THE TRAIN IS NOW IN THE STATION
The gilt wrought iron of mechanical filigree pulsed and gyrated ever slower until, gasping for friction on the well-used rails, motion became painfully slow; only the most minute of movement ebbing the giant metal beast along the remaining track of the station. Land steamers were a common sight, now in their year of golden anniversary, blasting their symphony of industrial strength through the smouldering countryside, but none were quite so monstrous and majestic as their latest descendant clawing itself to a screeching stand still in the station. This giant train with its mesh of decoration, swirls and leaves, lines and curves and protrusions, causing great hindrance to performance, but making it far more than just a cumbersome machine lumbering about the landscape.
Its exoskeletal web made the juggernaut elegant and above all beautiful; not just to the eye of an engineer, for its triplet boiler houses, terraces of hydraulic pistons, and battalions of wheels making it the largest, fastest, most powerful, and groundbreaking vehicle of the age. Not just to the eye of the artist who could not look past the unnatural skin of flora and furan, which an engineer would sneer and curse at as superfluous and unnecessary, covering the entire man made colossus, it’s veil of beauty over the bestial; it’s burden of burden. It was beautiful to the common man, the cynics, the very length, and breadth of society. The train itself symbolised their progress as a country, scientifically, technologically, industrially, but this train, this train symbolised might, brutal might, sugar coated by being so fantastically garbed. It was gorgeous, and the only way to travel.
From the air, perhaps a thousand feet above the ground, the gargantuan land steamer, curving slightly as it reached the edge of the town, would have looked like a massive oedipal of brass and copper and steal, glimmering innumerable metallic hues in the lucid late morning light. Upon breeching the town’s perimeter, the town itself would have taken on the guise of a cross-section of a great lady receiving her lover gradually, while his representative vents shoals of black smoke and white steam along her pudendum. The resultant grey marbled mist lining her walls would spill out over the streets, making the area of the town covered look as if it were moistening to her lover’s single tentative, slowing, yet constant, penetration.
The station, though only of a town and not a city, was more than large enough to accommodate the entire length and girth of the locomotive. It had only recently been completed, originally it was to be half the size, but upon receiving notice that this new train of immense proportions would, during its maiden voyage, be making an extended stop in this insignificant seaport town, the plans were revised. The organisers of the train’s virgin journey had decided to disgorge the entire company of its passengers in the seaport for lunch and an early afternoon stroll along the cliffs to take in the sea air and recover while the train is restocked.
The train progressively swallowed by the station, absorbed completely from head to tail by the ovum of the great lady, disappearing from sight, and the miracle of creation incarnated metaphorically in the seaport’s station. As the passengers alight from their carriages and fan out from the giant ornate building, spreading through the surrounding area, weaving through the streets with indirect purpose, the swarm appearing to be the vast multiplication of cells in the womb of the town. The great lady’s bosom swelling with pride as long overdue funds are emptied into her tired loveless pockets by the great horde of tourists flocking for the use of her establishments in all their guises.
Sade stood at the far end of the platform, so he would be capable of capturing as much of the land steamer as it edged its way along the rails beyond the ridge, with his large old box camera. Hiding under the black cloak on the back of the camera made him feel more at ease; far more calm and serene than he usually did in such a busy, bustling public place. His little black world a shell against the station and its occupants, while the retina of his camera stood unperturbed, ready to burn in the light and shadow of the encroaching train. Sade remained undisturbed as he waited for the train to halt and cool, for its passengers to hastily make their way from the station into town. He remained ignorant as the tourists assailed him for commemorative portraits; for activity on the platform to become minimal, so no soul may become involuntarily entombed in celluloid for eternity, and only the beauty of the train now standing in the station would receive such a fate.
Just Another Adult 