Pointing

I board the 9.31 to Brescia and sit down opposite a woman and a man. His florid face and unkempt hair, Las Vegas T-shirt and black leather manbag scream ageing rockstar. She has long, dyed blond hair and wears a yellow top and a flower print skirt. I count twenty-one diamonds encased in gold (seven around her neck, fourteen on her left hand). I guess they’re in their fifties, a couple, though their body language hardly suggests intimacy or even familiarity. She sits upright facing forward clutching a coffee-coloured handbag. He’s turned away, towards the window. After several minutes of silence, he launches into a non-stop tirade against the state of the world, his targets including, variously, blown-up oil tankers, the price of gas, Trump’s latest blunder, and Eurocrat largesse. She nods with the kind of boredom one sees on the faces of polite tourists after being taken around yet another twelfth-century basilica by a placard-waving guide. We pass green fields of maize.

‘It’s like corn on the cob,’ she says in a Yorkshire drawl.

He murmurs unintelligibly. ‘Vines,’ he says, pointing. Then turkeys, more vines, and a man picking grapes. ‘There’s loads of vines here.’ 

What is it with pointers? Must they turn every trip into a litany of the mundane and morose? The English seem especially prone to the pointing illness, which I think must have something to do with our unpredictable weather or maybe it’s passed down from our hypervigilant ancestors scanning the hills and horizons for the next band of invading marauders. My mind drifts back to childhood car journeys, the monotony of traffic jams and bad tempers broken by intermittent bouts of pointing:

‘Dark clouds ahead. Here comes the rain.’

‘Look! Green fields. Harvest is late.’

‘Look! A seagull. But we’re miles from the sea.’ Pause. ‘Must be lost.’

The man on the train points to graffiti on the wall of a factory. His face screws up. ‘Dis– gusting.’ At the far end of the carriage, two small children are playing pat-a-cake. The game comes to an abrupt end with raucous laughter and screaming. The man’s lower lip trembles. He raises his finger.

‘Noisy little buggers.’

He can’t help himself. It’s in his genes.

We get off at Brescia. As the couple walk away, they stop by the departures screen.

‘The return train to Edolo leaves at 11.23 from this platform,’ she says, as if the man can’t read.

He squints and points at his watch. ‘That’s if it’s on time.’