The Big Read: Notes from the Underground

Have you ever caught the tube in London around midnight on Saturday when the flower of English adulthood is lurching its way shit-faced home or to some atrocious further revelry?

It's a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life: abominations and sports of nature, dog-headed men eating one another's flesh, three-legged eggs attempting congress with hairy top-hatted half-hares, slithery salamander creatures trying to grow moustaches. You want to close your eyes against the horror but then you'll be left alone with them in the dark. Imagine Cresta shopping centre on a Saturday morning, except everyone is drunk. Or more drunk.

But on the tube there are also normal people trying to return from a shift at work or after a social engagement in which they didn't temporarily surrender their humanity. There were two women in the carriage amid the wash of sodden depravity, just quietly going home. One of them was occupying herself by taking selfies in the reflective glass of the window opposite her, giving herself the occasional encouraging thumbs-up. The other merely sat there, content in her thoughts.

Three drunk guys and another even drunker guy lurched on at one of the stations, and did that thing some drunk guys do, loudly and elaborately greeting everyone around them, inquiring after their evening. This is never a pleasant experience, even for a man. Beneath the flushed skin of that elaborate politeness is a flexing muscle. It's a mock-politeness, a declaration of entitlement. Do I make you feel uncomfortable? it says, feigning innocence. But I'm just saying hello. I could make you feel far more uncomfortable than this, but all I'm doing is saying hello. If I make you feel uncomfortable because you don't know what my intentions are, or because you're aware that I'm drunk and bigger than you, or that there's more than one of me, that's your problem. The space I'm entitled to occupy is larger than the space you're entitled to occupy and as of now my space has expanded to include you. Now answer my question, because you're in my space and I'm entitled to an answer.

As a man you sit there and calculate, however quickly and unconsciously it might be, what would happen if they start on you. How far am I prepared to resist? Which one is the leader? Will this accelerate or simmer down if I stand up? You know actual violence is probably unlikely because you're a civilised person in a civilised environment, but in your amygdala some sensors of fight-or-flight start flickering and firing. But mostly, as a man, the bullies aren't coming for you.

"Hi, how are you tonight?" they start asking the first woman. "How was your night? Give us a smile."

She tenses. You can't see it but you feel it. You feel your own body tense. What is she supposed to do? She doesn't want to reply, but all her life she has been told to be polite, to answer and be pleasant, to smilingly and self-negatingly carry the weight of men's entitlement. She looks away. She doesn't answer or give them what they want, and a part of her feels tight and anxious because if you don't give men what they want they feel entitled to get angry.

They switch to the second woman and her nerve doesn't hold.

She's fine, she says. Her night was fine. She smiles so that they won't ask her to smile, and her eyes dart away.

The guys get off at the next stop and as they go they invite the second woman to join them. Ha ha ha, no, she says, I'm fine, thank you. And she gives them her feudal smile and when they leave, her face falls and her eyes lower and she goes back to herself again and the worst part of watching it is you realise that this wasn't a big moment for her, this won't stand out in her memory, she may not even remember it tomorrow, because in greater or milder doses this is just the constant condition of being a woman around men. It's just the grey, choppy water a woman must swim through each day while we get to saunter or swagger on dry land.

When a man like Nico Viljoen bellows at a woman like Lebohang Mabuya and threatens her and shakes her table, we all take notice, partly because of the inflection of race, partly because the sight of a big man advancing on a woman is so viscerally horrific to watch, but that's only the cartoonish exaggeration, the after-midnight night-tube version, the enflamed eruption of a constant underlying condition.

It doesn't feel good being a man watching men. How must it feel to be a woman watching out for us?