Life at the end of the line

I live at the end of the line, where slow people get off with big bags. Where aggressive migrants lurk in the exits, demanding your used daily tickets, drinking cheap cans in the face of local bans. Where once a week the police come in heavy to drive them away, occasionally searching people of a certain age and colour for knives. Where half the time you can’t get the train all the way home and have to change at an interim station. This is where I live. I like it.

Where I live nothing much happens, but most of the people who live here don’t want anything much to happen. We like things this way. We’re commuters. That’s why we live at the end of the line. The line is what makes us live here. We get up, take the line in. We work, we take the line back. We muscle our way through the masculine grimness of the station exit, headphones on, avoiding eye contact. We eat, we pass two hours in idle pursuits of TV, internet or household chores, and then we go to sleep. The next day we repeat. We don’t need a life here. Life is elsewhere. We go to life, via the line.

So at the end of the line is nothing much more than houses and shops, because people sleep here, and sometimes they need to buy food. We have one of every supermarket, from the ones that have quality lines impeccably sourced to the ones where you pick your cheap milk off pallets. The rest is houses and flats, which are either called studios or apartments. There is nothing else here. We don’t have a cinema, while the library and the art gallery have gone part time, a staging post to closure. No demand, see. Who would look at them? During the day, we, the people of the end of the line, are not here.

Occasionally another unoccupied patch of ground gets built on, and up go another block of apartments. We do not see much grass around here. Soon all of the end of the line will be residential, apart of course from the one of each supermarket. Some people round here worry about this, but I don’t. I celebrate it. This is, surely, the epitome of what living life at the end of the line is about. We should venerate the mundane, and the domestic, and above all, rejoice at all additions to the housing stock, which help maintain the relative cheapness of accommodation in this suburb in this most expensive of cities, for that is why we are here. We live at the end of the line because it uniquely combines relative cheapness with reasonable convenience. It’s a winning combination. If we want grass and open spaces, we have the vast, lush expanses of the city centre’s considerable parks, a medium length train ride away. And anyway, those of us in the older houses tend to have narrow, secluded gardens in which we can pass our Sundays, and on in which on rare, warm evenings we sit contentedly, drinking white or rose wine.

I live near to the station, in a house which is now old and crumbling, but which a hundred and twenty years ago when it was built must have seemed a model home for a superior, upward-moving section of the working class. The house is small and, like many houses in these parts, plagued by mice, but we have grown used to these. They are part of the picture, and I consider they have earned their place. The main thing about the house is its proximity to the station, less than ten minutes’ walk, even in the morning when I tend to be hungover, weary and slow. There’s a slight slope up to the station, as much as passes for a hill in this town with appropriately bland geography, but that just makes it that little bit quicker to get home in the evening.

It’s also less than five minutes from the nearest supermarket, which is open long hours and serves as our corner shop, for newspapers, bread and instant meals. This is a secondary and still important consideration, although it is hard to live at the end of the line and be further than ten minutes away from a supermarket. But the grade of the nearest supermarket says much about the place in which you live. Do you live near the pallet shop, frequented by mad people who smell of cheap booze and urine? Or is your house by the organic specialist, which has banned plastic bags, and from which people emerge smugly with their food in hessian holders proudly proclaiming their naturalness? We do alright. We live near the third smartest supermarket of the town at the end of the line, where you get more deluxe foods than economy. It’s a fine balance. You can read the quality of the supermarkets in the precise gradations of house prices. It costs more to live a short walk from the good ones. This has far more bearing than the quality of schools. Many of us at the end of the line do not have children. Those who do tend not to send them to school around here. So the children also commute. I find this fitting. It prepares them for their lives.

Occasionally the more middle class people who live in pockets at the end of the line have started to concern themselves with this question of community. They fret about the loss of public spaces. They grow perturbed about the lack of a night-time economy, troubled by the absence of things that bring ‘the community’ together. I tell them they are wrong. We are not a community. If anything, we might be a community of interest, but we are a community of self-interest, which seems to me a contradiction. We chose not to belong to a community when we came to live here. We are the people of the end of the line, but our end-of-the-lineness cannot join us. So these well-meaning but confused attempts at promoting the community inevitably fail, and I welcome those failures.

All in all, I would say that I am happy with my life at the end of the line. And as soon as I can afford it, of course I am going to leave.