Underground

by Tobias Hill

  ‘I used to love it down there, really I did. It has been my life. I’ve had precious little enough of it up here. I loved being inside the system, like being in the pipes of a whacking great engine. It scares me now – enough to leave. And I trust myself on that. I dreamed about the Tube the other night, and it was like Joe Stalin’s railway, where one bloody worker died for each sleeper. That’s how it was in the dream: dead bodies and sleepers. What gets me is the line between it happening and not. What does it take for somebody to push someone? And all I can think is, it could be anything. Anything at all. Who’s to say what? In a place the size of London, there’s somebody pushing all the time.’

  ‘What about this time?’

  ‘Eh?’

  He looks up, distracted. Even in the bad light, Casimir can see how grey the skin of Adams’s cheeks and forehead has become. This is not the face of a well man. He wonders if the supervisor’s sick-leave is necessary or if it will become so. How Adams will look out for himself, alone in the last house by the water.

  ‘How do you know Saville was pushed?’

  ‘There’s the photograph. Anyway, she told me. She said it. She wasn’t talking to me by then.’

  Casimir drinks. The alcohol settles in his gut, warm and oily. ‘You knew her?’

  Adams stands up, goes back to the mantelpiece. ‘No. I went to see her, in hospital. Just to see how she was doing. They took her up to the Royal Free. She was full of pipes and junk. Past noticing.’ There is the chink of glass as he refills his tumbler. ‘But she was muttering all the time. This was Wednesday night. I went back the next day and she’d gone quiet. The doctors couldn’t keep her going long.’

  ‘What else did she say?’

  ‘She didn’t know him – she kept asking who he was. Like the men who Gray pushed, they wouldn’t have known him either. Strangers in the night, eh?’ Adams sits back down. ‘I thought I might get him then. She might have said something then. But she didn’t really, and I was getting the frights. I wanted to keep off it, even then. I only went to see how she was doing.’

  ‘It was a man?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Will you help me find him?’

  ‘No.’ Adams knocks back his drink. Bares his teeth again, hisses against the burn of it.

  ‘Don’t you want to find him?’

  ‘I want to be left alone.’ He stands up. Puts down his empty glass. ‘And I want you to do me a favour. Keep the police away from me. Will you do that?’

  Casimir stands. He shakes his head. ‘I can’t. I want him found.’

  ‘I know.’ For a moment they stand in the dark, watching each other. Then Adams moves past, into the hall. ‘It’s time you were leaving.’

  Casimir hears the front door click open. His glass is still half-full. He puts it down and turns to go.

  It is the third day of night shifts. There is time to kill before work begins. He walks up Spur Road in the early evening, through Waterloo terminus, down towards the Thames embankment. An elderly busker sits on a fishing stool by the Hungerford footbridge, playing ragtime clarinet into an echoey amplifier. Casimir goes past him up the steps, over the river.

  The tide is strong today. He watches it as he crosses, the way the sea currents churn the green river water back against itself, forcing it upstream. He enjoys walking in London, the simple rhythm of movement. The way his thoughts become clear and deep, skimmed of consciousness.

  Near the north bank a small man in a grey winter coat stands by the footbridge railing, an oversized spool of kite string in both hands. Casimir follows the cord with his eyes, out and up over Cleopatra’s Needle and the white stone of the Inns of Court. The kite is a glittering silver edge in the dusk, almost imperceptible above the Thames mud flats.

  ‘Nice evening for it.’

  It takes Casimir a moment to register that he is being spoken to. The kite man is talking to him.

  ‘Nice evening. You work round here?’ The man doesn’t look away from the sky.

  ‘No. Not so near.’

  His own voice is still sleep-rough and he coughs to clear his throat, leaning forward. When he straightens, the kite man has turned to look at him. His eyes are keen and intensely blue. It makes Casimir think of the sky from the aeroplane when he came to Britain, the colour of sky light at high altitude. Beautiful eyes in a wrecked grey face.

  ‘Office?’

  ‘No. Underground.’ The man looks at him, expressionless, as if not understanding. ‘The Underground. I am a Tube worker.’

  The kite man turns away. ‘You poor cunt.’ His voice has gone quiet. Casimir can still see his eyes as he looks back up, the pupils narrowing to pinpoints. He steps back and walks on.

  The footbridge goes on overland, a raised walkway above Embankment station and the left-hand side of Villiers Street. The riverside plane trees are already beginning to lose their leaves, late seed-balls hanging from the bare branches like winter decorations. There is the smell of frying food from the take-away cafés below, sweet and rank and familiar.

  He is following the Underground line northwards and as he realizes this he smiles, looks down. There is nothing to see, although he can track the direction of the tunnels with his eyes. The Tube system is like the city’s bricked-over tributary rivers, he thinks; the Tyburn and Fleet, other names he has never learned. A network hidden under the surface and visible only sometimes, like the blue of veins where they lie near the skin.

  By the entrance to Charing Cross terminus a small market has been set up. The stall-holders stand hunched forward, hands shoved in pockets while they wait for custom. Casimir goes on between the trestles of second-hand books, cheap cutglass figurines and used telephone cards.

  The station concourse is crowded with people, faces upturned as they wait for the departure boards to change. Casimir finds his way through the commuters and out across the Strand. A car blares past on the red light and he moves forward out of its way. His reactions are quick and he is in control of the instinct. Not falling. Not like Rebecca Saville.

  The thought of Saville has been with him for days now; since before he knew she was dead, he realizes. Since Adams told him about the accident, the day he saw the Underground girl.

  He thinks of the supervisor, his fear. Keep the police away from me. He has never spoken to the British police before. He keeps away from authorities, when he can. In Poland he would do the same; even in his own town, Gliwice, with its canals and looming garrison church. It is the way he is with control. He doesn’t like to be authorized or unauthorized. Still, he thinks of going to them, to tell them he can help. That he knows the Tube, the ways people think and behave underground. The ones who feel trapped and those who feel hidden.

  There is a Chinese pharmacy at the top of Adelaide Street, windows full of ginseng roots and medicine jars. Casimir ducks through an arch next to it, then down into the passage of Brydge’s Place. Security lights click on over the back doors of pubs and concert halls. The grime-black walls are high and narrowing towards their end, creating a trick of perspective, the vertical line of yellowing sky seeming far distant. Casimir’s jacketed shoulders scrape against the bricks as he steps out on to the busy pavement of St Martin’s Lane.

  There are taxis double-parked outside the London Coliseum, the traffic hardly moving around them. The road is filled with the smell and light and noise of traffic brought to a standstill. Casimir crosses carefully between two orange-striped Evening Standard vans, then goes on down the paved side-streets towards Leicester Square.

  He walks almost without looking where he is going, a large man alone, passing easily through the crowds. There is no one thing that makes him look not English, only the combination of details. The colours of his clothes, they way they hang on his prominent bones. The bones themselves, the angular cut of his cheeks and hands that suggests an experience of hunger. The black of his hair and eyes, which is revealed as red-black only in the strongest light.

  His face is slackened and set in its natural ha
lf-frown. His thoughts are disconnected but also seamless, passing from thought to thoughtlessness and back without intention.

  He is thinking of his home. Of his and Piotr’s mothers on the canal bridge, selling fruit and herbs. Fennel laid out on newspaper like pale green ox-hearts. Bilberries measured out in a chipped white enamel mug. Then later, in the curtained dark of the kitchen, his father’s hands cupping his mother’s face, holding up its heart shape. His father’s voice, its undercurrent of laughter cold and dangerous. Better. You look so much better when you’re sad.

  He is thinking of the platform photograph. The hand in the crowd, stretching out from the mass of bodies. He cannot tell if it is pushing Rebecca Saville away or reaching to save her.

  Then he is thinking of nothing again. He looks up to find he is in Piccadilly Circus. He has walked more than a mile from his lodgings. Electric light twinkles cleanly on the high circle of buildings. He remembers a picture of exactly this scene in his childhood bedroom, something his mother cut out of a magazine. The memory is painfully sharp. Tourists mill around the statue of Eros, posing for photographs. The fountain is blocked with rubbish and water spills over on to the steps, staining the grey stone black.

  A neon hoarding flashes up Coca-Cola slogans, the temperature and time. It is past nine o’clock. Casimir turns away. Tomorrow night he has a double shift, three in the afternoon until seven the next morning. Then for fifty-six hours he will be free, on his own time. The entrance to Piccadilly station is yards from where he stands, steps curving out of sight between wrought-iron palings.

  He takes a last breath of the stale city air, then goes down to the underground concourse. The ticket barriers at this station are mechanized, filling the hall with the clank of their opening and closure. Entrances lead off like spokes from a wheel, some of them continuing on into underground shopping malls. Casimir takes the escalator down to the Piccadilly Line platforms, an anonymous figure in his everyday clothes, work bag slung over one shoulder.

  The train is hot and packed with people. There are no seats and Casimir stands, head touching the curved carriage roof, held motionless by the crowd. At the next stop he gets out and walks across to the Northern Line platforms. The tiled cross-passage becomes yellowed and uneven as he passes into the Tube’s oldest excavations. Across each wall poster someone has stencilled SUBCIRCUS in crimson or bright green. It is senseless to Casimir, just another thing he doesn’t understand about the Tube. He wonders how much he has ever understood of the system. What proportion of it he still has to learn.

  The northbound train is half-empty. The windows between carriages are open, and the air is warm and damp, as if the weather underground has no relation to that above. Casimir watches the passengers around him. A Rasta girl with silver platform shoes and blue sunglasses, an old Asian man reading a worn Koran, lips moving silently, stations passing behind him. The Rastafarian makes him think of Adams again. If the station starts turning green and gold, that’ll be why. He realizes he misses the supervisor and is surprised.

  The stations give Casimir a sense of motionlessness. Each platform is the same blur of crowds, tiles and hoardings under London’s great squares and malls. A woman sits down next to him. Tweed jacket, wire spectacles. She picks a magazine off the carriage’s wooden floor, snaps it flat, folds it and begins to read. Casimir can see fragments of headlines like incoherent snatches of conversation: ‘BLIP GIRL’, ‘MAD COW’, ‘ANY MINUTE I’LL JUST START SINGING’.

  When he looks up again, the Camden Town roundels are flashing past the windows opposite. He stands up as the train slows, reaching for a hand-grip. The woman looks up at him. Smiles widely, too wide, light opaque against her spectacles. It blinds him and he looks away.

  ‘Cass! All right?’

  ‘Cass, you’re early, ain’t you?’

  ‘Casimir, come here. Look at this.’

  The control room is crowded with the last of the late-turn crew and the first of the night-shift workers. It takes a moment for Casimir to get through to the counter. Supervisor Leynes, Sievwright and Weaver are standing under the monitor screens, staring up at them. Casimir ducks through, looks up.

  ‘There. You see her?’ Leynes is pointing up at one of the southbound platforms.

  Casimir frowns, eyes moving quickly. A train is just pulling away towards the camera, under it. The evening crowd moves slowly along the platform, making its way out towards Camden’s bars and restaurants.

  He watches the passengers. They are wearing night clothes now, the colours and cuts of fabrics darker and more varied than in the daytime. On the train in, Casimir could smell the make-up and perfumes on women, sometimes on men. Now he can see the shine of jewellery and accessories in the stark light of neon tubing.

  The current of the crowd is uniform, moving towards the exit. A few people stand still, waiting for the next train southbound. Now he sees that there is only one figure walking against the current, down towards the side-tunnel passage. The woman stoops down, one hand moving out of sight. It is a moment before Casimir makes sense of the scene. As she moves on the woman’s hand comes back up, out of the shoulder bag of the person next to her.

  It is an old woman, hair long and frayed, a great grey rope of it down her back. She walks with a sluggish wide-shouldered roll, one hand tugged ahead of her by dog leashes, the dogs themselves out of sight in the crowd. The woman’s other hand is stuffed in her coat pocket as she turns back down the platform. Behind her a tall, elderly woman in black reaches into her handbag. Stops walking, looks down at the platform floor.

  ‘I have seen her before. The woman with the dogs.’

  ‘I was just saying that. Didn’t I say that? I seen her hanging around weeks ago. Did she talk to you? She’s ape, man.’

  ‘Obviously not that ape, Mister Sievwright.’ Leynes turns away and snaps the counter back, raising his voice. ‘Weaver? Call the Transport Police – no, ring Kentish Town Met, they’ll get here faster – then get up to the barriers. Casimir, wait down by the side-tunnel. Apeman will be with me. We’ll come on to the platform from the escalators in two minutes, then shepherd her down to you. All right? Let’s go.’

  Casimir runs out after the others, into the public tunnels. Weaver is already going up the emergency stairs, the echo of his footsteps pounding back. Leynes and Sievwright turn left, running hard. Casimir goes right, stopping at the mouth of the southbound platform.

  There is a circular mirror on the corner wall, a convex metal plate placed so as to make the platform visible. Reflected in it, Casimir can see the crowd emptying out, the dog woman left behind. She is not coming towards him. Instead she sits down on a bench near the public telephones, clicking her tongue at the lean grey dogs until they have curled up at her feet. She stretches her legs out straight, sighs with satisfaction. The platform starts to fill up again with new passengers, waiting for a West End late train.

  The dog woman goes still, head cocked sideways. Casimir follows her gaze. Leynes is at the main concourse entrance, looking up and down the platform. The woman has seen him long before he notices her. Sievwright appears behind the supervisor, still slowing down from a running pace.

  She turns her face away from them. Casimir can see her features creasing up into habitual lines. Bitterness and disappointment, but also something harder, tougher. She keeps her head turned like that while the men in uniform walk quickly down the platform towards her. They are yards away when she yells out in her cracked voice.

  ‘Kill’m, girls!’ She stands up and begins to run.

  Behind her the dogs uncoil with their heads raised, skin peeling back from the teeth as they bark. The sound is savagely loud and rapid in the enclosed space. Casimir hears Sievwright shout out in pain, his voice high-pitched, almost a scream. Other screams, passengers moving away from the scene. The woman looms up fast in the metal mirror, not looking back.

  He catches her as she comes around the corner, then he holds on tight. She cries out once and tries to bite him, but her face
is against his chest and her hands are trapped between them, pushing to get free.

  She begins to kick out at his legs. Taking her time, the blows slow and hard with her weight behind them. He listens to her boots thudding off his bones. For a moment he is detached, waiting for the pain to come.

  It is bearable. He staggers back at the force of one kick, feeling blood on his legs, hot and then quickly cold. She struggles again, heavy-built but not muscular under the layers of coats and shirts. He tries to keep her still, his face against her hair. She smells of dogs, sweaty and sweet.

  She goes loose in his arms, then he feels her begin to cry, the sobs rocking through her. He waits a few seconds longer to be sure, then stands back. Immediately she begins to slump against the passage wall and he catches her, holds her up.

  ‘Ah, you bastards. Why can’t you never just leave me alone?’

  ‘It is our job.’

  She looks up at him, calm and sad. ‘What will you do with my lurching girls?’

  He shakes his head, not understanding. Leynes comes round the corner, his eyes jittering from the woman to Casimir, taking everything in. He nods at Casimir as he takes half the woman’s weight. His voice when he talks to her is smooth and fast. Part-parent and part-interrogator.

  ‘There we go. Easy. OK? This way, please.’

  The woman looks round at Leynes, eyes wide. ‘Will you give me back my lurching girls?’

  The supervisor grins. A cold expression, bone-hard. ‘Your dogs? Lurchers, are they? Well, we’ll see about them a little later. Right now we’re going to sit you down in the ticket office. See the stairs? Off we go.’

  By the time they reach the surface concourse the dog woman is a dead weight between them. They carry her out to the ticket office, but at the door she wails and pulls back. ‘No! I’m not sitting in a room. I never sit in rooms.’

  ‘It’s all right, love. Mister Casimir here’s going to wait with you, and I’m going to get you a chair. All right?’