“Good evening customers. Your next service to depart from Platform 2 will be the four–fifty–six Flinders Street running express from Newport to Footscray, Footscray to North Melbourne, and then stopping all stations to Flinders Street. Always remember to touch on your Myki at the start of your journey.” The train announcer's voice is a worn chime, filling the stark station like a frayed tapestry in an abandoned household. The station smells like it always does, redolent with the acrid tang of piss, sweat, and smoke. There is something self-righteous about the smell of a train station; none are exempt from its slightly carcinogenic, slightly metallic embrace.
A low mechanical groan swells beneath his feet as the train approaches, its headlights cutting through the dimness of the already-darkening winter sky with a tired reluctance. The doors slide open with a hydraulic sigh. He steps inside. The 4:56 pm train from Newport Station on Wednesday, the 20th of August, the 2025th year of the Common Era is almost deserted.
He looks down at his hands, admiring the soft webbing connecting the valleys between his fingers. His calluses are peeling, revealing the angry red of new skin underneath. It distantly reminds him of the animal documentaries he used to watch as a kid. He recalls his grandfather teaching him about the rattlesnakes as they appeared on their family's old LCD; how their cyclical shedding of skin added a new segment to their rattles. Each interlocked and keratinised bit of memory ultimately conjoined to create their characteristic rattles, allowing them to alert nearby friends or warn foe when shook. He feels a bit like that rattlesnake now, shedding another layer of him, who he was (is?), as his sole ward against something bigger than him.
He straightens, instinctively brushing his hands against the worn fabric of his jeans, as though he can rid himself of that thin, flaking skin, of the evidence that he is still stuck in the process of becoming something else.
The carriage is quieter than he expects. Subdued, like a room where the conversation has only just ended and the last spoken consonant lingers. A man in a hi-vis vest dozes with his head tilted back, mouth slightly ajar and a tenuous string of drool tracing its way down the contours of his jaw. Two teenagers sit across from one another, sharing a set of earbuds, their heads bowed together in conspiratorial symmetry. The girl in green does not look up. He takes a seat by the window.
As the train lurches forward, the station recedes into abstraction. The steel beams dissolve into streaks of grey, then into nothing at all. He watches his reflection instead. It hovers faintly against the glass, superimposed upon the passing city: a face that feels both intimately his and faintly unfamiliar. The train gathers speed.
But at the city, the carriage doors part and the world rushes in. The platform is dense with motion. He takes note of the sudden layering of language, the multiplicity of accents folding over another like tenuous silk organza of his mother's sarees. Someone coughs sharply; someone else argues into a phone; a group of schoolboys with reckless affection. The air smells of coffee, of baked bread, and of the faint tang of iron from the rails.
He lingers. He feels it again, that distance. Not exclusion, really, but a kind of peripheral existence. As though he is still watching the city through the glass when in reality, he's out in the cold, the gale lashing unforgivingly like a whip against his face. He looks down at his hands, at the peeling skin, scrutinising the rawness beneath. Shedding, again. Becoming, again.
He steps off the train and follows the crowd instinctively, letting the current of its movement take him toward Queen Victoria Market. It is not the quiet barter of daytime commerce that he expected. Tonight, the market radiates luminous against the winter chill, illuminated by strings of fairy lights and the glow of fire pits. The scents are the first to hit him: the rich spices from the steaming laksa, sweet smoke from grilled takoyaki, and the inviting swirl of mulled wine and spiced Milo in ceramic mugs held tight between gloved hands.
Luxuriating in the sensory overload, he moves deeper into the market. He spots Hungarian chimney cakes next to Malaysian satay, Latin American empanadas beside Turkish gozleme; the diversity of flavour becoming a rare map of the world in itself, condensed into the congested borders of one crowded laneway. At a food stall selling steaming xiaolongbao, an older man smiles at him and nods, the gesture small but genuine. The delicate crows feet of his smile remind him of his grandfather, the passionate twinkle in his eye as he taught the young boy before him, so many moons ago.
Suddenly trapped in the fossilised resin of memory, he remembers his grandfather's parting words to him, “Life isn't just about finding yourself, beta. You must remember to listen to the stories around you.” He nods back to the older man, a little bit awkwardly, but finally laden with the understanding that had eluded him prior.
He realises, watching the ebb and flow of the throng, locals and newcomers, laughter and music, old and young, all engaged in the shared act of eating, moving, and breathing as one under the winter light, that belonging is not a singular destination. It is a mosaic of interactions, layered and overlapping, like the rattles on the snake's tail. Distinct segments forming something whole, something enduring.
He leaves the market with nothing in his hands, but a warmth settled somewhere in his throat. A loosening, however slight, of the tight, invisible vice of unfamiliarity.
The next evening, he boards the 4:56 again. The carriage is fuller now, or perhaps he is simply noticing more. A conversation drifts across the aisle, punctuated by laughter. As the train comes to a grinding halt, someone shifts to make space without being asked. He catches his reflection in the window. It is still there, sullen and superimposed against the speeding city. However, the edges have softened. The distance, though not demolished, has narrowed into something traversable. This is me, he thinks.
“Now arriving at Flinders Street Station…” The train announcer's voice is a worn chime and the station smells like it always does, like piss and sweat and smoke, but this time, he does not flinch. He listens instead, as the city moves with him, no longer a current he moves against, but something he is, slowly, learning how to inhabit.
