there is no immediate danger there's no rush... cops could be hours. Even if the kids disappear we can't take off again until they've checked out every last dark corner of the place.


I lit another cigarette and turned my attentions to the drama in the tunnels trying to see the funny side of being trapped and at the mercy of teenage hormones and an excess of cheap wine... the folly of youth... those were the days.