I am a very polite person. I’m so polite in fact, that I would queue up to get to the front of a hostage situation which involved my own family. This is why I had an immense internal struggle when I decided to tell a lady that she was smelly.
She was sat beside me on the train. She was a true behemoth of a woman with troughs for eyes and hunks of ham where her hands should be. I don’t like to insult overweight people, but she was pushing the very limits of existence with her overwhelming size. The fabric of spacetime was lower in mass when compared to the fabric of her tracksuit bottoms. She plonked herself down and grunted disapprovingly as she parked half of one bum cheek on the seat, as though the social responsibility were on me to move out of her way. I couldn’t move even if I’d wanted to, and certainly could not circumnavigate her without an ordinance survey map.
So there she was, balanced precariously on the edge of the next seat, leaving her suitcase in the aisle for other passengers to trip over. How rude of them to ignorantly step on her luggage and crush the 25 litres of Walkers Sensations she’d stuffed in there!
She then proceeded to produce a bag of pork scratchings from under her coat. She probably farms them under her armpits or something, then bags them up as snacks for later. I couldn't comprehend the audacity of her actions. If you were so big that the train begins to creak to one side, you’d think you’d make an effort to appear as though you’re trying to lose weight. The seat was buckling and I was starting to get nervous.
The next thing I noticed was the smell. Perhaps an expedition team had been sent down her gullet to find a lost dog or something, but had become trapped and died. She stank like a barge made of rotting corpses carrying a shipment of shit over a sewerage lake. That’s not even an exaggeration. You know when people say that smelly things make them feel sick? I was at the point where I considered having a shit, just to give everyone something more pleasant to sniff. My very soul was determined to escape from this cataclysmic death star of dung looming over me, and I'm pretty sure it climbed out of my ear and joined league with the devil.
Being fat is fine. I enjoy food as much as the next person, unless the next person is bulimic. But that god awful smell was inexcusable. It was the type of stench that could cut through safe locks. I took this as a personal assault; on me, my nasal passages, and my fellow commuters who had the common decency to shower and change their clothes once in a while. Rocking the sun-dried bacon and urine smell is just not on when using crowded public transport.
“Excuse me” Said I as I tried to clamour out of my seat like a puppy being sucked down a sinkhole. But she didn’t move. Perhaps she didn’t hear me because my hand was firmly clamped to my mouth and nose. Perhaps it was because my mouth was full of sick. Either way, she continued to munch down pig snacks faster than a relapsing Jew.
“Have you tried not smelling so much?”
As soon as the words popped out of my mouth, I instantly regretted it. An internal struggle had occurred where I weighed up the pros and cons of this potentially delicate and dangerous situation, like a man contemplating whether to stroke a sleeping tiger. In the end, my nasty side won the contest, causing me to meekishly make the above statement.
“Whaaaa-?!” Squealed Mount Thrushmore, turning in her seat and instantly creating enough friction to turn her labia into crackling.
“Err, I just meant, could you keep your stink molecules to yourself?” Was the politest thing I could think of saying. Essentially, flecks of her shit, piss and sweat were floating into my nasal cavity, which is tantamount to assault in my book.
She leaned forward towards me. I could smell those hot, salty, semi-digested scratchings were already mixing with various other flavours to produce a noxious gas of which science has yet to categorise. I felt like I was coming down with 100 undiscovered tropical skin diseases just by being breathed on. The floor began to dissolve beneath me as the train chassis gave way, exposing rushing rail tracks beneath me. Was this the end? My life tried to flash before my eyes, but my long term memory had been wiped clean, and my eyes had crusted together. She leaned forward yet further until she was right in front of me, and her mouth opened like a harpoon wound on a stretched seal as she emitted a noise.
“Nom!”
Nom?! Was that it, an eating noise? I was confused, was I being threatened? I concluded that her saturate-addled brain hadn’t mastered the art of communication. Then she took the unexpected step of unzipping her coat. As the sides drooped down by her waist, it was like Pandora’s Box had been opened. I swear I heard someone crying from within a cavernous fold of her t shirt. The room was spinning, or the train was crashing, I wasn't not sure. My nerves got the better of me and I started banging on the window in hopes of escape, or fresh air.
Then, she began to roll up the bottom of her t shirt. An unholy thought crossed my mind. A thought so unholy even Satan himself would say it was "a bit much". Perhaps she was going to mate with me. Maybe she had decided that somehow, my human and her porcine genomes would combine successfully to create superior offspring. I searched my person in vain for something to commit suicide with, but there was nothing I could use, unless you can kill yourself with a swiss army knife, a length of hessian rope, a can of petrol, and a whole bunch of cyanide pills. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a combination of those items that would do the job effectively.
It was at this point that I noticed the air rushing past my ears. As I looked at her belly button I noticed that it was literally sucking matter out of the universe. I held tightly onto my seat as we (me and the other passengers) all crossed the event horizon of her navel, and watched as several other people were sucked in and crushed like cream crackers protesting in Tiananmen Square. I couldn’t hold on any longer. The seat gave way and threw me into the void.
And where did I end up? Paradise, that’s where. As my eyes began to adjust, I found myself on a sandy beach. The warm sun was bearing down and heating the calm ocean to a comfortable temperature. All the other people were beautiful, not a single sag in sight. Was this heaven? I asked someone if Coldplay existed and was greeted with a blank stare. It was heaven! I ordered a cocktail and found myself a massaging sun lounger, then began to drift off to sleep.
This is when I awoke. The woman was gone, the train was intact, and I was a long way past my stop. Did I dream the whole thing? I asked my neurologist and he said the most likely outcome was that I was affected by neurotoxins that altered my perception. The chemicals in my system were similar to human sweat, indicating that she’d been emitting hallucinogenic chemicals. The military want to take blood samples from me to find out if my body holds the secrets to a new biological weapon. I'm told that my lifespan has been greatly reduced. Still, you've got to laugh, haven't you?
*Dramatisation may not have happened.*
