Every so often you get talking to someone and it takes you by surprise. There are a few people who almost make a point of talking to strangers, but I'm not one of them - there's been a sort of change in Britain whereby people are almost a bit scared if someone unknown to them starts a conversation up. This is how my boyfriend and I felt when a man sat behind us on the train and began to make determined conversation.
In the end, we gave in, and he proceeded to tell us his life story, in a nutshell, and he chose to begin with the enormous scar on his arm, which stretched from his wrist right into his bicep, where it indented the muscle sharply. Most of it was healed but there was still some gauze, so I assume that the skin had recently split. Being hungover, I couldnt look at that scar for too long, but at the same time, the morbid side of anyone wants to know details. At first, we didnt know whether to believe him, because he said 'this will freak you out. It happened because I fell asleep on my arm.' He'd found, when he woke up, that his arm was swollen and that he couldnt control it, so he was taken to hospital, and they'd had to operate. He showed us other scars under his arm and on his shoulder. It was shocking. It transpired that to get the use of his arm back he'd undergone a lot of physiotherapy and an awful lot of pain.
'My friends call me Lucky,' he said, 'because everything always happens to me.' If the story he gave us afterwards is true, that's a fair statement. 'We've gone past it now, but I used to live under a bridge along here, when I was homeless,' Lucky said. 'I was addicted to crack and heroine, and at my lowest point, I lived under there.' He went on to say that that made his tolerance to morphine extremely high, so the pain of the operation had probably been worse. 'I stole to buy drugs,' he admitted, but then said, 'but I would never have taken anyone's wallet, or stolen from a small family-owned shop. I couldn't steal from people who needed the money. I used to shoplift from big companies, but I got caught, and had to go to prison for about a month. And because there was some confusion about rehab programmes and drug-replacement, I didn't get anything stronger than a paracetamol for hours, so basically I was coming off drugs cold turkey.' My boyfriend and I were both pretty interested by this point.
'Is it really like in trainspotting?' I asked him, having basically nil experience with drugs.
'Oh yeah, it's agony,' he replied. 'You don't halluscinate babies on the ceiling; that's poetic licence, but it's horrendous all the same - you think you're going to die, and it's like this paradox because to live you have to take more of what's done this to you in the first place.'
He was an incredibly astute man, and very intelligent - after we'd talked about drugs he and my boyfriend started talking about architecture and bridge structures and all sorts of things. I suppose, despite his scar, and his struggle to overcome addiction, and the homelessness and prison, he was lucky. His brain had been left intact, and so had his body, for the most part. He was clean, and he had a house, and was working on getting a job. He still had friends, and he had a lot to say. He's lucky to be alive. He got off the train at Cheltenham and we said goodbye to him. The train announcer asked someone to marry him over the tannoy, and then said,'tell me at Birmingham.' It was later announced that she'd accepted. It was a very odd and heartwarming journey.
