PUBLIC (TRANSPORT) INDECENCY

Love in the time of Public Transport

1 - EXT. INNER CITY. DAY.

A crowded tram stop in Melbourne’s sluggish heart shivers licentiously with waves of glossy unrelenting heat. Sweat glistens on collarbones alongside tiny golden necklaces, leaves Rorschach blotches on the armpits of collared shirts. Thighs stick to the scorching bars of metal benches. Flies divebomb for dripping ice creams only to be swatted away by hands as quick and irritated as a horse’s tail.

Summer is here.

So is the tram.

2 - INT. TRAM. DAY

A girl boards the tram, swept up in the crushing wave of bodies eager for home and air conditioning. Her red hair is frizzing beneath heavy noise-cancelling headphones. She’s surrounded by people but seems distinctly alone. She struggles for a seat but there’s none to be found, makes do with a limp piece of green plastic hanging from the tram’s ceiling and holds on tight as they begin to move. Her feet hurt. She shifts her weight, tucks a backpack between ankles.

The tram is full, too full, and as they take off she bumps into the person standing next to her.

She glances up quickly and smiles, slipping off her headphones to let the world rush in.

CLAUDIA.

Sorry.

STRANGER.

All good.

The girl puts her headphones back on, but not before noticing that the person she bumped into - a boyhas eyes like the palest New Zealand jade. Her heart begins to race and she fiddles with her Spotify app to mask the moment. No one knows how shy she really is. The boy has floppy brown curls, her favourite, and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses that keep sliding down the bridge of his nose. A baby begins to cry in its mother’s arms but the girl can’t hear it over the sound of Jeff Buckley’s Lover You Should Have Come Over blaring at full volume through frazzled synapses.

The girl watches the boy from the corner of her eye. She likes the way he holds his book; gently, with respect. He opens it again as they trundle ever onwards and she spies the front cover. Hemingway. A Farewell To Arms. Her heart catches again. She thinks about speaking to him but he’s lost in the pages.

She lets the moment drop and goes back to her own book. Her life is a series of missed connections. What’s one more?

3 - INT. TRAM. TWILIGHT

TRAM ANNOUNCER (disembodied):

Stopping at Leonard Street: Stop 15. At the next stop, the doors will open on the right.

The girl looks up from her book. It’s nearly her stop. Just a few more minutes in the scorching heat and then she’ll be home. She needs a shower, can feel itchy fever running heavy fingers down her spine and the back of her legs.

She looks around to see that the tram has emptied. It’s just her, the boy and the mother with the crying baby now.

She stares at the boy from beneath her eyelashes, safe in the knowledge that Hemingway’s words have him thoroughly entranced. She watches as his mouth twitches at the corner and wants desperately to know which line made him smile.

She gathers her bag, gets ready to push the grimy stop button, but the driver brakes too quick and she stumbles into the stranger for a second time.

He catches her instinctively, one arm braced against a shoulder, and waves of something other than heat begin to bloom.

They lock eyes and he smiles, pupils blown wide in the coming dusk. She smiles too, almost apologetically, but can’t break from him – doesn’t want to feel empty air in all the places their bodies meet. A tendril of illicit joy unfurls like a fledgling fern inside her chest and she delights in this simple thrill; brushing up against another body in the sort of warmth that makes you lazy and loose and longing. She feels drunk on promise. On this spiderweb scrap of time, soon to be a memory.

The boy smiles and releases his hand. It’s the girl’s stop. She grabs her bag and drops from the tram onto the road, but not before looking back at the boy one last time. The tram is already speeding off but she can see that he’s watching her right back, intensely, right up until the tram bends artfully around a corner and he’s gone forever.

It might have been another missed opportunity, she thinks.

Or maybe it was exactly what it needed to be ... a tiny skerrick of stolen pleasure and mutual understanding. Hers to treasure. Never to be repeated.