1 Carole walks through Liverpool Street station with its inter-galactic glass and steel ceiling propped up by towering Corinthian columns she's headed for the escalators and the soaring windows that let in a holy glow of morning light she passes underneath the timetable board listing departures and arrivals articulated through the medium of glowing alphanumeric, text flipping and updating as announcements bellow from the clustered boom boxes informing passengers about platform numbers and itemizing all stations on routes to final destinations where this train will end and the numerous delays due to vandalism on the tracks or leaves on the line or sun on the line or a body under a train how very inconsiderate, not to her to choose to throw yourself in front of a mechanical iron beast weighing thousands of tons and racing at a top speed of one hundred and forty miles per hour? to choose such a brutal and dramatic finale Carole knows what drives people to such despair, knows what it's like to appear normal but to feel herself swaying just one leap away from the amassed crowds on the platforms who carry enough hope in their hearts to stay alive swaying just one leap away from eternal peace
these days, however, she feels very much alive, very much 'looking forward' as they say at work, to the next 'window of opportunity' these days she's a willing orchestral player in the cacophony of London's busiest station with a footfall of nearly 150 million pairs of living feet every year, the anonymous convergence of commuters who are 99.9% genetically identical regardless of their visual packaging, regardless of their psychological wiring – warped, tangled, shorted, electrocuted all of them so perfectly composed, so poised and in control, socialized to be out in public as reasonable members of society this Monday morning where all dramas are interiorized look at her in her perfectly-tailored city clothes, the balletic slope of her shoulders, straightened hair scraped back into a martial topknot, eyebrows plucked with calligraphic flair, her discreet, no-nonsense jewellery of platinum and pearls Carole whose daily lexicon revolves around the orbit of equities, futures and financial modelling who loves to immerse herself in a universe where fiscal cells split off to create gazillions of replicas of themselves spinning off into beautiful infinity the glittering stars of wealth that make the world go around her idea of bedtime reading is to scrutinize the profitability of businesses and oversee investment plans for the commodities of the African and Asian markets the darkness of night pouring into her study through its old-fashioned sash window her face bathed in the blue light of her hypnotically addictive 24-inch iMac the computer screen where she alone, it seems, ignores the parallel universe of social media and what she considers its time-suck temptations at least her addiction to the electronic motherboard is productive, she tries to convince herself, clicking on the never-ending monetary websites of cyberspace that pop up, NASDAQ, Wall Street Journal, London Stock Exchange while also monitoring the international news that affects market conditions, the weather conditions that affect crops, the terrorism that
destabilizes countries, the elections that affect trading agreements, the natural disasters that can wipe out whole industries, agricultures and communities and if it isn't related to work, it's not worth reading but with the news now available on the minute every minute, she can't ever keep up and can't stop the hyperactive habit of clicking on just another hyperlink even when she can't take anything in any more, can't remember the last website she visited, doesn't know why on earth she doesn't just call it a day when she knows she'll fall asleep at her desk, usually in the post-midnight hours, only to awaken hours later and drag herself bleary-eyed to bed the terror of the Gods of Theta and Delta who rob her of the consciousness that protects her sleep when bad things happen to bad little girls who ask for it.