The Train Situation, PART I

This is a short story about an incident on the train that took a turn to the worse.

The Where: TGM line from Sidi Bou Said to Tunis Marine.
The When: July 2, 2017.

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What you’re about to read could be labeled as anything but fiction. It is still green in my mind as it was shocking and has recently happened. Just to warn you: the amount of cringe you will be experiencing through this little piece of writing could reach an unbearable level. So before proceeding, be sure you really want to do this.

The whole thing has been pretty nasty from the beginning.

As my friend and I were approaching the Sidi Bou Said train station on foot, we heard a muffled train rumble and we couldn’t tell wherefrom it was coming. A few seconds later, the cockpit of the train slowly emerged from behind the turn, and we realized that it was heading to Tunis. Not the other way around. 

A fat faceless sunburnt bored-to-death man was sitting inside of it. Absent-mindedly, he was watching the rail, and mindlessly, he was handling the controlling panel in front of him.

The barriers came down bloacking the road that traversed the rails, and the train tooted. “Hurry up, man!” I exclaimed. “We’re gonna miss it!”

Our walking pace gradually accelerated until we began running. We reached the ticket window passing by the controllers hollering at us, “GET YOUR TICKETS FIRST, BOYS!”

And so we did. I hurriedly grabbed the tickets and waved them at their faces, while my friend raced me to the train door.

We barely made it. The moment we jumped on the train, the pilot had already put it on the move. So we picked two chairs by the window and calmly sat down, cursing the driver for unnecessarily being in a hurry. The train was swiftly moving on and was empty: only around 10 people were onboard.

My friend and I sat on two opposite chairs in the four-chairs set that was situated in the middle of the wagon, and as usual, we started cracking jokes to shorten time. But little did we know, we were about to have the longest trip in our lives at that point.

At the next stop, a group of shirtless dark-skinned boys, whose ages probably ranged from 16 to 25 at the best conjecture, with very cheap withered tattoos on their skins and disgusting awful-looking haircuts strutted inside the train. They were singing one of those crappy football cheering songs. Very. Very. Loudly. Their flesh was steaming with heat and produced such a horrible odor that was sprayed in the air. At each stop, their numbers increased by five or six. In the beginning, they were around 10. Then after few stops, they outnumbered all the misfortune passengers that happened to be on the wagon at that time, myself included. 

They were so wild and barbarian, that shortly after their arrival, I realized right away that this would be a train situation and things could go awry at any given moment. In one continuous motion, therefore, I collected all my accessories along with my phone, put them in my bag, wore it on my back and pressed it against the chair, so that none could by any means take it away from me.

The atmosphere was cloaked in chaos, so much so that I felt very uncomfortable and suggested that we descended the next station and wait for the next train.

“No,” my friend answered while alarmingly observing them with eyes wide open. “Just sit still and watch this. I reckon something is gonna to happen.”

They did all the sorts of stuff that you should probably not be doing on a moving vehicle. The disturbing vibration of their hideous vocal cords shrieking those football dissing cheering songs accompanied by the uninterrupted random banging on the dysfunctional pneumatic controlling box of the doors did not stop right from the moment they walked in. It rather became louder by the time, and the more they sang, the more dreadful and ear-piercing it became. Like monkeys, some of them climbed on top of the train through a broken door/window, then came in from a different one. They also wrestled next to the opened door, not fearing to slip and fall out of the train and getting their necks cracked. 

Without paying attention to the children and the elderly who were present in the wagon, awful names and adjectives were uttered in jest, and a lot of silly scenes were performed. For example, one of them would press on an empty bottle and suddenly turn the cap open so that it would fly for a second and land on someone. The moment the cap was released, they would all turn towards him, put their hands on one of their eyes, and scream at once “Ahhhhhh! My eye, you little punk! It f***ing hurts! Stop it!” Not to mention how they pulled each other’s shorts down, and how they jokingly touched each other. This and a lot more was happening all at once.

It was so hectic and so confusingly shocking, and they were all acting savagely similar, that even though I kept attentively watching them, endeavoring to delineate their physical traits, I could not distinguish a face from another. They all looked the same in everything as if they were all raised under the same roof, fed the same food, and taken out of the same womb. 

Their faces were long, and their bodies were tall and slender. For a moment, I had this notion in my mind that they were a unique specimen different from homo-sapiens. Their T-shirts and tank tops were either put on their shoulders or wrapped around their necks. And of course, they all wore multicolored Hawaii shorts. Some of them had bags on their backs, some had nothing. They looked abominable, and I almost threw up.

All the passengers on the train felt very uncomfortable, obviously. It was quite apparent on their faces, and you could feel it in the air. At the fifth stop, or thereabouts, three siblings, or so I should assume: two sisters and a brother, mounted the train and sat down apart from each other. The boy (hereafter, the Brother) sat next to my friend, facing me. One of the girls, (hereafter, Sister 1) sat behind me, and the other (hereafter, Sister 2) sat next to the door. 

Sister 2 had a purse that she tightly held on her lap. She leaned on the window edge next to her and kept enjoying the “view”. The Brother kept an eye on his sisters and processed the fact that he was trapped with these savages for the rest of the trip, and after a while, he also sent his sight through the window, watching the road as the train was directing to Tunis, which seemed like thousands of kilometers away.

Everyone on the train sat on the chairs trying to hide their anxiety from the sight, and they all did different things that a nervous person would do in such situations: avoiding looking towards the creatures by gazing down, up, or out of the train; pretending to be talking on the phone; speaking with a passenger to show that they are not alone; and that sort of behavior.

Without a notice, one of the passengers’ Messenger rang. Sister 2 knew that it was her phone, so she opened her purse and brought a Samsung Galaxy S5 out of it. She sent a few texts, then she put it back again. After a short while, her Messenger rang again. Stupidly, she did the same thing. But this time, the train was slowing down to stop at a station.

One of the ruffians casually descended hollering at the rest of his crew, “Alright, guys! See ya tomorrow! Don’t forget to bring that thing with ya tomorrow, aight? Bye bye, b*****!”

And right when the train was about to set off again, one tall dark-faced boy, who dressed relatively better than the rest and whom I did not see before that moment, silently walked closer to the door. Without uttering a sound, he slowly leaned towards the girl and extended his long arm towards her. Then, with a quick motion, he snatched the phone from her fat fingers and jumped outside of the train which had already been moving on a medium speed.

At first, no one noticed because there was a lot of noise and misdirection. But I saw everything. Still trying to make sense of what had just happened, Sister 2 sighed in bewilderment and could not react otherwise. I saw how her eyes did not move out of the trajectory of sight she was looking in when her phone was in her hands. But after a second or two, she turned around and said in awe, “my… my… phone…”. She was petrified and went completely blank.

No one has said or done anything until Sister 1 cried from the rear, “SOMEONE STOLE HER PHONE!"

TO BE CONTINUED...