Daniel Park

Happy Families

Daniel Park

The key to successful advertising is never take no for an answer. That’s why the moving billboard is so insidious. It looks so innocent and then whammo! the frozen image of a grinning aryan child erupts into cheezy giggles, the pretty ladies’ frenchweave tights go up and up and up like an elevator in the Eiffel tower, the grinning family in matching hooped polo-shirts jive along to a little ditty for the pre-requisite 4.8 seconds of optimal exposure, before the grinning child reappears, cheezier still.

It doesn’t work of course, commuters are more intent on fighting the ticket barriers with their metrocards than succumbing to the lure of Pampers, pantyhose or Pringles. Yet I can’t tear my eyes off this magic picture box, loaded with images utterly alien to my existence, to say nothing of my precious market segmentation. It’s like visiting another world of happy families, 70s sitcoms and the land of lost content.

Like scoffing an endless arctic roll in front of Terry and June episodes on repeat; innocent, but deadly.

I press my face against the flickering screen, a jumble of the gaily coloured beads searing my optic nerves and yet, try as I might, this leopard cannot change its spots, and the advertising norm takes “no” as their answer to my happy family.

Candy Daniel Park

'Death makes you reckless.' I said Glad cracked another sherbet lemon in her dentures and narrowed her eyes, 'No. It just makes you notice the buggers more.'

Glad stands vigil with me on Platform 2, propped up by her tartan shopping cart and fortified against the elements and delays by endless bags of boiled sweets. She bought all my scotch off me, to help me pay for mum’s funeral and haggled me down to the nub, but sometimes that’s just what you need in life, a sweet little old lady who’ll ever so gently slap you round the chops and tell you there’s no free lunch, beans on toast’s your only option and you’ll most likely die farting.

Twenty minutes ago, while we were still stood there, muttering under our breath about yesterday’s overcrowding, I thought a man on Platform 1 was looking at me.

'Glad' I whispered 'D’you see that fellah next to the woman with the purple handbag?'

'Oh yes. Really ugly. Doesn’t go with her shoes or anything.'

'No, not the handbag, the fellah. Is he looking at me?'

Glad shrugged.

'It’s just, y’know…with your new glasses…'

Our platform conversations are mostly the same, bog-standard commuter moans, but once in the carriage we take it up a notch – questing for the meaning of life by retelling the horrors faceless corporations inflict on us. Just lately, it’s been electric companies for me, and opticians for her. After weeks of wrangling, her opticians finally admitted she'd had the wrong prescription for months, sent her for a medical assessment and then supplied glasses so powerful that superheroes would kill for them. Of course that won’t be an end to it, she’ll have her solicitor investigating, but that’s Glad for you, never give a sucker an even break. I grieve for her sherbet lemons.

Glad knows my distance vision isn’t so good. She relents and casts an x-ray beam in his general direction.

'Oh yes, very nice. If I were younger…'

'Never mind about that, is he looking at me?'

'I’m sure I don’t know.' She’s taken offence I try looking across the platform again. I can see he’s slim, blond hair,, but his face, his face….he’s just that little bit too far away for me. He could be smiling, he could be frowning, he could have a unibrow. I shudder.

The optician told me my right eye was weaker than my left so perhaps if I put my palm over my right eye…is that clearer? Or maybe I’m wrong. Did he say my left eye was weaker than my right eye? I swap my palm over to my left eye…hmmm, now I can’t remember what it was like when my right eye was covered. I swap palms, and swap then again, and again, can I see his face now? I’m so desperate to see his face.

I feel an urgent tug on my sleeve. I look down at Glad and behind her catch the whole platform of commuters gawping at me slack-jawed. The crazy old poof playing pat-a-cake with his face to perv on eye-candy. Has he no shame? No sense of the proper conduct for a man of his age?

'What the fuck you lookin’ at? You’re no better than ‘im, you two-faced buggers.' shouts Glad at the top of her lungs to the whole sodding lot of them, with their phoney morals and their nine-to-fives and their 2.4 children waiting for them when they get home.

Eeee…she’s got some balls, has our Glad.

Oakland Excelsior

Daniel Park

I love people-watching. Visiting the Hepworth today was just an excuse to watch people watching things. God-awful spiky pottery things - you see one, you’ve seen them all - but people, well now, they’re all different.

Like that rail supervisor letting people through the ticket barrier - you see him? All sweeping arms and legs and smiles, like an enormous camp windmill? I’m not saying he’s you know, that way…but darrrrling, he parades that station concourse like a Bangkok Ladyboy on Brighton Pier. And he seems genuinely interested in other people. Take that miserable crumpled suit he’s just shown through - clearly a regular - only goes and shows him a picture on his iPhone - actually got the old git to crack a smile. Show someone you’re human and you can work miracles.

I bet if I told him Barbara Hepworth used to take the train from Westgate down that mile and a half of decommissioned track to Alverthorpe, where her dad was a churchwarden at St Pauls before the Great War, he’d be thrilled. I’d even let him use it as part of his act. I push myself towards the barrier and am gutted when he steps away to let a stream of noisy commuters through the other side. He’s someone I’d like to have ask me if I need any assistance madam, and he’d have meant it…but the gate opens automatically because I’ve the right kind of ticket and I just can’t find a good enough excuse to linger.

As I reach up to press the lift call button I realise how much I hate machines. Yes, they’re all very helpful I’m sure, but there’s no gritty edge to them, no hidden depth to fathom. You can’t have any fun guessing their motives the way you can with a sassy ticket inspector or that kid at the Hepworth who picked his nose and sneaked snot over the curve of a priceless Henry Moore.

The lift door opens and I push in. It’s a decent enough space all right, no danger of squashing your fingers between the wheel rims and the walls like some I could mention. I crane my neck up to read the shiny chrome panel that displays its name: Oakland Excelsior.

Oakland Excelsior - now there’s a wet dream from a marketing department’s perspective - all that twee tea-cosiness spliced with sci-fi nerdery - like a stair lift with warp drive. “Lift going up” announces Oakland Excelsior in an assertively male but appropriately non-domineering tone. I wonder how many desperate jobbing waiters they auditioned for that gig. Everything’s so swish and efficient in Oakland Excelsior

– all so damned DDA compliant, with its special alarm buttons built into the base of the walls so if you tip out of your chair you can crawl to the most convenient one in effortless comfort to attract attention.

It is only when the Oakland Excelsior glides to a halt that I hear the announcement.

“Footb”. The “B” cut off with all the ragged sharpness of Hepworth pottery, plus intrigue. Did someone in the marketing department judge the Oakland Excelsior was so perfect that it had to be spoiled to spare our blushes, or did the machine develop this flutter all by itself, absorbing the daily frustration of the heavy laden wheelchair, baby buggy and shopping trolley? If the Oakland Excelsior wants to perform its own miracle: to show enough humanity to turn me from people-watching to machinewatching, then what better way than with a speech impediment.

Poison Daniel Park Always the same, even in summer when the platform’s all but deserted, Jim and Kasim strain to be the first to get on at the door right at the front, because from there they can rush out and get their connections at Leeds. From the first door, they instinctively turn left to reach their secret half-carriage of seats tucked behind the driver’s cab: a safe place to chat, snooze and generally not be disturbed by the great unwashed.

Kasim always lets Jim splay out on the wider seats. In their short, jerky conversations over the years they’ve learned snippets about each other’s lives. Jim’s years of crawling around the ventilation shafts of cold damp factories has given him chronic backache and dodgy knees; Kasim runs half marathons for fun. Being courteous and choosing the slightly narrower seats at Jim’s side is a fair price to pay to give the old man a bit of extra comfort.

Occasionally, they’d find some turd from Skipton had got there before them, usually an off duty staff member, and Jim would shoot them filthy looks of betrayal all the way back to Leeds. Kasim would quote the Buddha, “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other fellah to die” but Jim had a natural taste for that kind of poison.

But, this time it’s not some inconsiderate passenger taking up their seats. This time, their carriage has been violated.

A trail of salted peanuts, sprung from the foothills of an armrest near the window, broadens into a lazy smear of beer-soaked crisps and crumpled cans of special brew, their jagged edges thrust proud from the stinking ooze. Beneath their seats, a fetid pool, swollen by the constant drip of sodden upholstery, bobs with more beer cans, clanking together with the ebb and flow set in motion by the train as it pulls away from Keighley station.

“Animals” grunts Jim, expecting Kasim to join in the righteous indignation.

Instead, Kasim sighs.

“What’s up with you?” asks Jim “I saw a cleaner, with a brush and pan at the end of a stick racing to get on the train, but I thought he was trying to get on at our door and…I tripped him over.”

“I saw him too,” Jim replies, “I pushed him to one side as he tried to get up. He was still on his knees when the doors closed. I thought the same as you. He wanted our carriage.”

“Oh he wanted our carriage all right,” echoes Kasim.

They stand up the rest of the way in silence, sipping on their poison