I overslept in the morning, but I stayed in bed for a while, wondering about the past few days, thinking how unreal it all seemed. Claire’s scars seemed Dr Who-ish, as if she might now be peeling them off, pleased that she had fooled me.
I rolled over, but Nuala wasn’t there. Her note told me she’d gone to buy some muesli and yoghurt for breakfast. I picked up the phone and dialled Greg. No answer. I felt I had to tell him about Claire, although I felt very strongly that he would not respond, that he didn’t care or wasn’t surprised or already knew. Maybe he would be able to help me find Shaun. His answering service wasn’t on, so I ditched the receiver and got dressed. The memory of my dad’s insultingly healthy plants had imbued me with a determination to wring any murmurs of life out of my stock as soon as I possibly could. I left a note for Nuala, signing it Crouton, then went out into the late morning.
Chapter 15
The face
Sixty feet under. The foot of a lift shaft. It might be midnight or midday. The dark is utter. What might be lying between It and the surface? Dinosaur bones? Roman coins? The sweat and tears of forgotten, unrewarded toil. The bodies of those who gave everything in the name of life, of living, and are now nothing more than an scratched name in a register. A profound memory for the son or the daughter, a fleeting distraction for the grandchild. Dead for ever, after that. In every way.
Seventy years since the trains dirtied up this place. Down Street. Great name. There’s dirt here, though. Sit long enough, It might become coated with the dust of all those ghost passengers from the 1930s as it blows around and resettles. It shifts on the step in the circular space, the darkness unbroken by even the palest suggestion of light from the Piccadilly Line. Tunnels snake away from the shaft; noises creep into it. The passage of trains is deafening, the shaft filling with the roar so great it seems that all the noise in the world must have been funnelled into this space at the same time. As the trains move away, they suck air from the shaft, dragging it through the baffles of reinforced concrete, creating a shriek so human that it might well be the voice of the wind itself.
And then the distant hum of electricity. And the darkness and the dust.
Concentrating on the noise helps to deal with the pain.
It raises a hand to Its face and feels the tacky lymph drying against the exposed surface. The jagged nubs of bone at the bridge of what had once been a nose pricks Its fingertips. Cold air hisses in and out between gritted teeth, drying and cracking the gash where Its lips used to meet. And my, what big eyes. It never realised how much It might miss blinking. Perhaps It should have kept Its eyelids.
It cocks Its head as she moves again. Another attempt at flight. The third since It brought her down here. It waits until It hears her footsteps on the metal bridge over the sump in the shaft before rising and wearily pursuing her up the spiral staircase. Their steps on the aluminium make ting-tang calls to each other.
‘I won’t kill you,’ It said. Its voice skips and scatters across the tiled walls. An underground whispering gallery. Someone on an active platform in another station many hundreds of metres away laughs, and the sound falls around him, as if mocking his promise. Speaking is difficult: the swelling of tissue around his mouth makes the forming of words painful, almost impossible.
‘I won’t kill you.’
‘Leave me alone,’ she calls back. There is terror in her voice, but it is tired, her spirit almost broken. She stopped screaming an hour ago. Another hour and she might be begging It to take her life. Desperation can do that to a person. Desperation can betray itself.
‘I need you. You’re my insurance.’ Pronouncing an ‘m’ is so agonising it brings tears to Its eyes. ‘It’s him I want. It’s Monck. You can go when I have him dead in front of me.’
Heathfield Road was stuffed with traffic when I finally came to my senses. I didn’t remember stepping out of Wandsworth prison or returning to the main drag in order to find a bus back to Clapham Junction. The howl and grind of engines met the numbed meat of my brain and shocked me into life. I sucked in a few filthy lungfuls of air and watched the shoppers sloping along the battered pavements. I decided not to rush back and instead ducked into a pub that was packed for lunch. Over a pint of lager – as I tried to rid my mouth of a dead taste – I recalled the meeting.
Shaun had sat there behind the mesh of the cage, shaven-headed, wizened. A decrepit Buddha, smiling serenely, perhaps touched that I had gone to the trouble of booking a visit. It could have been dope that smoothed him out so completely, but I didn’t think so. Drugs were just another part of life’s routines that he had grown to hate. It was almost funny that a person who had railed against convention so blatantly was now cooped up in a place that couldn’t function without it. Three years, he’d been given, for a road rage incident in which he’d driven over the legs of a man who demanded his insurance details after a minor collision. He’d built up a bit of form, since I’d last seen him. GBH, wounding, affray. It was no surprise to me.
‘I understand what he’s playing at,’ he had whispered to me, after we’d been sitting there for a while. ‘I see the point.’
The air in the visiting rooms was stale with ancient cigarette smoke and BO. I had found myself craving a drink.
‘I know too,’ I said. I remembered that I had respected Shaun at first, because of his utter separation, but that was why I never really got close to him either. Who did? Claire tried and look at where that landed her. Thinking of her stiffened my resolve. I was talking to a cunting bastard of exceptional quality. ‘That’s why I thought it was you. A person off his rocker who thinks that society is evil. A person who doesn’t like being told to “Keep Left” and can’t abide double yellow lines. Who doesn’t agree with taxation. Who walks against the red light.’
‘Hey, so what. I’m just one in a long, long queue. Someone who doesn’t jump when the system expects me to. Someone who doesn’t put his hands on his head, even when, especially when, Simon says. Respectable people fiddle their inland revenue forms, respectable people keep guns, respectable people rape and kill. They go off the rails. Some people never go off the rails. They do everything that is expected of them. They are pillars of the community. They are salts of the earth. They are rocks. My dad worked forty years for the same company and got a carriage clock at the end of it. A fucking carriage clock. He died three years later because his work had been his life. And for what? A semi on the outskirts of an industrial town. A piss-poor pension. His name on the Employee of the Week wall. Big wank. The biggest crime he ever committed was putting his vest on back to front. He used to see someone toss a match into the gutter, he’d turn to me and say, “He’s just committed an offence”. He was so straight I was surprised he could sit down for a shit. People are pissed on in this country. And then they’re forgotten when they slide off the plate. I go to that factory now, and ask the pair of braces sitting behind his big desk about my dad, he’ll say, “Who”? You get a job, you become the job. And the job kills you.’
‘Save it for your parole officer,’ I said. ‘Write a fucking book.’
‘So what are you here for?’
‘I want to apologise,’ I said.
‘Oh really? Why’s that?’
‘Because I thought you might have been behind this underground terrorism. Pushing people in front of trains. I thought you were involved. It was wrong of me and it has damaged by conscience.’
He smiled. ‘No need to apologise. I might have got involved, if I’d thought about it. I think it’s pretty smart thinking. So what? You looking for advice about him? My thoughts on a kindred spirit?’
‘Do you know anything? Have you heard anything in here? Do people talk about it?’
He sat back and looked around him. ‘You know they had a gallows here until recently. Only dismantled it in ’92, because they thought they might still need it if anyone topped the Royal Family, or committed piracy on the high seas. The Cold Meat Shed, they called it. It’s a TV room now. Some of the shit
they put on that box, half the time you’re wishing for a noose to come and rescue you.’
I thought of Claire and bore down on my urge to assure him that if he had a noose I would help him into it and pull any levers that were around. He rolled a thin cigarette, lit it, and let it go cold in a cheap, faux-Bakelite ashtray on the table. I sipped bitter tea from my polystyrene cup and waited.
‘The answer to your question is yes, they are talking about it in here, when they’re eventually let out of their cells. When they stop talking about overcrowding, and how nice it would be to have a shower, or use the phone to call home. Some say they can hear voices at night, coming from the underground. Or the Common. Or the tracks to Earlsfield. Sometimes they hear screams. There’s talk around here the Pusher is a woman.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah. Looks a bit like your mum. Likes getting reamed out on the buffers. You know.’
I felt the hard plastic edges of the seat biting into my hands. I couldn’t get to him, so even though my rage wanted to fly out of every pore, I tried to relax, knowing that he wanted a reaction and that if I gave it to him, he would have his little victory.
‘You must love it in here,’ I said, and the calmness of my voice surprised me. ‘Got a gripe with the world outside, it must be magnified tenfold in here. You’ve got to ask permission to empty your arse in here. Me, I’m off to the pub for a few pints after this.’
He shrugged, re-lit his roll-up. ‘You’re missing the point with the bloke who’s doing all this. Pushing people off the platforms.’
‘Am I?’
‘God yes. Just a little bit. He’s fucking insane, Adam. There is no cheese on his cracker. There are no beans on his toast.’
‘Insane,’ I said. ‘That’s very interesting. Let me tell you about insane. I visited Claire recently. And I saw what you did to her.’
He stood up and walked away then, but not before I had seen a look of shock on his face. Maybe I’d done the wrong thing, saying that. Maybe he was undergoing therapy for it, and my mention of his past – a past he was no doubt trying to block out – had driven a wedge into the treatment. Well, sorry Shaun, but your recovery is coming on a whole lot faster than Claire’s. Relapse away, cockwipe.
At the door, he turned to me, and some of his swagger had come back. ‘If you talk to her, pass on my regards,’ he said. ‘I promise you, tell her where I am and she’ll write to me on perfumed notepaper. She’ll send me photographs of herself masturbating, if I ask for them. She’d visit me, first chance she gets.’
‘I hope you have to share a cell with a wrestling leper! You cunt!’ I shouted, as he was ushered away by the guard. Heads turned. That’s when they turfed me out.
I finished my lager and had another. Buzzing, I caught a bus back to the flower stall and talked to Cherry about how good things weren’t going, until Lucas appeared at my shoulder.
‘Lucas, hi,’ I said. ‘Business good?’
‘Fair to middling,’ he replied. Then bowed his mouth. ‘Actually, bollocks to shite would be more accurate. I’ve sold one copy since three o’clock yesterday afternoon. I’m right pissed off. I think someone should just take this city and just... just flush it down the fuckin’ toilet.’
‘Me too,’ I said, searching his face all the while. He was looking as distracted as me. Staring into my eyes with a kind of charmed fear. I said, ‘My crysanths are fucked.’
‘Adam?’
Seeing her there, completely removed from our usual zones of contact, was so unbalancing that for a second I didn’t recognise her. She seemed like someone different, unknown to me. Her skin was the same colour as the clouds. Her eyes were too large, too deeply shaded with their own colour, as if she had been crying, or drinking.
‘Adam?’ she said again, as if she wasn’t sure either.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I need you to come with me. Now. I need you to come with me. Will you come?’
‘It’s okay,’ Cherry said, with a little smile. ‘It’s not exactly the Christmas rush going on here, is it?’
I told her I’d be back soon and I descended with Nuala to the southbound platform, where I grew calmer. There weren’t many people around at this hour, and the incipient threat of the Tube receded. There were no cracks in the ceiling; no shifty-eyed shadows waiting intently for a train. I thought I might persuade Nuala to come with me to Edgware Road, where I knew a nice café, but as soon as I was in the warm/cold currents of air, I felt guilty about not being back up top, clearing out the stall and making a list of the flowers we were going to order.
Nuala seemed to have settled into the new environment with gluttonous satisfaction, as if he was feeding off the claustrophobia, the hum of the electric cables and the unnatural light. Her confusion and reticence had vanished. She leaned into me like someone a little bit tipsy. She squeezed my arm.
‘Better down here, hey?’ I said, feeling a little odd, not feeling my usual antipathy towards the place. A few late start commuters arrived on the platform, with their newspapers, rucksacks and briefcases, but it felt like the entire tunnel’s length was ours to plunder alone. When the train came, the two of us walked quickly along the platform until we found an empty carriage. We grinned at each other from opposing seats.
‘Let’s forget coffee,’ she said. ‘I want to show you something.’
‘Okay.’
She seemed to sleep, or at least withdraw from herself a little, then. Her face, usually so animated, sucked the expression from itself till it was a flat area of pale planes, curves and angles. Her eyes closed. I wanted to lean over and smell her, run my hands over her head. Feel her through that cable knit sweater, her boot cut jeans and Merrells. I wanted to open her mouth and run my tongue over hers, see what she tasted of, what she’d been eating. I wanted to place my ear between her breasts and listen to the codes of her heart. I wanted to breath the warm odours of her cunt. Everything about her carried an immanence; there were messages and signals in every shred of her, from the contour lines in her thumb to the golden wisps of babyfine hair that followed the line of her jaw. Her hands were dry and flaking, the skin around the webbed curve between thumb and index red and sore-looking. I closed my eyes too and allowed the special jolts and rhythms of the Underground to sift into me. At Embankment, she nudged me awake and cocked her head. Her eyes were so large it seemed they had been transplanted to a smaller person. We caught a District & Circle Line connection to Victoria, where I followed her to the surface. The languor and intensity of the Tube seemed to follow us out, thin coatings of its ever expanding and contracting journeys protecting us against an infinite leap into the blue above our heads. Jesus, did I feel
strange.
‘This way,’ she said. Monck nodded and followed his slight companion as she padded across the road, jinking this way and that around the buses in the terminal. Across the busy Wilton Road they went, moving ever more swiftly as the vertiginous swirl of Topside swung around them. With Victoria Street stretching before them, Monck hung back, feeling greatly exposed, and craned his neck back towards Victoria’s ornate entrance.
‘It’s okay,’ she soothed. ‘We’ll be Under again soon. Don’t worry. Come on.’
It began to rain. The north side of Victoria Street as far as Kingsgate Parade was wrapped in scaffolding and green brick netting, like a giant Christmas parcel. Three 1960s office buildings looking forward to a facelift. In Palace Street, cranes bent their elbows to the lifting of girders and concrete blocks. Seventy thousand square feet of contained turmoil unfolded around them. Nobody saw them slip through the barriers and shadow the perimeter boards to a quiet corner filled with shrink wrapped tiles and a cement mixer. The traffic was muted now, it made the sound of a mother hushing her child to sleep. The tower of Westminster Cathedral darkened to burnt orange under the layers of rain.
He could see commuters criss-crossing the roads outside the building site, eyes dead ahead, intent on their meetings, their hirings and firings. Coffee. A fumb
le in the stationery room. High heels sent sharp echoes bouncing around the open space; a low, throaty cackle of thunder rolled away south. She squeezed between stacks of large blond wood planks steadily darkening under the rain, her jumper growing wet and heavy, hanging off her body and making her seem much larger than she was. She beckoned him in and they hunkered down, her eyes trained on the opposite side of the site, where a JCB digger was parked, its befanged mouth empty, its chin on the ground. Monck looked nervously around, almost expecting the walls of the site to start scything inward, like an iris diaphragm, trapping them.
‘What are we waiting for?’ he asked.
She raised a hand. ‘A signal.’
There were messages scratched into the planks of wood; all of them seemed loaded with meaning, even the ones he couldn’t understand. JAG VAR HAR MA-96 seemed straightforward enough, but HUR STÅR DE TILL? defeated him. Another graffito was written in black indelible pen on one of the containing walls: WE MAKE SAUSAGES YOU CAN TRUST. There were messages everywhere. Everything was a page.
Rain pelted into him, it seemed. His hands were cold, so cold he couldn’t push them past the rough edges of his denim pockets because of the pain.
‘Now,’ she said, and moved out of the poor shelter of timber.
Here, behind the detritus of demolition, a community had grown in spaces forgotten, or ignored, for the time being. They kept left of the rank of blanket tents and half-concealed boxes, the struts that supported them, the buckets and sleeping bags and ropes. Deeper still, a man was moving his hand from a small hessian sack to his mouth and back to the sack’s lip with a distressing rhythm. Monck tried to see what it was that he was eating, but then he was bustled into a bivouac with its roof pegged against the wall.
A space about four feet by three feet was occupied, with their introduction, by four adults, a baby and a dog. The dog, a bull mastiff, seemed the spitting image of the child: both wore straining, drool-washed chops. There was a woman whose head was cradled by a sling made of stout, grubby fabric fastened to a hook protruding from the wall, which was concealed by a collage of notes, maps and sketches. She wore a drugged look and her skin was heavily scored by fatigue. She seemed in great pain. Her swollen cheeks and chin resting in the brace were discoloured badly. Sores had erupted on the flesh where the material dug into it. One of her eyes carried the pale seed of a cataract.
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