Word: driver
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...tracks of the Métro last year. While it is a fallacy to imagine any suicide as a solitary act - even the tidiest affair leaves survivors stricken - death by train is a particularly declaratory form of killing oneself. It makes the act a form of theater - for the driver, watching it all from behind his windshield, and for the rest...
...humming cultural unease about suicides on the Tube, which are readily announced over station intercoms as the reason for delays, presumably to allay fears of terrorism. A movie in general release, Three and Out, attempted to turn this unease into dark comedy by portraying a hapless Tube driver who tries to exploit a (fictional) loophole in his contract that grants him early retirement if he witnesses three suicides from his train. The film misjudged the nation's mood and was savaged by film critics, mental-health workers and the train drivers' union, whose members picketed outside the premiere...
...Somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have remembered those picketers, because even in the daze of the moment my thoughts turned immediately to our driver. At the station before Queensway, Lancaster Gate, he had broken from protocol to announce to the pranksters holding up the doors not the scripted "Mind the closing doors" but the more personal "Please stop doing that or you will injure yourselves and end up in hospital." The statement had a slight "I-know-better" air, but it was also improvised, and showed concern for the passengers' well-being. I remembered this minor...
...seemed an odd thing to say, and at the time I didn't pay it much heed. But I keep thinking about it, how the driver's life at that moment became connected with the man under his wheels, how their roles even merged (it was the jumper, after all, who had stopped the train, not the driver) and how he might feel at that moment about this particular journey. This train is not going anywhere for some time; the psychological damage will linger...
...made clear that his desire for death had been betrayed by his body's instinct for survival. But to tell you I saw this would not be journalistically accurate, although true in the sense that I have seen this image repeatedly in my dreams. All I saw under the driver's carriage was a darkened space, a gap as black as a coffin. - With reporting by Camille Agon