by Geoff Ryman
The doors open. Maureen realizes that this is her stop, and leaps to her feet. She meant to read her beloved book, but has spent the last half hour, the last six months in a rage. This is getting silly, Mo, she tells herself. She has a vision of her cattery, its concrete floors burnished like metal. She sees herself in the Hayward, reading the catalogue, relaxing in the café. I really am not stupid. I can decide, she realizes, to have some fun. She gets out at Waterloo.
Duncton Wood has been left behind.
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81
MR DON DISNEY
Outward appearance
Man about 50, very tanned, short grey hair, black trousers, heavy-soled shoes, black jacket peeking out from the sleeves of a waterproof.
Inside information
A security guard on his way to work at Mosstains. He has just returned from Christmas holidays in Spain. He always wanted to be in the Army, but only ever made the Territorials. His parents wouldn’t sign the necessary papers to let him join at fifteen, so he ended up working in old Billingsgate fish market.
What he is doing or thinking
He remembers the old market, with its arches, its noise, its humour. He remembers the heavy leather boots with the copper toes, and the thick leather hats on which he would balance boxes of fish, or trays of eels.
Don once chained his boss to the stall all day. He had come back having skived off on his birthday, so the lads had made sure he’d stay put. Once a Jap tourist came early to take photographs. He stood up on the barrow which Don pulled, so Don pulled just a bit too hard and sent him flying backwards into the haddock and John Dory.
Life was smart, hard and funny. Now it’s grey and corporate. Don wants to live in Spain, and thaw out.
They used to have big metal chests full of frozen eels. The eels would come back to life. The foundations of the old market were frozen solid from the cold store. When they moved the market the foundations thawed, and the building began to fall down. Like Britain really.
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82
MR THOMAS WEST
Outward appearance
Young man in corduroys. Pink skin, red hair, red jacket under a blue overcoat. Soft brown shoes. Going over papers covered with children’s handwriting. Suddenly he stops.
Inside information
A teacher at Lower Marsh Primary on Baylis Road. At 24, the youngest in the school.
Tom became a primary school teacher for two reasons. First, he was good at taking care of his younger brothers after his father disappeared. Second, he wants a girlfriend and primary schools are full of women teachers. He is already on his second potential wife.
What he is doing or thinking
Coming to terms with the sudden return of his father. Dad’s showed up at Mum’s new address with no explanation of where he’s been for fourteen years.
Thomas’s father had always been odd. He would bring strangers home for supper and put them up. The lawn was never mown; grass grew high around the front door steps. But he sowed wildflower seed, poppies and foxgloves.
He was constantly tearing up floorboards and pipes and then losing interest. Woodworm became an obsession. He took the roof off the house in winter, wrapped it in plastic, and then deserted his family. Effectively a ruin, the house was sold at half price, and the family moved into a flat over an Italian restaurant by the Hanger Lane Gyratory System.2
Thomas has always feared that he was like his father in any way. He can’t be: he notices children and loves them, and he is charming to women. But last night he saw his father: small, red, round, determined, like himself.
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Another helpful and informative 253 footnote
2 The Hanger Lane Gyratory System is, despite its fancy name, simply a roundabout. It entangles the North Circular Road with the A40, the major road heading due west out of London.
The Gyratory System is poignant because soon after it opened in the late ’70s, the designers admitted that they had made a mistake and it would never work. God knows how you can mistake either of those two roads or which directions they go in.
The result in 1996 is this: a roundabout which is designed to avoid a traffic light snarl-up is now controlled by a carousel of traffic lights. Say you want to turn right: you may have to wait at four red lights as you gyrate. This is instead of the one traffic light the System replaced. The Gyratory System regularly achieves gridlock, which is excellent considering that all the through traffic on the A40 passes under it via a tunnel.
83
MRS GWEN UTLAY
Outward appearance
Big-boned, with slightly frizzy hair. Red jacket, gold brooch, rust-coloured dress and shoes, large camel-coloured coat and briefcase. Reading a copy of Management Excess. She underlines key passages.
Inside information
Gwen works for the NHS Tabulation and Processing Agency in Leeds. She’s in charge of their Total Quality Management programme. She is visiting the London office, which shares the same building as the London Emergency Service. Gwen plans to write a report on the success of this related body in establishing procedures and targets. She has been invited by the boss of Passenger 45. He wants Gwen to see his birthday party, and the level of commitment he has from his staff.
What she is doing or thinking
Gwen firmly believes that the entire NHS should have an ISO standard quality accreditation. She was particularly inspired by the example of a ball-bearing factory which held a joint Total Quality Conference with their suppliers. She envisions a national conference of quality stewards from all the NHS agencies and suppliers, to agree industry-wide quality targets.
Gwen is armed with a draft questionnaire for the Emergency Service. It asks ambulance customers if the vehicle was comfortable, the driving of a safe but speedy quality, the staff polite and informative. Did patients have to sit on a trolley for a long time? If they had a complaint, did they receive an acknowledgement? Was the waiting room clean? Did the decor make a friendly impression?
Gwen prides herself on thoroughness. What else might people using ambulances possibly want to comment on?
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84
MRS JASMINE McGOWAN
Outward appearance
Professional shoplifter? Flat tennis shoes, grubby pink trousers, puffy lime-green coat, straw-like untended broom of hair. Plump, smiling slightly, surrounded by shopping bags full of bits of metal.
Inside information
Runs a shop next to Emil’s Window Displays. It sells bedsteads, radios, lamps, refrigerators in need of repair, hubcaps from a range of automobiles, old magazines, clothes. It would be easy to mistake it for a junk shop. It is in fact a clinic that cures old jukeboxes and 1960s psychedelic lamps.
What she is doing or thinking
Jasmine left a lamp on all night to warm. The red wax has settled into a sluggish clump at the bottom amid the oil. Sometimes prolonged heating restores its youth. The red bobbles churn once more as livid as a Yes album cover.
Jasmine is also nursing a sick Rock-ola. It’s an early ’70s model, called Rhapsody in Colour because lights flicker within different coloured panels. Jasmine is buddies with the dealer who bought the whole warehouse of Rock-ola spare parts when Mr Rock-ola retired.
She’ll be able to keep the Rock-olas and lamps going for years yet. Like the record in the jukebox says: I Won’t Hang Up These Rock and Roll Shoes.
Jasmine grew up in a trailer in Canada, drifting across another continent with her hippy parents. She remembers pine trees, huge lakes surrounded with rock, flaming autumn colours and winters that left her cold six months of the year. Her dad’s still in Canada, near Vancouver, fishing. Her mum’s in a home.
She hopes the wax will have warmed.3
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Another helpful and informative 253 footnote
3 Like so
many of the smaller shops around Lambeth North, even as the recession ended in 1996, Jasmine’s shop was suddenly empty and with metal shutters bolted down over its windows. It is still used for something, however. Sometimes, mysteriously, the shutters are left rolled up. Inside are a few bedsteads, scraps of clothes and notices still pinned to the wall.
85
MR RAFAEL DA CUNHA
Outward appearance
Middle-aged man, black moustache and hair, yellow and green slacks, jacket. Throws himself back in his seat, stomps his feet with laughter. Tobacco-stained teeth.
Inside information
A baker at Blands Patisserie, wholesale suppliers of pies and cakes. Blands staff are a mix of regional Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Rafael lives alone in a hotel in Seven Sisters.
What he is doing or thinking
A fool peers at the London Underground map over Rafael’s head. He doesn’t notice when an old lady sits down in his seat. The idiot sits down on top of her. Some dumb American by the look of him. Rafael doubles up.
The idiot looks like the men in the park. Rafael knows no one, speaks little English. He started strolling around Archbishop’s Park in the evenings after work and men started to make suggestions. Young folks. He told them, he only did that for money, and they paid him. The young office workers, the boys from the flats, even once a priest, they pay him, old as he is, and become women for him. He tells them he is an Arab, they seem to like that.
If he was home, he would never do anything like that. But working around cakes all day makes him feel sick. He never eats. He used to haul concrete blocks up ramps and play football. He has a big man’s body, shrunk back to muscle and bone. He gives them cream, like cakes, and that also makes him sick, but now, now he can laugh.
Laugh at all of them.
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86
MISS BERYL BARBER
Outward appearance
Round-faced black woman. Spectacles perched on the end of her nose. Both feet in a contained parallel. Reading a textbook, World Peace and Social Change.
Inside information
At 27 Beryl is many years younger than she looks. Running the family for her mother has left her matronly. Still living with her mother and father, unmarried, a devoted auntie. Works for her overbearing cousin in a theatrical costumiers off Baylis.
What she is doing or thinking
The book is for her evening course at Merely College. It is divided into units not chapters. Beryl hopes that the course, about the history of modern Britain, will help her to understand the people better, why they are as they are. She hopes for that even though the course, and particularly this book, bore her deeply.
Roused by a squall of laughter from the man next to her, she looks in time to see some poor man who has sat on an old lady, stand up, hit his head, and sit on someone else. The old lady laughs, shaking her head. The man he sits on scuttles away, so timid to be sat on first thing in the morning. A pretty girl opens her mouth wide. They all laugh.
Beryl lets the book settle down and laughs too. The man next to her doubles up, like he’s done himself a damage.
She wishes she understood. They are all mad. They all enjoy themselves. Underneath everything, the place has as much life in it as home.
Who needs history? She prepares to get off at Waterloo.
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87
MR BEN BEVIS
Outward appearance
An advertising executive from some 1950s sitcom. Squiggly, pockmarked, in a grey suit, pork pie hat, pipe, specs.
Inside information
Professional comedian, organizer and star of Mind the Gap, a troupe that stages comedy skits on the Underground for a fee-paying audience. Trying out Geoff, a promising amateur who might fill in when Ben has a better paying gig.
What he is doing or thinking
Ben is jealous. To go ahead and sit on a real passenger instead of the plant was brilliant! And then to sit down on Ben anyway and make it look convincing!
Ben spends two hours, three days a week in protracted ritual humiliations up and down the Tube. He gets in a fight with his tie, and eventually cuts off the ends with a pair of scissors. He gets gum stuck to the soles of his shoe, and from there all over his suit. People roar with laughter. Even for one routine, he misses it.
Then the woman next to him growls, ‘This is a put-on, isn’t it?’ The newcomer hasn’t been believed! Ben pretends that he doesn’t understand the woman, but a kind of satisfaction settles over him.
It’s a brief respite. Police get on. Ben has left the letter of permission from London Transport at home. In any case, it’s a forgery. He might have to pay a fine. He has no money. Geoff has a job, he can pay it. Ben decides to make a break for it, first chance he gets. It’s every man for himself.
The comedy never stops.
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88
DAME VITROLA FELDMOUE
Outward appearance
Mauve spectacles, henna-red hair, blue denim jacket, multi-coloured ski coat. Leans back, and growls at her neighbour.
Inside information
Famous actress, currently rehearsing The Way of the World at the National. Long acquaintance with her own profession makes her impatient with fantasists and phoneys.
She is carrying small arms in her handbag.
What she is doing or thinking
From the moment she got on, Vitrola thought she was watching a show. It was quite fascinating. Either they were very good or something had gone wrong. The way the actor sat down on two people. You couldn’t, couldn’t time a double mistake like that.
But when his second victim, the fake City gent, scuttled across to the seat next to hers, it all began to look rehearsed. She smelled it: failed actor, poncing about for free.
‘This is a put-on, isn’t it?’ she growls at him. He pretends to look blank. In case there is a hidden camera, Vitrola calculates how to raise a laugh and insult him at the same time. She smiles tigerishly. ‘You know one of these days they’ll stop giving actors benefit, and you’ll have to work for a living.’
Two policemen get on at her stop, and she looks back over her spectacles at the actor. She asks with her eyebrows: Are these part of the show too? He’s too alarmed to notice.
That tells her: the policemen are real. As real as anything gets. She stands up to go. Her guns clank.4
God, she thinks, if only we had a real Conservative government.
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Another helpful and informative 253 footnote
4 When, in October 1996, the British Government banned most handguns, Dame Vitrola emigrated permanently to the United States in protest. She became a key spokesperson for the US National Rifle Association. ‘Britain now lies defenceless before the seething masses of Europe!’ she declared at their national convention. Applause was rapturous. ‘Never say: it can’t happen here.’ She then repeatedly fired a .22 calibre pistol over the heads of the crowd, crying ‘Freedom!’ with each shot. This resulted in her prompt arrest.
89
MRS BUNNY TAIT
Outward appearance
Perhaps Italian? Calm, beautiful, in a Virgin Mary way, about 35. Tan slacks, shoes that appear to be made of varnished straw. Stares unmoving as Mind the Gap unfolds around her.
Inside information
Canadian stage manager, part Amerindian. Works in MtG for pin money (if that). Introduced Passenger 96 to the troupe. Her husband Julian is an actor at the National, but only gets walk-on parts. His biggest role was masked in a production of the Oresteia which was known to use actors normally too ugly to take lead roles. Julian is a lovely man, kind, wise, but now increasingly depressed, haunting their flat, tending the allotment.
What she is doing or thinking
She watches distracted as the routine goes wrong. Geoff’s inexperience somehow covers for it. Bunny is more concerned
with finding some way to make money. Her friend Judith takes people on London walks, but then Judith has been studying London for years. The Japanese have a plan to start exporting their art and culture. Maybe she could bone up on their theatre or something, start an agency.
The woman next to her is saying ‘…they’ll stop giving actors benefit, and you’ll have to work for a living.’
It’s like the entire country is shrinking. When Bunny arrived in 1978, London’s theatres roared, and there were punks and subsidy and yes, the DHSS.
As an Indian, Bunny has the right to live in either America or Canada. She thinks of Julian, whose rich voice would be perfect for radio, the thousands of American radio stations.
She decides. They’ll move.