Underground

by Tobias Hill

  9

  The Low Road

  In Casimir’s dream there is the Underground and the sound of the squirrel-cage. He is down in the tunnels. The ballast stones are uneven and sharp against his bare feet.

  Between the rough gravel are track sleepers, wood flush with the tunnel floor. Smooth and dangerous, smelling of damp and creosote. It is a paradox of his dream: the smoothness of the danger, the pain of what is safe. He takes small steps. He has no torch, no lasting source of light.

  He is holding out his left hand so that his watch-face is ahead of him. The luminosity is already fading. He doesn’t take his eyes off it as he walks. The tunnel wind beats against his bare skin. Soft and insistent, like moths.

  The Underground closes around him. Its dark presses against his face. It is safe as a locked room; it is terrifying as a locked door. He is shivering, his head is shaking with it. As if he is refusing to go further, even as he walks. He tries to think where he is going but in the darkness he knows nothing. It is like having no thoughts at all. He stumbles and cries out as he falls.

  The ceramic bowls of the current insulators loom up. The live track is so near his face he can smell the acid wetness of its metal. The insulators are white and featureless. Faces in the crowd of a northern country.

  The track hums with power. He backs up from it with his father’s watch against his chest. Then he begins to walk again. The ballast stones have cut his legs and the palms of his hands. He is glad of the feel of it. It is something to be sure of.

  The noise begins as a wheedling echo in the track. It is the sound of a train coming and he puts out his right hand, feeling for the point where the wall opens out. The train doesn’t frighten him. He knows this dream. There is a crossover point here, the tunnel widening around a junction. There is room for him to stand and not be killed. And the train will bring light. Everything is wrong in the dark; but what he can see, he can make right.

  The wall beside him gives way to space. He steps sideways, ducking under the loops of cables and the bright coppery lines of the old line-telephone live wires. Beyond is a warren of tunnels, branching away. He turns around, pressed into the space between rails.

  The train is much nearer now. Already the sound of it is going wrong. Casimir can hear something metallic, a skitter of movement against wire, the sound of something wild trapped in a narrow cage. A crash on stone and the sound of water. Echoes distorted back up the sightless black shaft.

  The train roars past him. Grids of light move across his face. He looks up into the train, face screwed up against the light but grinning, teeth set. The light feels so good.

  The train is deserted. The carriages press tunnel air against Casimir’s face and chest as they pass, windows empty and bright. He can feel himself beginning to wake and he turns, eyes closing, as if he will walk out into wakefulness.

  At the last window is a figure. It is indistinct, gone before he has turned properly to see. But he recognizes Alice. She is not singing any more, just looking out at him. Looking out of her eyes but giving out nothing, no humanity. Her eyes are so familiar to him now. The colour of blood seen through muscle.

  He wakes. He is cold with the late afternoon sun on his face. The rims of his eyes still sting with sleep loss. He is sitting on a bench, its ironwork hard against his spine. In front of him is a wide stretch of concrete paving. The pavement is littered with broken bottle-glass and curlicues of plane-tree bark, split from the trunks in the September heat.

  He can smell river mud. A girl with red hair and blue sunglasses roller-blades past, slaloming between pedestrians. Beyond them is the Thames. A pleasure boat hoots as it passes the Houses of Parliament, light criss-crossing in its wake.

  He shifts upright and immediately he is alert, the sleep leaving him cold. He leans forward, elbows on knees, head in hands. His face is warmer than his fingers.

  Across the river, Big Ben strikes four. The giant clockface shines white in the autumn afternoon. Casimir makes himself stand. He has been asleep for nearly four hours and the light hurts his eyes.

  He walks across to the embankment railing, passing easily between the slow rush-hour of pedestrians. Leans against the railing, stretching out hands and arms.

  This is one of his routines, the embankment bench. Often when he has finished a day shift he comes here before going home, walking down from Waterloo station, past the arched glass of the Channel Tunnel terminus. He sits for a while even in winter or spring, when the cold rain drips off the plane trees and soaks his uniform. Partly he does it because he loves the river, but mostly because it is a routine. Routines are important to him. They make things clear and certain, like light.

  Now he tries to remember the last time he came here. It is a week ago already. The day he heard of Rebecca Saville’s death.

  He blinks, and for a moment there is the overpowering sensation of Alice kissing him. Her breath, its warmth and sound and feel. He keeps his eyes closed until the memory is gone. On his work clothes the dirt is a dark sheen at the folds of the knees and the jacket lining. He feels good, still tired but sharp and hungry. Sleeping underground; he smiles at the idea of it. Like something from a children’s story or folk tale. Persephone or the Ohyn.

  The railing is warm against his hands and he leans over it, looks down. Low-tide mud stretches out to the water. Casimir can see people sitting down there: an old man in a torn sports shirt and stained check jacket; a woman with a bottle in her hands, light catching its clear glass. The homeless. He looks away.

  The days return to him haphazardly, in distinct images. He lets them come. Photographs spread out on a grey-lit counter. A child turning, neck stretching monstrously. The wheelchair, edging away from him. The hand in the crowd, blurred by freeze-frame, reaching out; and then the crowd itself, its faces in shadow. Casimir wants the faces lit up clear. Where he can see them.

  He looks upriver to Westminster Bridge, yawning as his mind clears. The sound of car horns carries down. A double-decker bus sits in the grid-locked traffic, stranded diagonally between lanes. Casimir watches, taking in none of it. He turns away from the river and begins to walk, back along the embankment. The thin crowd moves around him and past him.

  The Tube train to Camden is old rolling stock, a rush-hour replacement from the depot yards. Its green sides flare outwards at their feet, and inside the wooden floor is worn smooth, lit by light bulbs under scalloped glass. Casimir sits in the last carriage. There is less crowd this far down the train, and in Casimir’s section there is only a single other passenger, a gaunt man with a purple sports bag gripped on locked knees.

  The old carriages pick up speed, rocking into the dark. Casimir thinks of the first trains on the Underground. Locomotives with breathing holes in the roads above. Sleek industrial brass and steel, letting off steam like whales.

  The stations pass: Goodge Street, Warren Street. The thin man unzips his bag, takes out a dozen lottery cards and scratches them out with a ten-pence coin. As the train slows towards Camden Town, Casimir sees the man is wearing a name tag on his jumper: Sam Deane – ‘The Human Fountain’. When he has finished, the man reaches into the bag’s bulk again. Takes out another handful of cards.

  Casimir gets out with the crowd. He is glad of the crush as it moves him along towards the escalators, up towards the surface. He is here on his day off, on his own time, his uniform seamed with dirt. There will be questions to answer if he is seen; where he has been, where he thinks he is going. It is simpler not to be seen.

  He steps out on to Camden High Street and immediately twists back out of the path of a pavement cyclist.

  ‘Oyoyoy!’

  Around the oxblood tiling of the Underground entrance are a few stalls, bunches of henna-coloured incense and oiled hotplates of thick, pepper-red pizza. Trade spilling over from the big markets on Chalk Farm Road, the Lock and the Stables. Casimir turns north towards them, moving slowly through the shoppers and sellers.

  It is not often he comes above ground at Camd
en. There is rarely any reason to do so. It reminds him of Adams: I’m just going upstairs. He was right to stay out of things, Casimir thinks. And I am wrong again. Not really careful, not like Adams. Needy. Needing to know everything. Walking out over wet spring ice.

  He walks north-west. The bulk of life up here surprises him. A laughing woman with a tall bucket of green sugar cane, next to a tiered trestle of black-bruised yellow peaches. White posters spiralled around lampposts, zigzagged across building site walls. Samosa salesmen leaning between shop fronts of black leather and white goods. Voices –

  ‘Any wear you like, ladies!’

  ‘Shh! Hash? Hash?’

  ‘Rass, man! You need new clothes, you start looking like a tramp. Hey! Hey, big man!’

  Teenagers in bright clothes and office workers in grey, all of them walking too fast in the gutters and road. A fire engine slows, thundering at them with its horn.

  The pavement ahead is blocked with a red tartan blanket, an obese skinhead brooding over his merchandise. Mechanical sniper figures snake across the blanket. When they go too far the skinhead prods them back with one steeler boot. Behind him is a fenced square of clothes stalls, electric-blue halter tops and sequinned tie-dye skirts. Casimir steps over the blanket and stops, looking across the stalls.

  A small building rises out of the sea of clothes. It is simultaneously anonymously placed and curiously shaped: a conning tower of pinkish brick, ventilation slits near its small, flat roof. The brickwork is covered with giant graffiti, SUB 73 on a scrawled background of silver, purple and crimson. To Casimir it looks as if the colour of the market is creeping up the walls, a bright lichen.

  He turns right at the edge of the clothes market. The smell of street foods is stronger here, air sweet and fat with the fumes of chilli and lime leaves, cumin frying in ghee, almonds browning in hot caramel. Casimir tries to remember how long it is since he has eaten, his stomach turning over with hunger.

  The flank of the building protrudes to the market’s edge. A metal door is set into its side. Next to the door is an intercom, an inconspicuous plaque over the verdigrised metal: DEEP SHELTER ARCHIVES INC. NEWSPAPERS & RECEIPTS. Casimir presses the buzzer and steps close to the intercom, turning his face sideways to the smell of urine.

  ‘Yes?’

  Casimir smiles, eyes resting on the brickwork. ‘Jak sie’n chuyesh, Wanda? Are you well?’

  A pause. ‘Jako tako, so-so. Who is this?’ The voice is female, and Polish. The heavy accent of someone too old to ever lose it.

  ‘Casimir. From the Underground.’

  ‘Ah? Ah. Yes, I remember you, Kazimierz Kazimierski. Wait.’

  There is a rattle of metal and Casimir looks round. A diminutive man in white jeans is pulling a shop grille down. The showroom lights are still on, gleaming through rows of lava lamps. Globules and teardrops of orange and organ-pink.

  When he turns back, Wanda is standing in the open doorway. Her broadness is emphasized by thick bifocal glasses, a great head of steely white curls and an oversized jumper patterned with trees, sheep and a small cottage. She is holding a large paperback in one hand, a Danielle Steele in Polish translation.

  ‘Hello. I close soon. Is it the ventilation?’

  ‘No. I need – there is some information I am looking for.’

  She frowns. The bifocals press up against her lined forehead. ‘You are not here on Underground business?’ Casimir shakes his head. ‘You have authorization to see the records?’

  ‘No.’ The old woman waits, looking Casimir over. ‘It is important. Please.’

  After a moment Wanda stands back, holding the door open with her wide, pale hands. ‘Quickly. I am in a hurry tonight. I go to the club. You want to come?’

  ‘No. Thank you.’ Casimir knows she means the Polish Hearth Club, in Kensington. A place filled by older Poles, wartime refugees, critical of the new waves of immigrants from home. It is not a place in which Casimir feels comfortable. The eyes of the old people on him. Expecting little, assuming too much.

  ‘I will not take long.’

  ‘No, you won’t. What information is this which is so important?’

  ‘A newspaper story.’

  She stops moving and turns awkwardly towards him. They have come through into a poky office room. An Elvis Presley picture calendar half-covers a bricked-up window. Both side-walls are hidden behind filing cabinets the colour of gunmetal. At the back of the office is a small red cage-work lift.

  Wanda begins to cough, staring at Casimir. It is only from her eyes that he realizes she is laughing. ‘This is Newspaper Storage. We have every story here.’

  ‘A death on the Underground. Someone was caught for it – 12 June 1987.’

  ‘Ah? That’s better. Maybe I can help you.’

  The archivist backs away to the lift, hauls open the folding door. It is years since Casimir has been here, checking some common ground between the subterranean properties of London Transport and Deep Shelter Archives – crossroads of ducts and pipes, knottings of cable thick as a torso. The archivist looks unchanged. Even the jumper is familiar. Casimir sees that she still limps, her left leg longer than the right, the shoulders slightly tipped.

  ‘Come on, please. In here.’

  Casimir gets into the lift. Immediately it starts to descend, jerking back against the shaft walls. When Wanda speaks again her voice is softer, adjusting to the packed space.

  ‘It is important to you, this death? Maybe you know who died?’

  ‘No.’

  It is a long way down. Outside the lift, the concrete shaft; outside the shaft, blue London clay. He is thinking of Alice waking in the abandoned station. The smell of him on her. He wonders how she can recognize morning, without light to touch her eyes.

  ‘Ah. Well, it is nice to have a visitor. To tell the truth, things are not so good here now. No one comes. The libraries, they have all the newspapers inside computers, and warehouses are cheaper for storage, so why come here? This is not to be repeated, you understand.’

  Casimir nods. The lift is small, so that he is pressed against the archivist’s soft bulk. The smell of her jumper is as strong as that of the market above: lanolin and a bitter, trapped sweat. He watches the black shaft passing outside the diamond lattice of the door.

  ‘This week my son and my daughter-in-law go back home to Warszawa. I will miss them but I am glad. Why do you stay in England? And just to work underground. You will go blind, like a bat – I am going blind, you see? When will you go home?’

  Home. He thinks of his father, an old man in misfitting clothes, wasteground around him. He wonders if it will be necessary for the old man to die before he can go back to Poland. He thinks it will be this way. Otherwise there would have to be forgiveness. Casimir cannot imagine any means of forgiveness.

  ‘Eh? You don’t talk much. Still waters run deep, that is what the English say. The Polish is better, of course. Cicha weda brzegi rwie. “Quiet waters break the river’s banks.” You should talk more, Kazimierz Kazimierski.’

  Wanda narrows her eyes and he sees it is meant as a smile, although her mouth is unsmiling.

  The lift slows, two hundred feet down. Wanda pulls the door open and Casimir follows her, out into the deep shelter.

  ‘Now we will find your story.’

  They are standing at the edge of a great hall, broader than a Tube tunnel, its massive dimensions sectioned off by miles of shelves and walkways. The curved walls are painted two-tone, black and beige edged off at chest height. The floor of the deep shelter lies across the tunnel’s widest point, creating a single arched chamber. Casimir remembers a second level, curving downwards like the belly of a ship.

  ‘1987… 1987 is this way. Come on, please.’

  Wanda turns down an aisle between the shelves. As Casimir follows her, he sees that the shelves are packed from floor to ceiling with filing boxes, cardboard caked with dust.

  ‘Tonight is my games night, you see. We play Pan for pierogi! So I get fat, because I
am so good. But maybe you are too young for games. Maybe tonight you have a girl to be with.’

  Ahead and behind, the black-and-tan walls run off into the far distance. Casimir bends his head, trying to see past Wanda to the chamber’s end.

  ‘How far does the deep shelter go?’

  ‘From here to Lvov. No! A kilometre or two. And the same downstairs. Too much room. There is space now, where the shelves end. I never go down there.’ She smiles back at him. ‘It gives me the willies. The willies. You know what this means?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The archivist’s teeth are the same pearly grey as the frames of her glasses. They walk on. In the overhead strip light Casimir can see that the walls are marked by slight, spiral ridges. He recognizes the pattern of a drum digger, the Underground’s tunnelling machines. But I am deeper here, he thinks. Under the Underground.

  ‘Now we are back in the 1980s. Not far to go now.’

  The hall itself feels newer than the train tunnels above. There is no smell of limestone and water here, less sense of a human construction becoming natural. It is because the deep shelter is wartime, Casimir thinks; six decades old. The Underground above is twice its age.

  Casimir can see the end of the shelves now. They stop dead a few hundred feet ahead. The strip lighting penetrates some distance further, before fading into darkness. The end of the chamber is out of sight.

  In front of him Wanda comes to a halt, out of breath, holding on to the shelves. The boxes are wedged in tight, cutting the light down between rows.

  ‘Here we are!’ The old woman’s voice is sing-song, artificially bright. She edges one box out, puffing and muttering. There is a string of letters and digits on the box lid: LONDON GDN, 06/87. Wanda dumps it on the floor in front of Casimir.

  Dust billows around him and he wipes his face. The boom echoes away as he reaches down, lifts off the lid. Inside are copies of the Guardian, wrapped in plastic, pages compressed together.