He’s wearing an unobtrusively dark suit. It’s no longer hidden by the yellow jerkin, and I might not have recognised him except for the flag pinned to his lapel and the briefcase in his hand. “He’s here,” I shout, and my hands sprawl away from the grille. “He’s got back on the train.”
The only response from the grille is a blurred metallic clatter. I didn’t say that the man has the case, and now I’m sure it’s too late. My instincts send me to the train before I have a chance to think, and I dodge between the closing doors. “Let me through,” I say at once.
I didn’t have time to reach the carriage the man boarded. Nobody ahead of me seems to believe my mission is urgent. I have to thrust my pass over people’s shoulders to flash it in their faces, just long enough to leave them with an impression of officialdom. I’m crawling with sweat from the closeness of so many bodies, whose softness feels horribly vulnerable, ready to be blown apart. The carriage seems little better than airless, and I feel walled in by the tunnel, not to mention my own scarcely rational decision to pursue the man onto the train. Now I’m at the door to the next carriage, and someone is lounging against it. As I pound on the glass my heart mimics the rhythm. At last the loafer turns his sluggish apathetic head. He stares at my pass and then at me as if I might be a patient posing as a nurse, and then he slouches aside just far enough to let me sidle around the door.
I can’t see the man with the briefcase. His badge is too small to show up in the crowd, and what else is there to distinguish him? Mousy hair, bland nondescript face, dark suit—none of these stands out. My heart counts the seconds like a clock or some more lethal mechanism as I force my way along the carriage. I peer at the floor but see only people’s legs—bones that could shatter in a moment, flesh and muscles that would fill the air. I’m nearly at the first set of doors, and I crane around the partition behind the seats. There indeed is the briefcase.
I feel as though I’ve rehearsed the moment. I stoop and grab the handle, and I’m lifting the case when the train shudders in the midst of a burst of light. I’m almost used to that, because I know it means we’ve reached Moorfields. I still haven’t located the man with the flag in his lapel, but it can’t matter just now. The moment the door opens I struggle through the crowd and its reinforcements onto the platform. Where can I take the briefcase? I’m fleeing to the nearest exit when a hand grasps my shoulder. “Where do you think you’re going with that?” says a voice.
It belongs to a tall man in an unobtrusively expensive suit. The lines on his high forehead and the hint of grey in his cropped black hair may be raising his apparent age, but he seems reassuringly official. “Where’s safe?” I blurt.
“I’m asking what you’re doing with it,” he says and keeps hold of my shoulder.
“Trying to get rid of it, to dispose of it, I mean. Someone deliberately left it on the train, and not just once either. Don’t you know what that means?” I’m so desperate that I shake the case at him, and it emits an ominous metallic rattle. “Just let me—”
“You made the call.”
I don’t see how this can be an accusation, and so I say “It was me, yes.”
“Thank you, Mr Conrad.”
I’m bemused by this, even though his grip on my shoulder has begun to feel more appreciative than custodial. “How do you know my name?”
“We know everything we have to know.”
His eyes have grown so professionally blank that I say “You’re not with the railway, are you?”
“We’re responsible for this kind of situation. That’s all I can tell you.” He lets go of my shoulder and repeats “Thank you, Mr Conrad.”
Even when he holds out his hand I don’t immediately see he’s asking for the briefcase. Its reappearances have left me wary, and I say “I wonder if you’ve got some identification.”
“Don’t you think we would have?” he says and produces a wallet almost as thin as a wafer. It contains a single card with his name and his likeness and some abbreviated information. “Is that good enough for you?” he wants to know.
“Thank you, Mr Joseph,” I say and hand over the briefcase.
He doesn’t move away at once. He has to know what he’s about, which is why I didn’t panic when he lingered over questioning me—he would hardly have been putting himself at risk. There may be a trace of doubt in my eyes, since he says “Are you sure that settles it? Would you like to be there when it’s disposed of?”
“I’m sure.” Indeed, I’m growing anxious for him and the case to be gone. “You’re the authority,” I tell him. “It’s in safe hands now.”
As he heads for the nearest stairway I hear a train. I’m eager to board, and more eager for it to leave any danger behind. The doors close as I find a seat and give in to expressing relief—shaking my head, mopping my brow, letting out a loud sigh that shudders with my heartbeat. “I’ve really done it this time,” I declare.
Nobody responds except for glancing at me as if I might be a mental patient on the loose. I don’t care what they think of me; I know I’ve kept them safe. A young man in a business suit returns to reading a comic book, and a girl gazes at her extravagantly large wristwatch, which shows seven minutes to six. A woman who pushed her thin spectacles high with a forefinger lets them subside, and a man lifts one foot after the other to rub the toecaps of his shoes even shinier on his trouser cuffs. None of the passengers might be able to do any of this without me. The idea accompanies me around the loop, past Lime Street and Central Station, and prompts me to stare along the James Street platform. I see nobody with a briefcase, but the absence isn’t quite reassuring enough. As the doors start to close I jump off the train and run up the stairs to the underground bridge.
I still seem to have a task. When a train appears I stay on the platform until the doors begin to close, but I can’t see anyone suspicious. As soon as I step aboard a girl gives me a seat, and everything seems settled as the train sets off around the loop. A bald man with a tweed hat on his lap gazes at the polished toecaps of his shoes before turning over his newspaper. A bespectacled woman in a checked overcoat and with queries dangling from her earlobes is reading another copy of the paper. A young man dressed for business takes a comic book from among the documents in a cardboard folder, and a young woman in a waspishly striped sweater pushes a headphone away from one ear while. she consults her considerable wristwatch. As blackness closes around the train I see the time is seven minutes to six.
I could imagine the lights on the tunnel walls are signalling to me, and I search for some distraction inside the carriage. The headline on the front page of the bald man’s newspaper says ISLAMIC PANIC, but I’m not sure if that’s the name of a terrorist group. The bespectacled woman’s paper has its letters page facing me. One letter is entitled NO ASYLUM, which seems to be the slogan of a party called Pure Brit, and the correspondent has suggested that the party is planting bombs so as to blame Muslims and provoke a backlash against immigrants. I grow aware of a voice too small to belong to any of the passengers. It isn’t in my head; it’s on the young woman’s headphones—a recorded radio phone-in, where somebody is arguing that the bombs are the work not of Muslims or their foes but the first stages of a plan by the secret service to force the country to accept dictatorship. Another caller on the phone-in accuses the man who was credited with trying to save his fellow passengers of having planted the bomb himself. All these idle theories make me feel as if nothing is to be trusted, and I focus my attention on the young man’s comic book. The cover shows a boffin grimacing in disbelief while he tells his colleagues “It’s not that kind of time bomb. It’s a bomb that destroys time. It’ll blow the past to bits.”
“It’s nothing like that.” The idea has gone too far, and I can’t keep quiet any longer, especially since I’ve seen the truth at last. I can hear the women murmuring behind me like nurses, and I should have listened to them sooner. “That’s right, someone’s talking about us again,” I tell everyone. “But don’t you see, if
they can keep changing it we can change it too.”
Nobody appears to want to listen. They’re all gazing at the floor, even those who’ve turned towards me. “It needn’t be what any of them say happened to us,” I insist—I feel as if a voice is speaking through me. “It needn’t even be what did.”
Everyone is staring at the floor beside me. I look at last and see the briefcase. “We don’t have to be what people say just because of where we are,” I vow as I take hold of the handle. A thunderous rumble swells in my ears, and brightness flares in my eyes, but it’s on the wall of the tunnel. I mustn’t be distracted by the absence of my shadow—of anyone’s. I have to get my task right this time, and then we can head for the light, out of the tunnel.
The Decorations
“Here they are at last,” David’s grandmother cried, and her face lit up: green from the luminous plastic holly that bordered the front door and then, as she took a plump step to hug David’s mother, red with the glow from the costume of the Santa in the sleigh beneath the window. “Was the traffic that bad, Jane?”
“I still don’t drive, mummy. One of the trains was held up and we missed a connection.”
“You want to get yourself another man. Never mind, you’ll always have Davy,” his grandmother panted as she waddled to embrace him.
Her clasp was even fatter than last time. It smelled of clothes he thought could be as old as she was, and of perfume that didn’t quite disguise a further staleness he was afraid was her. His embarrassment was aggravated by a car that slowed outside the house, though the driver was only admiring the Christmas display. When his grandmother abruptly released him he thought she’d noticed his reaction, but she was peering at the sleigh. “Has he got down?” she whispered.
David understood before his mother seemed to. He retreated along the path between the flower-beds full of grass to squint past the lights that flashed MERRY CHRISTMAS above the bedroom windows. The second Santa was still perched on the roof; a wind set the illuminated figure rocking back and forth as if with silent laughter. “He’s there,” David said.
“I expect he has to be in lots of places at once.”
Now that he was nearly eight, David knew that his father had always been Santa. Before he could say as much, his grandmother plodded to gaze at the roof. “Do you like him?”
“I like coming to see all your Christmas things.”
“I’m not so fond of him. He looks too empty for my liking.” As the figure shifted in another wind she shouted “You stay up there where you belong. Never mind thinking of jumping on us.”
David’s grandfather hurried out to her, his slippers flapping on his thin feet, his reduced face wincing. “Come inside, Dora. You’ll have the neighbours looking.”
“I don’t care about the fat old thing,” she said loud enough to be heard on the roof and tramped into the house. “You can take your mummy’s case up, can’t you, David? You’re a big strong boy now.”
He enjoyed hauling the wheeled suitcase on its leash—it was like having a dog he could talk to, sometimes not only in his head—but bumping the luggage upstairs risked snagging the already threadbare carpet, and so his mother supported the burden. “I’ll just unpack quickly,” she told him. “Go down and see if anyone needs help.”
He used the frilly toilet in the equally pink bathroom and lingered until his mother asked if he was all right. He was trying to stay clear of the argument he could just hear through the salmon carpet. As he ventured downstairs his grandmother pounced on some remark so muted it was almost silent. “You do better, then. Let’s see you cook.”
He could smell the subject of the disagreement. Once he’d finished setting the table from the tray with which his grandfather sent him out of the kitchen, he and his mother saw it too: a casserole encrusted with gravy and containing a shrivelled lump of beef. Potatoes roasted close to impenetrability came with it, and green beans from which someone had tried to scrape the worst of the charring. “It’s not as bad as it looks, is it?” David’s grandmother said through her first mouthful. “I expect it’s like having a barbecue, Davy.”
“I don’t know,” he confessed, never having had one.
“They’ve no idea, these men, have they, Jane? They don’t have to keep dinner waiting for people. I expect your hubby’s the same.”
“Was, but can we not talk about him?”
“He’s learned his lesson, then. No call to make that face at me, Tom. I’m only saying Davy’s father—Oh, you’ve split up, Jane, haven’t you. Sorry about my big fat trap. Sorry Davy too.”
“Just eat what you want,” his grandfather advised him, “and then you’d best be scampering off to bed so Santa can make his deliveries.”
“We all want to be tucked up before he’s on the move,” said his grandmother before remembering to smile.
Santa had gone away like David’s father, and David was too old to miss either of them. He managed to breach the carapace of a second potato and chewed several forkfuls of dried-up beef, but the burned remains of beans defeated him. All the same, he thanked his grandmother as he stood up. “There’s a good boy,” she said rather too loudly, as if interceding with someone on his behalf. “Do your best to go to sleep.”
That sounded like an inexplicit warning, and was one of the elements that kept him awake in his bedroom, which was no larger than his room in the flat he’d moved to with his mother. Despite their heaviness, the curtains admitted a repetitive flicker from the letters ERR above the window, and a buzz that suggested an insect was hovering over the bed. He could just hear voices downstairs, which gave him the impression that they didn’t want him to know what they were saying. He was most troubled by a hollow creaking that reminded him of someone in a rocking chair, but overhead. The Santa figure must be swaying in the wind, not doing its best to heave itself free. David was too old for stories: while real ones didn’t always stay true, that wasn’t an excuse to make any up. Still, he was glad to hear his mother and her parents coming upstairs at last, lowering their voices to compensate. He heard doors shutting for the night, and then a nervous question from his grandmother through the wall between their rooms. “What’s he doing? Is he loose?”
“If he falls he falls,” his grandfather said barely audibly, “and good riddance to him if he’s getting on your nerves. For pity’s sake come to bed.”
David tried not to find this more disturbing than the notion that his parents had shared one. Rather than hear the mattress sag under the weight his grandmother had put on, he tugged the quilt over his head. His grasp must have slackened when he drifted off to sleep, because he was roused by a voice. It was outside the house but too close to the window.
It was his grandfather’s. David was disconcerted by the notion that the old man had clambered onto the roof until he realised his grandfather was calling out of the adjacent window. “What do you think you’re doing, Dora? Come in before you catch your death.”
“I’m seeing he’s stayed where he’s meant to be,” David’s grandmother responded from below. “Yes, you know I’m talking about you, don’t you. Never mind pretending you didn’t nod.”
“Get in for the Lord’s sake,” his grandfather urged, underlining his words with a rumble of the sash. David heard him pad across the room and as rapidly, if more stealthily, down the stairs. A bated argument grew increasingly stifled as it ascended to the bedroom. David had refrained from looking out of the window for fear of embarrassing his grandparents, but now he was nervous that his mother would be drawn to find out what was happening. He mustn’t go to her; he had to be a man, as she kept telling him, and not one like his father, who ran off to women because there was so little to him. In time the muttering beyond the wall subsided, and David was alone with the insistence of electricity and the restlessness on the roof.
When he opened his eyes the curtains had acquired a hem of daylight. It was Christmas Day. Last year he’d run downstairs to handle all the packages addressed to him under the tree and guess
at their contents, but now he was wary of encountering his grandparents by himself in case he betrayed he was concealing their secret. As he lay hoping that his grandmother had slept off her condition, he heard his mother in the kitchen. “Let me make breakfast, mummy. It can be a little extra present for you.”
He didn’t venture down until she called him. “Here’s the Christmas boy,” his grandmother shouted as if he was responsible for the occasion, and dealt him such a hug that he struggled within himself. “Eat up or you won’t grow.”
Her onslaught had dislodged a taste of last night’s food. He did his best to bury it under his breakfast, then volunteered to wash up the plates and utensils and dry them as well. Before he finished she was crying “Hurry up so we can see what Santa’s brought. I’m as excited as you, Davy.”
He hoped she was only making these remarks on his behalf, not somehow growing younger than he was. In the front room his grandfather distributed the presents while the bulbs on the tree flashed patterns that made David think of secret messages. His grandparents had wrapped him up puzzle books and tales of heroic boys, his mother’s gifts to him were games for his home computer. “Thank you,” he said, sometimes dutifully.
It was the last computer game that prompted his grandmother to ask “Who are you thanking?” At once, as if she feared she’d spoiled the day for him, she added “I expect he’s listening.”
“Nobody’s listening,” his grandfather objected. “Nobody’s there.”
“Don’t say things like that, Tom, not in front of Davy.”
“That isn’t necessary, mummy. You know the truth, don’t you, David? Tell your grandmother.”
“Santa’s just a fairy tale,” David said, although it felt like robbing a younger child of an illusion. “Really people have to save up to buy presents.”
“He had to know when we’ve so much less coming in this Christmas,” said his mother. “You see how good he’s being. I believe he’s taken it better than I did.”
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