by Geoff Ryman
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233
MR MALIK BEGUM
Outward appearance
Handsome businessman, dark suit, camel-hair coat. Black hair rolls back in waves. Deep circles under his eyes. Rubs them, seems to crumple, then sits up straight, in power again.
Inside information
Owns The Sharma Restaurant, near Lambeth North. It is well appointed, with glass panels frosted with Hindu motifs, though Mr Begum is Muslim. The restaurant is almost always empty, but keeps large numbers of people in employment.
It launders money for gentlemen in Soho. Last night, they took Mr Begum to dinner. It went on too long, he became suspicious; they tried to get him drunk then they asked him to work through a ludicrous sum. His percentage would keep his family in comfort—but he didn’t know what would happen if he refused.
It’s such a risk. No one will believe that sum for food, table-cloths, maintenance. He spent all night trying to work it out and decided: the only way the business would move that much cash was if it were sold. He has to close it. Then that will be it, he promises, he will have no more dealings with them.
What he is doing or thinking
Mr Begum gets out at Lambeth, and to his horror sees his wife in the next car. The doors close, and the train pulls away.
What does he do? The platform is in strange disorder. People from his own car blow party favours. At the far end, two policemen interrogate some tourists. Their radios squawk. They all suddenly look down the tunnel in the direction his wife has gone.
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MR PAUL HENRY
Outward appearance
Pretty man in his early thirties. A puff of blond, thinning hair. Brown winter coat, olive suit, brown wool tie. Stares smiling.
Inside information
One of the managers of the Queen of Tarts bakery on the other side of Waterloo Road. Lives with his mum. The only survivor of Donald Nielsen’s attentions.
What he is doing or thinking
Paul is wondering why the meat pies don’t sell. People buy them once, shudder, and ever afterwards order the spinach and aubergine.
A boyfriend ate one once and said it tasted like burnt tyres. Paul can cook every other sort of pie, even savoury cheese. But not meat.
He has this weird notion that he is somehow tainted. He liked Donald Nielsen; he was older, stable, kindly. Nielsen cooked him dinner, and plied him with booze and then Paul woke up underwater in the bath with a tie being tightened around his neck. Donald apologized, helped him out of the bath, and dried him down. It was only the next day that Paul began to think that someone had tried to kill him and that he had allowed someone to get away with trying to kill him. Paul stayed silent, until he saw the papers. The police were thunderstruck. Why had he waited until now? Paul still doesn’t know.
Donald Nielsen cooked him meat pies. He cooked other things as well. The train stops at Waterloo. Paul gets out and a woman in blue, head held high, sweeps past him. For some reason, the platform sways underfoot and Paul has to sit down.
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MR TRISTAN SAWYER
Outward appearance
A once handsome face emerges from folds of fat. Grizzled hair. Has his FT out, but isn’t reading.
Inside information
Financial forecaster for a large corporation. Used to be a colleague and the best friend of Richard Thomlinson. Works late most nights. Has the confidence of the Managing Director. At dinner last night the MD asked Tristan if he knew why Richard had left. Tristan didn’t say.
What he is doing or thinking
Thinking he really should give Richard a call. Tristan was very angry with him for getting himself infected. Silly trollop, there were plenty of nice men who would have fallen all over themselves to have a relationship with him. In his younger days.
The Corp sent them both out to the Falmouth office, and they had to share the company flat. It had been fun, getting drunk, pretending to be het. He really needed watching over, that boy. Overdid the sauce at times.
It was pathetic after he resigned. He didn’t realize he no longer had the same hold over people he once had: not as pretty, not as successful. It really was a bit difficult introducing him at dinner parties: this is my dropped-out friend Richard.
He’s as strong as a horse of course, and will be fine. Anyway, Tristan has to fly out to Brunei next week. Maybe he’ll give him a call after that. Just to show he isn’t avoiding him or anything.
Tristan suddenly sees Richard’s face as it was in Cornwall: happy, bold, smiling, beautiful. He tries to dismiss it, and can’t.
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MS JULIE GLUCK
Outward appearance
Stylish woman in late middle age. Skin like a walnut, honey hair wrapped in a slinky patterned scarf, clean blue jeans, brown nylon stockings visible in cleavage of tiny shoes. A painting is turned to face the wall. Canvas has been left unstapled at the back; the wood is badly joined.
Inside information
Runs No Bars Gallery, a space on Lower Marsh. Friends stage openings, drink cheap wine, skittishly look for critics who never arrive, and then leave the pictures on the walls for two weeks in the locked and closed ex-café. Nobody bothers to steal them. It’s called art.
What she is doing or thinking
Wondering how she can face carrying the painting through the streets. It is an impasto portrait of female genitalia.
‘I’m a heterosexual Mapplethorpe,’ said the artist, Jeremy. Some hope. He’s always been a sad little fuck, the kind of kid who gets beaten up. Julie has always found him physically repulsive; she didn’t know that he was obsessed with prostitutes.
What faces the wall is quite simply the worst single thing Julie has ever seen in her life. Muddy with paint, hideous to look at, poorly mounted, it involves an inserted and lit candle and is called True Love.
‘I wanted to celebrate the endless variety of whores,’ says Jeremy. Sure. That’s why all the paintings look the same.
The train whines into Waterloo. Julie stands, adjusts her headscarf and suddenly realizes she’s not going to carry that thing out. With an air of delicate nonchalance, she turns and leaves it to its fate.
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MR BILL HAVERS
Outward appearance
Burly man, mid-thirties, curly hair, in slacks, soft shoes. Reading The Daily Mail.
Inside information
Pharmacist for a small chemist’s shop in Kennington Road. Has been troubled by a series of unskilled, unfriendly shop assistants. Until Bertie arrived.
Bertie is nineteen, from a family in the garment trade. She isn’t pretty, but she is remarkably cheerful and energetic, with a blunt nose and freckles. For some reason, their senses of humour mesh. She tells jokes about her boyfriends or family. Her uncle Joe is an unapologetic Stalinist who still hopes for a return of Communism. Her aunt Ruby saw off thieves by chucking her stock of fruit and veg at them.
They even went out together to see Diana Ross. Bill’s wife was worried until she met her. ‘I was wondering why you were so much more cheerful lately,’ his wife said.
Bill replied, ‘It’s just nice working with such nice people.’
Bertie’s brother was convicted of causing an affray. The original charge was assault. He’s big, cheerful, but loses his temper. Bertie asked if Bill couldn’t try to get him a job in the shop. Something told him: no.
What he is doing or thinking
He’s agonizing over it. He would hate to turn Bertie down, and hate even more to lose her friendship. But someone with a temper dealing with customers? He can’t imagine what Mr Kumar would say. He can’t ask. It’s not right.
The train slows. He’s going to have to say no. With a sense of loss, almost of doom, he folds away his paper.
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MR CHARLES WRIGHT
Outward appearance
Unshaven, plump older black man with twists of silver in his hair. Green track suit bottoms, working-class cap, trainers. Sits holding a W. H. Smith bag with a CD in it.
Inside information
Took early retirement from Lloyds. The payout wasn’t quite sufficient. Has worried too much about finances since. He’s distracted.
This morning he woke up and realized that he had forgotten his wife’s birthday. Paule makes such a big fuss over occasions. He pretended to be asleep, as she got ready to go out to her cleaning job. He waited until he heard the door close and then got up, ill with the earliness, did his morning chores, and nipped out of the house.
He went to the concourse at Waterloo Station to buy some chocolates. The confectioner’s was closed. Then he thought: I’ll buy her a CD single for a card and say I’m getting tickets for a show. But Our Price was closed as well. In a panic, he headed across the river, to Charing Cross. He had a coffee until W. H. Smith opened. Saw nothing she might like. Bought Now That’s What I Call Music 30.
What he is doing or thinking
Getting back on at Embankment, he saw his wife flash past in Car 5, followed by her friend Mary Wallis in Car 6. Finally made it into Car 7.
Which means he’ll have to get out at Waterloo, or they’ll see him. He’ll have to run all the way home and hope that Mary and Paule will stop to talk.
Happy birthday.
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MISS CHERL JONES
Outward appearance
About 24, hair in stripes of different shades of blonde pulled back by hair grip. Black jumper, red bodywarmer, blue suede hiking boots, all spotless. Large cloth bag with ROCK GEEK logo.
She sits like a stack of precariously balanced china. She seems to be looking permanently upwards because of the tilt of the tip of her nose. Her upper lip looks numb.
Inside information
Dental nurse. The gear is a disguise. She’ll bounce back into the practice and breathlessly tell them she just got off the train from her especially long skiing holiday in France. In fact, she is returning from plastic surgery.
What she is doing or thinking
She is completely occupied simply with sitting on a train. She feels exposed, as if the top layer of skin has been peeled away (it has). Are people looking?
Cherl is convinced that she is now extraordinarily beautiful. She glances sideways in the reflecting windows and has this confirmed. She looks just like Sharon Stone. She feels nervous and joyful all at once. Her chin used to jut out towards her long and downward turning nose. She looked like a nutcracker.
Now she wonders if a career in modelling might not be possible. She crosses her legs and holds her hands aloft in the air, to judge the effect. Her whole life will change.
She only wishes her face wasn’t so cold and heavy. She stands up at Waterloo with a flourish. Her feet pluck a pathway down the aisle, as if she were being married to a new self.
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MR STUART COWE
Outward appearance
Pale, ageing man, grimly chewing gum. Ribbed white pullover in stretched ruffles around the bottom edge. Shoulder length blond/grey hair. Grey woollen hat with row of red stars. Lumpy silver ring on finger. Sits like knock-kneed schoolgirl, a bloated hardback notebook on his lap.
Inside information
A compulsive diarist. Stuart cannot help himself writing down every aspect of his life. He feels something akin to terror if he cannot, as if life is leaking away. The current notebook is two weeks old.
Works in a cramped electronics retailer east of Waterloo. Gets up at 5.30 AM to record the previous evening’s events.
What he is doing or thinking
Has recorded the morning’s ironing and television news, and has moved on to his train journey.
Dear Bill
it says at the top of the current page. Every page starts like a letter to fool anyone who sees him writing.
Sitting opposite me is a rather pathetic specimen of manhood very skinny with bulbous nose and buck teeth in a blue shirt with diamond patterns and clean blue jeans probably married. Trainers have grease mark along one edge. My tummy is burning from the bacon. I got off schedule and wolfed it down. This is because I did not sleep with worry. I sit here fuming about bloody Ian reorganising my shelving, but there is no communication at that place. All this angst is such a waste of energy…
Unlike his diaries.
The woman next to him is leaning over the page. He rears back, snorts, and snaps the book shut.
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MISS MARY SHERRATT
Outward appearance
Woman, late twenties. Stretch cord slacks, pointy lace-up boots, enormous fluffy blue hat, matching blue scarf, art nouveau brooch. Hair short, black, in a feather cut.
Inside information
Works part-time for the National Dysphasia and Dysgraphia Society, an underfunded room in the ex-nursery of a housing estate behind Westminster Bridge Road. An accident prompted a small stroke: Mary is dysgraphic. She cannot turn speech into writing. She also has a slight dysphasic speech impediment. She’s good at accounts, fashion, make-up and shoplifting. She knows precisely how pretty she is, and how much of the prettiness is contrived. Part of her feels even the prettiness is false.
What she is doing or thinking
Trying to solve the mystery of what the man next to her is doing. What it must be like to read and write. What on earth can he find to write about on a train? Is it for work? He must have to work very hard. She feels sorry for him and wonders if being dysgraphic means she has escaped some hardships.
Suddenly, the man snaps the book shut and bloats like an angry bullfrog. She wants to tell him: it’s all right, I couldn’t read anything. He flounces off; she looks around for something to do…and hears a merry wheezing sound.
A Chinese lady is blowing a party favour. A bottle full of brown fluid flashes between people along with plastic cups. Who needs boring old words…and boring old people? There’s a party! Mary moves up the carriage to join in.
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MRS HOKIKO McTAVISH
Outward appearance
Young Japanese woman. Crisp, plaid jacket, white blouse, black skirt. Everything looks brand new. Reads a letter with calm deliberation.
Inside information
Hokiko was a lecturer in business law at Moshiba-Electronics University in Kyoto. While doing research at Adventure Capital, she met William McTavish, a fleshy, aggressive analyst with blond hair.
Her mother finally persuaded Hokiko’s father to accept the marriage, and frequently visits England to make sure Hokiko is happy. Hokiko wonders if she is.
What she is doing or thinking
The letter is from the Billericay Building Society. They are about to forcibly repossess her home.
Last year the Billericay began to write to a Mr Shum and a Miss Fritt at Hokiko’s address, reminding them that they were missing mortgage payments. Hokiko replied several times explaining that neither of those people lived at 92 Harrow Court, nor had the property ever been mortgaged to the Billericay.
Further letters were addressed to The Occupant. ‘If you are not Mr Shum or Miss Fritt, do you rent from them? Do you know where they can be contacted?’
Today, the Billericay has served notice of repossession. William thinks it’s a huge joke and laughs. Hokiko is afraid to come home and find the flat locked and empty. She is ashamed: they have as good as called her a liar.
How, Hokiko wonders, does a company manage to mortgage a property without knowing its address? How do they manage to mortgage it to non-existent people? And why do they never read letters?
Rude, stupid, be
wilderingly incompetent: it’s what her father says.
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MS MARINA PENSBURY
Outward appearance
Corkscrew hair, age somewhere between early and late thirties. Woollen tan matching jumper and skirt, large tan overcoat. Listening intently to her neighbour. Then a sudden, withdrawing shift of body language.
Inside information
Works in HM Customs and Excise, well north of Waterloo. There is something in Marina’s timeless looks, professional dress, and sympathetic manner that means she is forever receiving confidences. People tell her about their anal warts; their snoring, their dislike of colleagues, how they changed their names when their father was convicted of child abuse.