At midday precisely, David slips a paperback into his jacket pocket, gets up from his desk with barely a nod to his colleague opposite, takes the lift to the ground floor, leaves the building and heads briskly towards St James’s Park underground station. While working, he had just finished the half dozen rounds of sandwiches his mother makes for his lunch every day; just as, a few hours earlier, he had eaten the ones she makes for his morning break. Boarding the first Circle Line train at the furthest end of the platform, where he is more likely to find a seat, he takes out the book he will read for the next fifty minutes or so it will take the train to return to the station, leaving him with just enough time to get back to the office before the end of his allotted hour. Luckily for David, by 2009, when the line ceases to operate in a continuous loop, he will have retired, sparing him the inconvenience of interrupting his reading to board another train for the return journey. 

As he reads, David does not think about his job as a quietly insignificant public servant of the lower grade and calibre. Nor about lunchtimes over thirty years ago, in his small grammar school, where for one hour every day, he would endure the unchecked insults and abuse of his peers about his physical appearance and personality. Nor those first few weeks when he tried, but could not find, the method to fit in and endear himself to his peers; when searching across the dining room for a place to eat became harder each day as his company was shunned by the other eleven-year-olds who quickly found someone of his size, looks and awkwardness a burden to sit next to beyond the unavoidability of the classroom seating plan.

As the train rattles around the tracks, David will not remember that looking for a seat in the refectory in those early days became irrelevant when an anonymous jolt to his elbow unbalanced the tray sending everything crashing to the floor amid a raucous chorus of jeering, clapping and catcalls. Nor how he asked his mother if she would provide him with something from home instead of paying for the school meals which he pretended to complain were not a patch on her cooking. Nor the daily challenge of finding a location where he could eat and read in peace; a place where sandwiches, book, or both might not be ripped from his hands and rendered uneatable or unreadable under a crushing heel.

Nowadays, nothing intrudes upon the latest work of fiction which is, Monday to Friday, the only lunchtime company with which David wishes, or is able, to engage.

At one o’clock, or thereabouts, his colleague occasionally remembers to nod to David, back at the desk opposite, as he rises to join the friends loudly sharing a joke as they collect him on the way to the canteen.