by Peter Millar
Still feeling his way along the wall, he edged past the door. There was a round metal handle in the middle. Maybe there was another door. Barely two metres further the wall turned at right angles. Stark felt his way along it. Five, maybe, six metres long, then another right-angled turn. Then he bumped into something, hard, round, metal. Stark found what he had been praying for: a second door. With an identical, round handle.
Here too no light leaked through. But was it locked? And if not, what or who would he find on the other side. He leaned his ear against the cold metal, but could hear nothing beyond the faint hum that he had almost come to ignore as part of the background. At the same time he heard the scraping of chair on floor again from beyond the door on the other side. Any minute now, Stark realised, they could come to get him.
He had no alternative. With his back to the door – just about the worst position possible for opening one – he turned the handle and edged it open, expecting at any moment a shout of discovery, a flood of light. Instead a rumble from the distant throat of a snoring giant turned into an ear-splitting rattling roar and a whistle of wind behind his back throwing him forward onto the concrete floor. He got up and in the low lighting beyond realised immediately why the background noise had seemed so familiar. He was underground alright. In The Underground, a service facility for the Tube.
For a second his dilated pupils were confused by even the glimmer of light from the vestigial illumination in the train tunnel. The door opened on to a ledge recessed into the tunnel wall for about three metres before descending at either end some sixty centimetres to the tunnel floor. He had found an escape route. Of a sort. Which direction hardly mattered; either way had to lead to a station. What worried him was whether a train could pass him. He doubted it. And then there was the high voltage power rails. To touch them accidentally meant certain death. He listened for the sound of an approaching train. Nothing. How frequently did they run? He had no idea which line he was on. Some ran more frequently than others.
He was not even sure what time of day it was. With his hands tied behind his back, his watch was useless. In rush hour there could be trains hurtling through the tunnels every three minutes on average. But fewer later in the day. How long had he been out? If he was lucky there could be more than ten minutes between trains. Not enough to make the distance between stations. But in one direction he could see another recessed ledge in the wall. Another service facility. That decided it.
Making his way as quickly as he could – he dared not run in case he stumbled or fell without the use of his hands to steady him. He doubted if there was more than ten centimetres clearance between a passing train and the wall. Anyone who tried to flatten themselves against the wall would find the experience a mite too literal for comfort.
He had heard that if caught in the path of an approaching train, it was best to lie down flat in between the tracks but he doubted that was a safe prospect in the tunnel where both inner rails carried the voltage. Even if the clearance was sufficient to allow a man to lie beneath it, he would have to remain perfectly still to avoid touching either.
He tried counting off the seconds but realised there was no point. If a train came, it came. And then he saw it, dimly, ahead of him, a faint glimmer of expanded light as the tunnel straightened out. He breathed a sigh of relief. A station. It had to be. He could make out now where the tunnel opened out to the platform, and in the distance the dark hole where it narrowed down and once again became a tight circular tube. The platform was barely fifty metres away, closer than he had dared hope at first, but not quite close enough for total comfort. It was not as well lit as normal, even considering the recent brownouts, and seemed empty. Odd. It had been barely daybreak when he had arrived at St Bride’s. How long had he been out? It couldn’t be longer than a few hours at most. But he would worry about that later. He was almost safe. Relief flooded through him. A moment too soon.
Even as he relaxed, the rumbling began again, unmistakably behind him and rapidly rising in volume, a harsh, metallic sound accompanied by a high-pitched zinging from the rails. Stark cursed, picked up his feet and ran, his tied hands flapping behind him as uselessly as the rope that dangled from them as he rocked dangerously from side to side. Any second he could topple over and fall onto the tracks to be either electrocuted instantaneously or seconds later sliced in two by the speeding train. Why wasn’t the damn thing slowing down? They were approaching a station, after all. Why had they turned the goddamn station lights down? The only illumination he could see was a baleful little green light near the end of the tunnel, which he realised with an extra frisson of horror was a ‘go’ signal. He wanted to look behind but didn’t dare. The platform was still metres away. To make matters worse there were no steps; he would have to climb up on to it.
The noise was deafening now. Stark felt a blind panicky urge to leap out into the middle of the tracks waving his arms. He knew it was the sort of urge that inspired men to suicide. And then he saw it, just this side of the platform, four metres in from the end of the tunnel, right underneath the glowing signal that illuminated it in ghostly green like a sarcophagus cut into the Victorian brickwork: a niche barely big enough to hold a man. A refuge, they called them. Now he knew why.
Stark hurled himself into it and flattened his back against the wall, blood pounding in his veins and his chest heaving. Not a microsecond too soon, as he watched the red-painted front of the driver’s compartment hurtle towards him out of the dark and screech thunderously past his face, only centimetres away.
His heart palpitated, his ribcage rose and fell with snatched short intakes of breath as the speed of the train’s passage sucked the air behind it. His heaving lungs ached but it was his brain that was reeling as it registered what he had seen. The commuters inside. Not their faces. Their clothes. And the adverts, glimpsed too fast to register anything but the very fact of their existence. The colours, the light, the intensity of the bright, constant neon, clear and white not yellow and flickering.
And the train itself: its front had not been grimy red but shining silver and bright blue, as it flashed in front of his eyes. And above all his final view of it as it sped past the platform without stopping, the defacing scrawl, as unimaginable in itself as the other world inside, of orange spray-paint graffiti in metre-high lettering across its rear end: LICK MY ARSE.
Stark hauled himself up onto a platform bathed in the right sort of lighting for the world he had found himself in, a twilight world. His hands were still tied behind his back. Otherwise he would have put his head in them. And laughed. Or maybe cried.
He shouldn’t have been surprised, he told himself. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t known places like this existed. It was just that it was easier for him, as it was for everybody else, for the state and the party, to simply forget about them.
But there was no arguing with the big letters picked out in blue enamel on the white tiled wall in front of Harry Stark’s face, between signs warning of air raids that had long since ceased and behind them faded posters advertising shows that were already a poignant memory when the last passengers had alighted here: LEICESTER SQUARE.
Chapter 41
Harry Stark raised his eyes to the curved tiled ceiling of Leicester Square Underground station. It was as if it was still all there, a vanished world above his head. As if he could walk to the end of the platform and take an escalator up into theatre land, a world of bright lights and self-indulgent fantasies, the heart of a bustling cosmopolitan metropolis instead of a wasteland of scrub grass growing over barren foundations and a concrete wall that marked the end of the world.
The white space on the big map on his office wall was like the uncharted ocean on ancient mariners’ charts with florid script proclaiming ‘here be dragons’. Now he had seen one of the dragons close up, a great blue and silver worm snaking underground beneath the streets of the city unbeknown to the people above. He was not on the other side of the wall. What had once been Leicester Square was still, nomin
ally, in the capital of the EDR, except that it lay next to the ‘dead zone’, the so-called no-man’s-land between the two walls that formed the Anti-Capitalist Protection Barrier.
Stark walked along the platform, wondering at the ancient adverts, the wartime public information posters, relics of a world that had already long vanished by the time the ‘barrier’ had been built. His father had known this world, had seen its passing and learned not to mourn it but to welcome the new. And then the new had let him down.
Once upon a time, he now dimly remembered hearing, the Westminster trains that passed through a station in the ‘other half’ of the city had slowed down as they passed through, even opened the doors on the off chance that any ‘fellow Londoner’ might have found their way into the closed station and made a dash for a ‘freedom train’. Armed border guards patrolled the platforms. Then a more convenient solution had been found: the station entrances had been concreted over, the signs that marked them removed. The memory, and with it the face, of this ‘other’ Underground had been erased.
They have forgotten us, thought Stark, as surely – if not more so – as we have forgotten them. The difference is that they can afford to. He was as sure at that moment as he had ever been that those who dreamed of reunification were living in a fool’s paradise; or a fool’s hell.
He was so lost in his reverie that when once again rattling thunder announced the arrival of another train he threw himself backwards in startled shock, jarring his shoulder. He looked to see what he had bumped into and found a pair of ancient vending machines fixed to the wall. One advertised a ‘full pint and a half of milk in every bar’ of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate, the other once dispensed maps of the Tube, a very different Tube from the one Stark knew. Both had been vandalised, long ago, perhaps even during the war when Londoners had sheltered down here. But for all his police training, this was one piece of attempted larceny Stark was grateful for.
The tray that would once have delivered a chocolate bar had been prised out by a jemmy, and now jutted out from the machine in a mess of twisted and jagged metal. A jagged edge that Stark had painfully fallen against, but was, in the circumstances, just what he needed. Turning his back to the machine he lifted his hands as high as he could behind his back and slid the ropes that bound them over the tray. It was difficult. Particularly because he could not see what he was doing. The idea was to press the ropes down on the metal edge and saw, but every so often his position slipped and the metal tore his wrists causing him to swear loudly. But he could feel the strands gradually tearing and ripping until he could pull his hands a good ten centimetres apart and saw easily through the remainder.
Stark sighed with unexpected bliss – like a man freed from prison – when the last strand parted and he was able to bring his hands, albeit bleeding and aching, in front of him. He discarded the ropes on the platform floor. All he had to do now – all, he almost laughed! – was find a way out. At that point he realised that although he knew where he was in theory, he had no practicable idea how to get back above ground.
He was tired, he suddenly realised, and hungry and thirsty. More in hope than anticipation, he turned the ratchet on the chocolate machine. In vain, not that it would have been at its best after forty years. But that did not stop Stark thumping the machine in exasperation. To his surprise, however, similar abuse of the second machine produced results, in the form of a yellowing Tube map that fell to the ground at his feet. He picked it up: a souvenir, he thought wryly, as he opened it out to reveal a map of the London Underground that resembled nothing he had ever seen – a great sprawl of a network, nearly four times the size of the Tube he was familiar with since childhood. There was a similar map he now noticed, further along the platform wall, but there was something magical in holding a copy in his hands.
The black lettering of the sign on the wall indicated Leicester Square was on the Northern Line. The Northern Line that Stark knew, and travelled on regularly, was a three-pronged affair centred on Old Street: one spur ran north and west via the Angel to Highgate, another north and east to Finsbury Park and a third, the one Stark was most familiar with, south of the river via London Bridge to the Elephant and Castle. Once, he now saw, the southern spur extended onwards and onwards out into the distant southwest suburbs of Wimbledon and Morden.
The only question now was how the hell would he get out. It made no sense to retrace his steps to his dungeon, even if he had wanted to. He looked at the watch on his wrist, which he could now see clearly for the first time. It showed 9.15. In the morning? It had to be. It had been 6.30 a.m. when he had turned up at St Bride’s. He had no idea how he had been moved from the room beneath the crypt to a disused service facility on a Tube line that was supposed to be inaccessible. But there was no way he could make any further progress through the tunnels. The trains were clearly running. And they would be on rush-hour timetables.
Even as the thought crossed his mind a third of the blue and silver dragons sped through the platform, this one more covered in graffiti than either of the others: meaningless brightly coloured lettering that Stark could have taken for decoration had it not been so totally anarchic. One bit of proof, he mused, that some of what we are told about the evils of the society on the other side is not wholly invented.
Even so, it reinforced his belief that to go back into the tunnels was madness. Could there still be an exit here? He knew roughly the area above ground where Leicester Square had once been. It was only yesterday that he had driven past it with the American. But there was nothing there even to indicate where once a Tube station entrance might have been. The labourers who had eradicated it had done their work as thoroughly as the men with the airbrush who had taken Trotsky out of the history books.
A map of the network, even one that his own government would have considered seditious, was not going to help him escape from it. At least not obviously. An exploration of the passageways marked ‘Way out’ was a surreal excursion into darkened halls that were all at once strange, alien and eerily familiar. The low-level lighting on the platforms leaked out into the concourse but where there should once have been escalators up, there was a wall of breeze blocks. There was no way out here. Not now. Not ever. Staring at this manifestation of the Wall that extended even underground, Stark found it hard to believe there ever had been.
The only alternative indicated was signs to the Piccadilly Line. The Piccadilly, Stark knew, was the old name for what in his city was now called the Holborn Line, for the obvious reason that it no longer went as far as what had once been Piccadilly Circus. The corridor that led towards it was unblocked but it could hardly do any good; the Piccadilly lay deeper. The signs pointed to old wooden escalators leading down, though it had been decades since they had ever worked. Almost certainly passengers from the lower line had had to pass through this same upper concourse to the exit.
There was a remote possibility that there was a separate exit, but even if there was, it had undoubtedly been blocked too. Still, he had nothing to lose. There was something irresistible about exploring this surreal underground world. The light diminished with every step and as it faded, one by one, the wooden-framed advertisements that lined the escalator walls dimmed into obscurity. Stark strained his eyes to make out decades-old adverts: brands he still recognised from television – Coca-Cola, Schweppes, Ford – mingled with others – Robinson’s Barley Water, Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles – which Stark assumed had either gone bankrupt or perhaps, because of their geographic location, become People’s Own Enterprises.
Here and there, like totems from some historic Roman war, public information posters conveyed warnings from an ancient era: the officers, army, navy and air force, with their Brylcreemed hair wafting cigarettes and swapping boastful banter around the smug seductive blonde in an armchair: Careless Talk Costs Lives, the motto warned. It was the slogan his mother still remembered, the one that half a century later was still too close for comfort. Stark descended into darkness.
; As he reached the bottom of the escalator, a faint glow returned, a pale bluish light similar to that on the platform above. It was like being underwater, in some cold northern sea, except that the light on the white rectangular tiles of the concourse wall made it look more like the bowels of some vast but disused municipal swimming baths. Stark took the corridor that led to the right, signed ‘Piccadilly Line, Westbound,’ with beneath it a list of stations that existed only in his imagination: Piccadilly Circus, Hyde Park Corner, Knightsbridge.
The blue light emanated from a series of low wattage bulbs on the platform ceiling. The emergency level power supply provided for safety purposes on the Northern Line platform had to be on the same circuit as that down here. At the platform’s western end, rather than the gaping black hole of a tunnel, another wall of concrete blocks crossed the track, as high as the ceiling. This was it, then, the definitive end of the line.
And then he saw it. The concrete barrier closed the western exit only. Obviously trains on the renamed Holborn Line no longer came this far, even though the surface above was still on the ‘right’ side of the Wall, because as he had surmised there was no way up that didn’t intersect with the concourse for the Northern Line platforms. In any case the land above was derelict, the Wall and the watchtowers too brutally evident for the state to encourage its citizens to come and gape.
But the eastern tunnel was unblocked. That had to mean that if he followed it, not only would there be no danger of a train passing, but he ought theoretically to be able to get to Covent Garden station. To his fellow citizens Covent Garden was the end of the line, one stop beyond Holborn, which had been maintained for the dowdy old opera house with its never-ending regurgitations of Mussorgsky and Brecht and for the old fruit and vegetable market.