by Shadows
“Peggy short for?”
“No. Peggy McGill.”
“No. Is Peggy an abbreviation?”
“No, lad. It’s a name.”
He consults his clipboard. He straightens his arm.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. We’re not oversubscribed. How old is your son?”
“I don’t have a son. I have a daughter. She’s twenty-six going on five.”
“It’s just that some of this tour will be me talking about things and it might go over his head. Nazis and that.”
“It’ll go over mine as well, then. I wouldn’t worry.”
Soon there’s a group of half a dozen standing in the damp, wearing variously disappointed faces.
“I’m Clive,” says the guide, consulting his clipboard. “I’ll be showing you around the forgotten chambers of Mancunium today. I hope you brought stout shoes and a torch.”
Peggy stares at her flats. At least Billy is wearing his boots.
“Have you got a torch on you?” she asks. “Don’t boys carry things like that around with them all the time?”
“I’ve got a light on my bike,” Billy says.
“Never mind, look. Everyone else has got one. We’ll stick close.”
The guide talks for a while about the hotel, how it would have been Hitler’s north-west nexus of operations had the Nazis successfully invaded Britain. German bomber pilots were expressly forbidden to release their payloads anywhere near the hotel for fear of damaging it. The guide’s voice is the endless gritting cycle of a cement mixer. Billy fidgets. The cold is clinging to the ends of Peggy’s fingers like a needy child. What has all this talk of architecture and Nazi plans, and Rolls meeting Royce, and the Beatles being thrown out because they didn’t adhere to the dress code. . . what has all this got to do with the tour? Underground Manchester. As Jill might say, this is not doin wot it sez on the tin dot co dot uk LOL!!!
Eventually it’s time to move off. It’s a little way to the entrance to the tunnels, explains the guard, reminding them that they have signed waivers that abrogates the tour company from all responsibility should someone be mown down by any vehicle, including a bicycle. Somebody says something about litigious culture. Someone else says something about the nanny state. Billy, in a too-loud voice, tells Peggy that this morning he did a poo that looked like Uncle Derek’s moustache.
Soon Peggy has become the back marker. Maybe they should just peel off to a cafe for hot chocolate. She’ll get Billy a comic. He’ll be happy with that. He’s only six after all. What was she thinking, bringing him here? But the talk of tunnels and torches has excited him. Do you think we’ll see any rats? Do you think we’ll find the goblin king?
Peggy looks at the thin face of the guide and bites her tongue on Look no further. She has to concentrate on her breathing, so she smiles and winks instead. She can feel the tubes in her lungs winking too. Once, when she was young, she could drink in litres of air. She’d do it to tease George, who liked it when her chest expanded. Look at you, he’d say. All fulla love.
Dark spots crowd the edge of her vision, as if they’ve already started along one of the tunnels.
They’ve stopped again. They’re on James Street standing in front of an unassuming brick building with large wooden gates and a tower. The guide tells them, through his mouthfuls of cement, how this building was the entrance to the main tunnel of Manchester Guardian, an underground telephone exchange built in 1954 when the Cold War gripped the world. The tunnel would have been able to withstand the blast of a twenty kiloton atomic bomb, preserving communications links even if the city had been razed. There was enough food to keep people going for six weeks. The toilets had restful scenery painted on the walls. The guard laughs. “Of course,” he says, “by the time the tunnel was ready, the Soviets had developed much larger bombs that would have obliterated the place. Waste of money if you ask me.”
The guide eyes Peggy’s shoulders, bowing like the spine of a pitched tent in high winds. She’s waiting to be taken to one side, the dropped voice, the reiteration of point twelve on the terms and conditions, people with health problems such as high blood pressure and heart defects should be aware that there are a number of stairs to be negotiated during the course of this tour. When it comes she maintains eye contact and tells him she’s fine. “We’re nearly there,” the guide says.
“I’ll look after you, Peg,” Billy says. In the past Billy has made monsters from clay to scare her bad cough. She has a drawer filled with them. They are drying out now, crumbling golems, but she refuses to throw any of them away.
“Then I’ve nothing to fear,” she says.
The entrance to the tunnels is through an office at the rear of a busy department store. They descend well-lit steps covered with linoleum, bypassing two office workers texting feverishly. To each other, Peggy imagines. At the bottom is a heavy, padlocked door. The guide pulls out a single bronze key from his pocket. Brandishing it like Neville Chamberlain with his piece of paper, he unlocks the door. The sound of the tumblers turning sends echoes into the space beyond. Peggy thinks: leave now. Take Billy to the football museum instead. Take Billy to the helter-skelter in Spinningfields. Take Billy away.
But people are jostling for position, and she feels herself being herded through the doorway by those behind her, and she reaches for Billy’s hand and he squeezes it and everything will be fine.
The temperature drops the moment they pass through into the gloom. The guide is ahead of them and he’s saying something about how they were going to install a simple lift but it’s logistics, you know, but she can’t properly hear and it doesn’t really matter because she’s here for fun with Billy and it will all go over his head and her head. Soon there’s no light and people start flicking on their torches. Some of them are poor, cheap affairs, casting not enough light to illumine the low ceiling above them. Peggy gets closer to a couple huddled together who are carrying a large, powerful rubber-cased torch that seems bright enough to find its way between the cracks in the brickwork and surprise people up on the surface.
It’s dank down here; the cold has a raw, weirdly elderly touch to it. It’s ill-tempered. Impatient. It’s like being prodded, an old aunt wearing too much make-up pinching your arm before declaring there’s not enough meat on you to last till lunchtime. Billy’s hand is warm inside hers. Her left foot disappears into a puddle and she almost loses her shoe. The cold judders along her leg like in the cartoon she watched with Billy where Bugs Bunny, or Daffy Duck, or whatever cartoon animal it was hits a petrified tree with an axe. If the cold reaches her heart she’s sure she’ll stop moving and shatter into a million pieces. The thought makes her want to laugh more than anything else though. Silly old carrot, she thinks. Just think of the bath and the rum-laced hot chocolate you’ll enjoy later.
She used to laugh a lot. God, George could pull a giggle from her, and often when she was determined to be angry with him about something. But he was one of those people it was impossible to remain annoyed with. Now if she so much as chuckles or titters or snorts it can bring on a fit of coughing that convinces her she might die. She no longer watches the funny shows she likes on TV. She tries to avoid spending time with the girls who know how to tickle her: Penny or Jenny or Flo.
The guide is at the front. His voice comes to her in strange swells and beats, like the rhythm of the sea on the shore. He’s saying something about the Manchester and Salford Junction canal. He’s saying something about a shelter from the German bombings. There are steps coated with slime, and pieces of rubble lying around where the brickwork has started to fail. Great arched ceilings stippled with stalactites. Some day they will cease to take people down here because of the risk. The doors will be sealed off and whatever is left down here will be trapped for good. Watch yourself here! Part of a wall has collapsed into one of the arterial corridors, partially blocking it.
Shards of graffiti are picked out by the lunatic splashe
s of light. She can’t make out the names, or the deeds, or the insults. Scraps of old warnings from the war remain. The guide reads out a few: No insobriety. No rowdiness. No unseemly conduct. In a corner of this particular. . . what do you call it? Chamber? Cellar? Crypt? (no, let’s not do that. . . let’s not give ourself a reason to be fearful) there’s a dummy slumped over its knees, dressed in a red-checked flannel shirt and black jeans. Its head looks to be made from polystyrene. People giggle and point. It looks punched in, crumbling. It reminds her of George, how she found him that morning after breakfast when he’d gone upstairs to get dressed. It was as if death had upset him so much that he had the time to sit down against the foot of the bed and cry into his chest about it. But think of George thirty years younger at the Twisted Wheel, dressed to the nines in blazer and brogues while she was always at sixes and sevens over what to wear. His hair scraped back with the ubiquitous back-pocket comb. The Oxford trousers and sports vests. The smell of sweat and Brut. The amphetamines; the jaw grinding. Juicy Fruit and Doublemint. He moved so hard and fast on the dance floor she was scared sometimes that he might break. The heat and the smoke in that place grew so thick that it condensed on the ceiling and returned as a light yellow rain.
They move deeper into the Manchester underground and her mind sinks with it. She remembers how slim she was back then, and how taut the muscles in her calves from all the dancing. George could almost enclose the span of her waist with one outstretched hand. Where did they get their energy from? The calories they must have burned off! And afterwards, in George’s little Hillman Imp, they’d drive up to Saddleworth with the windows open and they’d be smoking and singing rare-soul classics and they’d make love in the moors for a while, or in the car if it was too cold, and back to George’s parents’ house in Longsight as the sun came up, just in time for bacon and eggs with George’s old man before he went off to the bleach factory.
All those days of twists and shimmies. The miles covered more or less on the spot. All that energy spent. The endless cigarettes. And throughout it this was down here: coldness and damp and coursing water. The Land of Far Beyond. Upside-Downville.
The guide’s voice slaps against the damp brick and falls at his feet. He’s saying something about how dark it really is down here. He invites everyone, for thirty seconds, to switch off their torches and to put their hands in front of their faces. You won’t be able to see a thing. In the split second between this palsied light and the utter black that follows, Billy tugs his fingers free of Peggy’s hand.
“No, Billy,” she snaps, but then the delighted yelps of alarm get in the way of her warning and all she can think, as she swings around, trying to catch hold of Billy’s arm, is: This is what it is like for George every single day.
She shuffles forward a little, blindly groping (just as we used to, George, out on those wild, black moors, remember?) but she succeeds only in bumping against a figure that recoils at her touch. The feel of her (must have been a her, too thin an arm to be male) is waxy under her fingers, but maybe that’s because she’s so cold, and anyway, people these days wear strange waterproof fabrics and . . .
“Billy!”
She hasn’t shouted like that for a long time, maybe not since Jill was a teenager. Billy doesn’t answer. People are still laughing about the dark. It’s a darkness she has never known. It seems so deep as to be beyond understanding. Even in her own bed, when her eyes are shut, the colour is not nearly so extreme. The guide says: this is what it must be like to be profoundly blind. He says: it is literally blacker than the grave. In the absence of light, his voice seems different, as if it is wetter. She doesn’t understand how the light can alter the acoustics of a place. Maybe it can’t—of course it can’t—so then it must be her own rising panic that is adding juice to his words.
“Turn the lights back on!” she caws, but the effort of shrieking Billy’s name has deflated her. Kippers in a smokehouse, Jill used to sing, cryptically, to the tune of “Mirror in the Bathroom” and it’s only in recent years Peggy’s realized she must be referring to the lungs in her chest. She thinks of the tar marbling them, like bitumen she used to tease from the road on hot summer days. She decided she wouldn’t follow George into the earth. When she goes she’ll face the flames. She imagines the crematorium workers who would have to shovel her out, their faces when they see those two smouldering lumps, tacky with crude fuel, burning on long after the rest of her is dust.
It’s been much longer than thirty seconds; minutes, it feels like, before the torches spring back to life in a contagious relay. They seem much brighter than before, even the cheapest model causing her to avert her gaze. She hunts for his tiny shadow, the little cowlicks of bed hair. She claws her way towards the guide, but already he is off through the archway—Mind your head! Mind your head!—and everyone pushes forward to see what’s coming next. No queuing down here in the dark. No manners in the Mancunian shafts. The light is shrinking from the chamber
we don’t abide that shine in shaddertown
and she spins, spiked with adrenaline, ready to lash out at the owner of the grinning little voice that hissed at her. But there are only the etiolated shadows of the departing, jerking and frisking against the walls.
“Wait,” she calls out, but she barely hears herself. Billy must be in the middle of that scrum of people. She has to believe that. If he were here, in this darkening room, he would call out for her. He’s always calling her. Keep up Peg! Peg, can I have a biscuit? Peg, where are my toy cars? He’d call out to her, if he were able. Did he fall? She peers into the gloom but she can’t see any figures, other than that damn stupid dummy. Maybe he’s hiding, playing a daft game. She hasn’t the puff to admit defeat. I give up. I give up. Ally Ally in come free.
She staggers from the chamber and one of her shoes skips off her foot as easily as if it had been snatched away. She crouches and pats the earth around her, but she feels only soil and brick dust. Forget it. Billy needs me. I need Billy. She leaves the chamber and she’s slowing down because the light has dwindled to such an extent that only a dim graininess remains. The hubbub of excited voices has gone and now she can hear the rumble and squeal of her chest, her breath coming in shallow plosives. She’s straining so hard to hear beyond that for Billy that her ears might bleed. She can imagine Jill with her arms folded across her chest. She can imagine triumph in her face, more so than any grief, and her heart is pierced with double the guilt.
Perhaps they’ve found Billy and he’s all in a tizz, blubbing, they can’t get any sense out of him so they take him up to safety. She has to find out. Maybe someone will realize she’s not come up after them and they’ll come to help. She’ll make damn sure that cement-mouthed chocolate teapot of a guide loses his job, that’s a given.
Peggy makes her way through the archway and along the corridor, tensing herself for obstacles she might trip over. Her one shoe carves sharp skrit-skrit noises into the walls. Peg-leg. Ha, George would have loved that.
She’s almost at the end of this corridor—she can smell the canal, and feel cool air coming from what must be some sort of junction up ahead. . . that surely means she’s close to the steps where they descended, doesn’t it?—when she hears another grating in the rubble behind her. She turns, hoping it might be Billy, but instead she sees a pall of smoke funnel through the archway she’s just vacated. It’s lit palely within, a soft, mellow light, the colour of burnt amber. It shifts constantly, contracting and expanding as if powered by some internal engine, though it might just be the ebb and flow of air through all of these tunnels. Some trick of light and shade. A weird internal example of marsh gas. Billy, maybe, acting the goat. He had a torch all along and now he’s playing tricks on Nana.
She draws in breath and the pall swings towards her. She speaks and as his name trickles out of her, the pall contracts. What is this? Is this consciousness shrinking? Is she about to faint? She mustn’t, for Billy’s sake. The moan might have come from he
r, it, or the tunnels but it doesn’t matter. She rounds the corner and there are the stone steps, muddy and wet and subtly gleaming, like barely-set mortar.
Fear is at her heels, but also the awful feeling that she might be making a mistake and leaving Billy behind in the dark. She turns and sees the pall rounding the corner as if it was on a thread attached to her shambling feet. And she thinks: every toxic inhalation.
She’s right to go up. She can report Billy missing if he’s not with the rest of the touring party. Within ten minutes there will be a search party down here.
o you wish. . . you think you can climb these steps in ten minutes o my o you!
But it’s her only choice. Billy will be found, but only if she gets out of here. She plants her shod foot on the first riser (thirty steps, just shallow ones, not as steep as those at home, but three times as many. . . come on old girl, you can do it. . . you used to glide up the steps at the Oasis as if they weren’t there, and then dance all evening to Blue Dice or The Gordons or The Needles) and begins the long haul to daylight.
She counts each step and she does not look back. Four, five, six. . . she sucks at air that has turned intractable. It sits, niggardly and hot in her chest, as if her lungs were strangers to their job. She tries to imagine George up ahead, reaching out to her from the dance floor, the light catching in the oil in his hair and the rings on his fingers, the polished buckle on his high-waisted trousers. He looks lean and wolfish and sizzling with nervous energy. Young again. Christ, what she’d give.
Come on Peg, come on my Lili, let’s give it some rice.
Eight, nine, ten. . . But there’s something rising behind her too. Something within that bronze fug of smoke, she thinks, that is not so pleased to see her progress. She imagines a Billy trapped down here for decades, a Billy that is fish-grey, his eyes pale from the lack of sunlight, his skin mucoid and failing, touched by iridescent green flashes. She imagines that happy, chubby boy emaciated from hunger, lost in the maze, trying to find his nana. Clawing at the air for her.