One man is really, really angry. He swears. He says he’s going home to bury his father and if this fucker doesn’t get himself out of there he’ll personally go down there and kill him and bury the pair of them together. Another joins in and suggests it could be settled if the train rode over him. He’s on his way to a music festival and there’s a girl involved and he’s sorry, he’s not being funny like, but if a guy is determined to kill himself this isn’t the way to do it, so this guy’s obviously a faker and all they got to do is start the train and he’ll hop up on the platform and that’ll be it. Over. They can all carry on.
There’s a bang. People turn. It’s just a woman struggling with a suitcase that slipped out of her hand as she tugged it. Sorry, she says, lifting her shoulders a bit for emphasis. It turned on its wheel. The angry brigade budge back from the gate to keep one eye on the board, but not far enough back to admit defeat. It’s like they are half-watching a football match while cooking the dinner. They want movement. They’re primed, the angry brigade, because most members of the angry-when-the-train-is-late brigade haven’t contemplated throwing themselves under or onto the tracks. They just want to get on the fucking train, which is the right of every man or woman who ever thought about getting on a train. Trains for riding, beds for lying in.
Late to the scene: the pelters. Those who are running at full pelt, who know if they aren’t already on this train, which they aren’t, it is probably gone or about to go so they just push and shovel through the crowd. The ticket inspector hears them approach and moves forward to instruct them to stop, except they think he’s generously moving up to scan their ticket and assist them on the fly. Stop, he says. No, you can’t go through, there’s a delay. There’s a problem with a passenger. They only stop when he says emphatically there’s a passenger on the line and if you go through there you will die, I mean he will die.
Nobody likes being told they’ll die. It’s a human brake moment. No matter how pumped, how primed, how indignant you are, if you are told even by mistake you could die . . . well even John Smith pauses a moment.
Ambulance men stand bored. One has bought a fizzy drink, looks like Iron Bru. Another is eating a doughnut. Procedure demands nothing will move until procedure ascertains it can move. Nobody can do anything until procedure has its demands met. Procedure demands that nothing be done until procedure exaggerates its demands. What are procedure’s demands? Procedure doesn’t know, but there are protocols. They are being followed and thus nothing is happening. The plain people are unhappy.
The woman who left the crowd declaring she was going to stop this is back. She has bought three bottles of Lucozade or possibly more since she has two under one armpit. Excuse me she says to a man in front of her. She aims one of the glass bottles at Martin John’s head and fires it onto the track. It misses.
“Why did you do that?”
“I want him to move his arm,” she says. “I think he’s holding something in his hand. He could be armed. I want him to move. I want him out of there.”
She puts two bottles into her pocket and shuffles her alignment. She is squinting and concentrating hard.
“If they’re not going to move him, I’ll move him,” she rasps. She lifts another bottle of Lucozade up and hurls it even harder. It hits the side of the train, smashes to clinking glass, liquid, and draws the attention of the procedurals. They move in and remove the Lucozade-throwing woman, who attempts to chuck two bottles at the same time, one of which lands on her own foot.
“He moved, he’s moving,” some voices say.
Martin John is not moving.
Martin John has issued his demands.
He says he will not come up from the train wheels unless the entire station is emptied so he can do his circuits alone.
“What about your job? They will be wondering where you are.”
He likes that she imagines he has a job and that a job is waiting on him. That he is useful and people are waiting on him to be useful.
Is there anyone whom it might help him to talk to?
Maybe when he sees the phone, he’ll know whom to ring?
Is there someone she should phone in his house?
Martin John does not like the words home and telephone.
Now she has mentioned Baldy Conscience.
Baldy Conscience is in the station.
Snipers in the roof. Armed and waiting.
They probably have the girl out there too.
Waiting to identify him.
To say he is the one.
Who did the thing.
None of them liked.
But not ’til they noticed it.
And threw the tea.
This will be a problem.
They didn’t notice. They never notice and when they do they do not move and he has liked this about it before. That no one moves on him. That he can always be assured of the human capacity to be passive.
There are a few problems down here. He is whispering now because if they know there are problems down here . . . well. And another thing, the smell down here is not good. Nor the cold. Nor the metal. He has positioned himself so his legs are threaded behind two wheels. If the train moves it will cut his legs off. The hospital gown is caught on something. Things are digging into various parts of his body and he has his face towards the undercarriage. His wrist has gone so numb he can’t imagine it will work again. The stones that line the railway tracks are embedding themselves absolutely, with some finality, into his flesh. Agony. It’s the kind of pain that’s poking euphoric. Martin John has tunnelled beyond uncomfortable. But the best thing is his bladder is fuller than even he ever imagined it could be. This, he likes.
Martin John is happy for the entire train service to grind to a halt.
He cannot go up. If he goes up, she will be waiting and it will be over.
Over for you, Martin John, he can hear mam saying.
Can’t save you now.
Big boyos likely bouncing around the station with plans to topple him. The whole of Euston’s full of policemen on horses waiting to greet him. Would they form a circle while he walked his circuits? Horse nostrils can be disconcerting. He remembers the smell of wet straw and piddle at Hyde Park.
Snipers in the roof are already in place. They are possibly trained on the back of his head.
He regrets choosing to face the ground rather than the roof.
Would they also kill the horses to get at him?
He hadn’t even the good grace to come home directly. No, mam had to go over to England and collect him. But first she had to get him outta there. For wasn’t he inside again and this time with the Irish sea between them. He’d not just gotten himself in, he’d gotten himself stuffed so far inside she had to plead with them and makes promises to them so they’d let him out. She’d make her life only about him. She would. Oh she would. (When had her life not been about him?) It took weeks to convince them. He’s very ill, they said. Mentally ill. He’s not, she thought. He’s just a very bad listener. And she told the doctors this. And they were also very bad listeners.
The single good listener is Noanie, who agrees with her. She’ll take her lead from Noanie and him above. When they gave her all kinds of names and titles and explanations she gave them back the bald facts as they stood between her and the file folder notes and those white coats. I’ve told him. I’ve warned him for years. I said I was sure. If only he’d heed me but he won’t and now he’ll pay. They’ll kill him if he ends up in there.
In the end she brought Noanie in with her. When Noanie heard the details of what he’d done and how they found him in the station: What? she said. What? Come again? I’m surprised I didn’t see that in the paper.
Mam sat beside Noanie and ran through the inventory of warnings she’d given Martin John whilst insisting to the doctors no, no, he’s never gone this far, while knowing she had no true
idea of how far he might have gone. But he had technically never set a building on fire to her knowledge. A good, hard-working man he is. Was the fire a suicide attempt? I hope so, she thought. I hope so. Please God he’ll succeed the next time. She said none of this aloud. Only what she’d learnt to say, I don’t know, I don’t know and perhaps beneath her breath they might have heard, I don’t want to know. Please spare me. Redirect it in the post to someone else.
But they’d an awful thick sheaf of notes on him. They weren’t going to let her off easy. They’ve a big folder on him, she told Noanie on the train back to Hatfield. They do, Noanie said. But he’ll get out. They can’t afford to keep him in there and they release all the lunatics onto the street and he’ll be no different. We’ll have him out by the end of the week.
They agreed she could bring him home to Ireland. You’ll have to bring him home, Noanie said. ’Til he’s stable. Then you can let him come back. Mam didn’t want him home. It only seemed like yesterday she’d managed to get rid of him.
He needed a strong hand, mam told the doctors. That was what was missing. A good strong man’s hand. Mam offered no explanation as to why a man’s hand was missing. Why a man’s hand, say, couldn’t be found in North or South London. If that was what could fix him? Prison might be the only thing that could fix him. She didn’t say it aloud, but she thought it. She thought about what Noanie said. Noanie said lock him in. Lock him in, she said. She didn’t say how. The how was her own doing.
He’ll have to come home with me. I’ll mind him, she said. I’ll let him know what’s what.
These fellas can do nothing for him, mam told Noanie, who agreed that people who talked in a medical language could do nothing. They can do nothing really, they may as well be talking to the wall for all the sense they make, Noanie said brightly while she fed her green bird. Then she said Timmy the bird would need cleaning out on Thursday and when she cleaned him out she had to let him fly around the room and he’d expect to do his tricks, so if they could get Martin John out of the hospital one way or the other by Thursday it would be for the best. I’ll have to clean him, she said, indicating the bottom of his cage. There’s only so long he can go without cleaning. Everything has to be right when I clean him or he’ll get upset.
They were getting sick of the hospital and the hospital was getting sick of them and Martin John was in-between the lot of them, making no sense at all.
—He’s going on about Beirut all the time. It’s Beirut this, Beirut that. Why’s he doing that, Noanie wanted to know.
—I’ll tell you the truth, I think they injected him with something. Or he needs a bang on the head. Or, mam whispered, he’s just pretending. Mam swings between two poles. The bash-him and fix-him poles. The sympathy and I’m-sick-of-him poles. The let’s end it: It’ll-just-take-time poles.
That evening Noanie said brightly they were wasting their time, all of their time, and they needed to put a stop to it. Well Noanie said it as they were eating a trifle that she’d made that day. The only thing I am not satisfied with about this trifle, Noanie said, is the bottom layer. The other two layers I can live with, but there’s something missing in the bottom layer. They agreed some mini-oranges or a splash more of sherry might be it.
The rest of the week she and Noanie watched telly together silently.
—It’s an awful interruption.
—Oh it is.
—Why couldn’t he have paid more heed?
—There was no telling him.
Each evening, with or without trifle, they reached the same conclusion. It was all a waste of their time. All of their time.
—I haven’t time to be dealing with this, mam said. I’m not for another minute of it.
She worried though. He’d been away so long and that was a good thing. It was a good thing he’d been away so long as they might not remember when they see him back. Noanie didn’t ask what it was they might not remember but they both agreed whomever she didn’t want remembering might not remember. Noanie thought she was talking very loosely. No one remembers much anymore, she said. It was no consolation, but mam tried not to think beyond that fact. People forget, do you think? Oh they do, Noanie said, they do.
She had a plan for what she’d do when she got him home. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was a plan.
She works at the French-themed bakery that the majority of passengers trek by to purchase food at the burger and chips joint beside it and her name is Mary and she is devout. Mary and Martin John had once come to blows when he tried to grab hold of her hand as she gave him change for a pain au chocolat he didn’t really want.
Today Mary is pushing a large rolling rubbish bin down to the massive compactor where the transfer over her head has to be made. It’s full of dirty baking paper, napkins and gunk. The compactor, located well out of sight, is beneath the station, for passengers must never be made aware of the volume of disposable muck they create while travelling up/down the country’s railways. It requires two people to bring down such an oversize bin, but staff cutbacks have doomed the safe, unobstructed passage of this rolling heap of crap.
There are police officers in her way.
There are random men and women in her way.
There are British Rail people blocking her way.
“You can’t go through,” an unidentified uniform, appearing from the front of the giant bin, tells her.
“Well I am not taking this rubbish home to Watford, am I? I work here. I need to bring it down.”
“You’ll have to wait. We’re not letting anyone through.”
Mary is determined she is not taking this crapheap back to the food court because Florence, her Irish supervisor, will only insist Mary return with it again, under the plea my back, my back love. I can’t risk it. It’ll put me on a stretcher.
Mary will wait it out.
It is the mad mesh of all these bodies running into and away from each other, carrying explanations rather than progress, that further frustrate her. Mary is a woman who likes to get things done. Mary is a woman who can get things done. Mary has worked more consecutive hours on this station than some of the light bulbs. She also hasn’t eaten for thirty-six hours and is hyper.
A what’s happening? only gives her: there’s a guy under a train. A guy under the train is not good, thinks Mary. A guy under the train can mean delays. Is he dead? she asks Anthony, a handsome Nigerian ticket collector with whom she sometimes chit-chats and who is always tired and complaining about his wife, while happily implying Mary could join him anytime for a variety of indulgences. By reply she traditionally provides Romans 10 3-4, “For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness and going about to establish their own righteousness have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God,” which usually calms his ardour.
Anthony, on this occasion, has more information than Mary.
“No he’s not dead. He’s not moving, but he’s not dead. Stupid guy! Train could have killed him. Trains can kill you. Bam!”
He tells Mary this like she may not have realized trains can kill her. But he is animated. Mary appreciates that he is animated.
Mary, on the verge of sending up an appeal to the Lord, sidles over to have a look. She must ascertain whether there’s something going on down there worth burdening the Lord with. She parks the bin out of the way and moves closer so she can neck a peek and see what’s going on.
She knows him. Even from this squint she recognizes him. It’s the pain au chocolat perv. The one she’s resorted to discussing scripture with.
“It’s him,” she thinks. “Damn.”
“I know him.” Mary says loudly. “Let me talk to him. He knows me. I can get him up.”
No useless official in charge of the situation believes or trusts Mary, but Mary has long since grown used to being disregarded in both London and by the brotherhood that surrounded her husband in Abuja and now pile int
o her hallway every Sunday to shout at each other over her. She doesn’t listen to them when they crowd out her flat and she won’t listen to these clustering spouters who say she can’t go down there. Mary is powered by the Lord, not railway officials. So she calls across the waist-high glass which houses the public from the buffers below. She calls out to the back of Martin John’s head.
“You! Get up here now and stop being so stupid!”
Mary has a good reason to call across to the man on the tracks. He’s in her way. He’s holding up the trains. He needs to get out of her way. Tonight is Mary’s chance. For weeks she’s awaited her turn. Several women in her Watford Women’s Ministry were ahead of her. There’s a roster. She has listened to her sisters. She has nodded at the sisters and delighted in each sister’s response to a selected Bible reading while secretly counting down to her moment. A sister’s talent for lifting the word of God off the page is not created equally. She may get up on the horse of God but can she hold her saddle? Can she lute his words? Because the simple fact is yawning can set in. She has seen it. She has yawned it and tonight’s her night to present her practiced preaching. How she has silently prepared these words while putting a hundred ham-and-cheese croissants inside paper bags for indifferent passengers.
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