“Valerie Mason and Steve Blythe. Whatever we’re doing, it’s keeping us away from the phone, so please leave your name and number and the date and time and we’ll tell you what we were up to when we call you back . . .” Though the message was less than six months old, it and Valerie’s giggle at the end of it sounded worn by too much playback. Once the beep had stuttered four times on the way to uttering its longer tone, he spoke.
“Val? Valerie? It’s me. I’m just about to start the tunnel walk. Sorry we had a bit of a tiff, but I’m glad you didn’t come after all. You were right, I should send her the maintenance and then object. Let them have to explain to the court instead of me. Are you in the darkroom? Come and find out who this is, will you? Don’t just listen if you’re hearing me. Be fair.”
Quite a pack jogged between the booths at that moment, the man to his immediate left taking time to emit a triumphal hoot before announcing to the ticket seller “Aids for AIDS”. Blythe turned his head and the phone to motion the woman behind him to pass, because if he stopped talking for more than a couple of seconds the machine would take him to have rung off, but the official in the booth ahead of him poked out his head, which looked squashed flat by his peaked cap. “Quick as you can. Thousands more behind you.”
The woman began jogging to encourage Blythe, shaking both filled bags of her ample red singlet. “Get a move on, lover. Give your stocks and shares a rest.”
Her companion, who seemed to have donned a dwarf’s T-shirt by mistake, entered the jogging competition, her rampant stomach bobbing up and down more than the rest of her. “Put that back in your trousers or you’ll be having a heart attack.”
At least their voices were keeping the tape activated. “Hold on if you’re there, Val. I hope you’ll say you are,” Blythe said, using two fingers to extract a fiver from the other pocket of his slacks. “I’m just going through the booth.”
The official frowned his disagreement, and Blythe breathed hard into the phone while he selected a charity to favour with his entrance fee. “Are you sure you’re fit?” the official said.
Blythe imagined being banned from the walk on the grounds of ill health, when it was by far his quickest route home. “Fitter than you sitting in a booth all day,” he said, not as lightly as he’d meant to, and smoothed the fiver on the counter. “Families in Need will do me.”
The official wrote the amount and the recipient on a clipboard with a slowness which suggested he was still considering whether to let Blythe pass, and Blythe breathed harder. When the official tore most of a ticket off a roll and slapped it on the counter Blythe felt released, but the man stayed him with a parting shot. “You won’t get far with that, chum.”
The phone had worked wherever Blythe had taken it, just as the salesman had promised. In any case, he was still 200 yards short of the tunnel entrance, into which officials with megaphones were directing the crowd. “Just had to get my ticket, Val. Listen, you’ve plenty of time to post the cheque, you’ve almost an hour. Only call me back as soon as you hear this so I know you have, will you? Heard it, I mean. That’s if you don’t pick it up before I ring off, which I hope you will, answer, that’s to say, that’s why I’m droning on. I should tell you the envelope’s inside my blue visiting suit, not the office suit, the one that says here’s your accountant making a special effort so why haven’t you got your accounts together. Can you really not hear it’s me? You haven’t gone out, have you?”
By now his awareness was concentrated in his head, so that he didn’t notice that his pace had been influenced by the urgency of his speech until the upper lip of the tunnel swayed to a halt above him. Hot bare arms brushed his in passing as the megaphones began to harangue him. “Keep it moving, please,” one crackled, prompting its mate to declare “No stopping now till the far side.” An elderly couple faltered and conferred before returning to the booths, but Blythe didn’t have that option. “That’s you with the phone,” a third megaphone blared.
“I know it’s me. I don’t see anybody else with one.” This was meant to amuse Blythe’s new neighbours, none of whom betrayed any such response. Not by any means for the first time, though less often since he’d met Valerie, he wished he’d kept some words to himself. “I’m starting the walk now. Please, I’m serious, ring me back the moment you hear this, all right? I’m ringing off now. If I haven’t heard from you in fifteen minutes I’ll call back,” he said, and was in the tunnel.
Its shadow was a solid chill at which his body was uncertain whether or not to shiver, considering the heat which was building up in the tunnel. At least he felt cool enough to itemize his surroundings, something he liked to do whenever he was confronted by anywhere unfamiliar, though he’d driven through the tunnel several times a week for most of twenty years. Its two lanes accommodated five people abreast now, more or less comfortably if you discounted their body heat. Six feet above them on either side was a railed-off walkway for the use of workmen, with no steps up to either that Blythe had ever been able to locate. Twenty feet overhead was the peak of the arched roof, inset with yard-long slabs of light randomly punctuated with slabs of brick. No doubt he could count them if he wanted to calculate how far he’d gone or had still to go, but just now the sight of several hundred heads bobbing very slowly towards the first curve summed up the prospect vividly enough. Apart from the not quite synchronized drumming of a multitude of soles on concrete and their echoes, the tunnel was almost silent except for the squawks of the megaphones beyond the entrance and the occasional audible breath.
The two women who’d addressed Blythe at the booths were ahead of him, bouncing variously. Maybe they’d once been as slim as his wife Lydia used to be, he thought, not that there was much left of the man she’d married either, or if there was it was buried under all the layers of the person he’d become. The presence of the women, their abundant sunlamped flesh and determined perfume and their wagging buttocks wrapped in satin, reminded him of too much it would do him no good to remember, and he might have let more walkers overtake him if it hadn’t been for the pressure looming at his back. That drove him to step up his pace, and he’d established a regular rhythm when his trousers began to chirp.
More people than he was prepared for stared at him, and he felt bound to say “Just my phone” twice. So much for the ticket seller’s notion that it wouldn’t work in the tunnel. Blythe drew it from his pocket without breaking his stride and ducked one ear to it as he unfolded it. “Hello, love. Thanks for saving my – ”
“Less of the slop, Stephen. It’s a long time since that worked.”
“Ah.” He faltered, and had to think which foot he was next putting forward. “Lydia. Apologies. My mistake. I thought – ”
“I had enough of your mistakes when we were together, and your apologies, and what you think.”
“That pretty well covers it, doesn’t it? Were you calling to share anything else with me, or was that it?”
“I wouldn’t take that tone with me, particularly now.”
“Don’t, then,” Blythe said, a form of response he remembered as having once amused her. “If you’ve something to say, spit it out. I’m waiting for a call.”
“Up to your old tricks, are you? Can’t she stand you never going anywhere without that thing either? Where are you, in the pub as usual trying to calm yourself down?”
“I’m perfectly calm. I couldn’t be calmer,” Blythe said as though that might counteract the effect she was having on him. “And I may tell you I’m on the charity walk.”
Was that a chorus of ironic cheers behind him? Surely they weren’t aimed at him, even if they sounded as unimpressed as Lydia, who said “Never did begin at home for you, did it? Has your fancy woman found that out yet?”
He could have pounced on Lydia’s syntax again, except that there were more important issues. “I take it you’ve just spoken to her.”
“I haven’t and I’ve no wish to. She’s welcome to you and all the joy you bring, but she won’t hear me symp
athizing. I didn’t need to speak to her to know where you’d be.”
“Then you were wrong, weren’t you? And as long as we’re discussing Valerie, maybe you and your solicitor friend ought to be aware she makes a lot less than he does now he’s a partner in his firm.”
“Watch it, big boy.”
That was the broader-buttocked of the women. He’d almost trodden on her heels, his aggressiveness having communicated itself to his stride. “Sorry,” he said, and without enough thought “Not you, Lyd.”
“Don’t you dare start calling me that again. Who’ve you been talking to about his firm? So that’s why I haven’t had my cheque this month, is it? Let me tell you this from him. Unless that cheque is postmarked today you’ll find yourself in prison for non-payment, and that’s a promise from both of us.”
“Well, that’s the first – ” Her rising fury had already borne her off, leaving him with a drone in his ear and hot plastic stuck to his cheek. He cleared the line as he tramped around more of the prolonged curve, which showed him thousands of heads and shoulders bobbing down a slope to the point almost a mile away from which, packed closer and closer together, they streamed sluggishly upwards. On some days that mid-point was hazy with exhaust fumes, but the squashed crowd there looked distinct except for a slight wavering which must be an effect of the heat; he wasn’t really smelling a faint trace of petrol through the wake of perfume. He bent a fingernail against the keys on the receiver, and back-handed his forehead as drops of sweat full of a fluorescent glare magnified the numbers on the keypad. His home phone had just rung when a man’s voice said loudly “They’re all the same, these buggers with their gadgets. Can’t be doing with them, me.”
There was surely no reason for Blythe to feel referred to. “Pick it up, Val,” he muttered. “I said I’d ring you back. It’s been nearly fifteen minutes. You can’t still be doing whatever you were doing. Come out, there’s a love.” But his voice greeted him again and unspooled its message, followed by Valerie’s giggle, which under the circumstances he couldn’t help feeling he’d heard once too often. “Are you really not there? I’ve just had Lydia on, ranting about her maintenance. Says if it isn’t posted today her boyfriend the solicitor who gives new meaning to the word solicit will have me locked up. I suppose technically he might be able to, so if you can make absolutely certain you, I know I should have, I know you said, but if you can do that for me, for both of us, nip round the corner and get that bloody envelope in the shit.”
The last word came out loudest, and three ranks in front of him glanced back. Of them, only the woman whose T-shirt ended halfway up her midriff retained any concern once she saw him. “Are you all right, old feller?”
“Yes, I’m . . . No, I’m . . . Yes, yes.” He shook his free hand so extravagantly he saw sweat flying off it, his intention being to wave away his confusion more than her solicitude, but she advanced her lips in a fierce grimace before presenting her substantial rear view to him. He hadn’t time to care if she was offended, though she was using the set of her buttocks to convey that she was, exactly as Lydia used to. The ticket seller had been right after all. The tunnel had cut Blythe off, emptying the receiver except for a faint distant moan.
It could be a temporary interruption. He pressed the recall button so hard it felt embedded in his thumb and was attempting to waft people past him when a not unfamiliar voice protested, “Don’t go standing. There’s folk back here who aren’t as spry as some.”
“When you’re my dad’s age maybe you won’t be so fond of stopping and starting.”
Either might be the disliker of gadgets, though both appeared to have devoted a good deal of time and presumably machinery to the production of muscles, not only beneath shoulder level. Blythe tilted his head vigorously, almost losing the bell which was repeating its enfeebled note at his ear. “Don’t mind me, just go round me. Just go, will you?”
“Put that bloody thing away and get on with what we’re here for,” the senior bruiser advised him. “We don’t want to be having to carry you. We had his mother conk out on us once through not keeping the pace up.”
“Don’t mind me. Don’t bother about me.”
“We’re bothered about all the folk you’re holding up and putting the strain on.”
“We’ll be your trainers till we all finish,” the expanded youth said.
“Then I ought to stick my feet in you,” Blythe mumbled as those very feet gave in to the compulsion to walk. The phone was still ringing, and now it produced his voice. “Valerie Mason and Steve Blythe,” it said, and at once had had enough of him.
All the heat of the tunnel rushed into him. He felt his head waver before steadying in a dangerously fragile version of itself, raw with a smell which surely wasn’t of exhaust fumes, despite the haze into which the distant walkers were descending. He had to go back beyond the point at which his previous call had lost its hold. He peeled the soggy receiver away from his face and swung round, to be confronted by a mass of flesh as wide and as long as the protracted curve of the tunnel. He could hear more of it being tamped into the unseen mouth by the jabbing of the megaphones. Of the countless heads it was wagging at him, every one that he managed to focus looked prepared to see him trampled underfoot if he didn’t keep moving. He could no more force his way back through it than through the concrete wall, but there was no need. He would use a walkway as soon as he found some steps up.
Another wave of heat which felt like the threat of being overwhelmed by the tide of flesh found him, sending him after the rhythmically quivering women. As far ahead as he could see there were no steps onto the walkways, but his never having noticed them while driving needn’t mean steps didn’t exist; surely a trick of perspective was hiding them from him. He narrowed his eyes until he felt the lids twitch against the eyeballs and his head ache more than his feet were aching. He poked the recall button and lifted the receiver above his head in case that might allow him to hook a call, but the phone at home hadn’t even doubled its first ring when his handful of technology went dead as though suffocated by the heat or drowned in the sweat of his fist. As he let it sink past his face, a phone shrilled further down the tunnel.
“They’re bloody breeding,” the old man growled behind him, but Blythe didn’t care what he said. About 300 yards ahead he saw an aerial extend itself above a woman’s scalp as blonde as Lydia’s. Whatever had been interfering with his calls, it apparently wasn’t present in that stretch of the tunnel. He saw the aerial wag a little with her conversation as she walked at least a hundred yards. As he tramped towards the point where she’d started talking he counted the slabs of light overhead, some of which appeared to be growing unstable with the heat. He had only half as far to go now, however much the saturated heat might weigh him down. It must be his eyes which were flickering, not as many of the lights as seemed to be. He needn’t wait until he arrived at the exact point in the tunnel. He only wanted reassurance that Valerie had picked up his message. He thumbed the button and flattened his ear with the receiver. The tone had barely invited him to dial when it was cut off.
He mustn’t panic. He hadn’t reached where phones worked, that was all. On, trying to ignore the sluggishly retreating haze of body heat which smelled increasingly like exhaust fumes, reminding himself to match the pace of the crowd, though the pair of walkers on each side of him made him feel plagued by double vision. Now he was where the woman’s phone had rung, beneath two dead fluorescents separated by one which looked as though it had stolen its glare from both. All three were bumped backwards by their fellows as he jabbed the button, bruised his ear with the earpiece, snatched the receiver away and cleared it, supported it with his other hand before it could slide out of his sweaty grip, split a fingernail against the button, bruised his ear again . . . Nothing he did raised the dialling tone for longer than it took to mock him.
It couldn’t be the phone itself. The woman’s had worked, and his was the latest model. He could only think the obstruction was moving
, which meant it had to be the crowd that was preventing him from acting. If Lydia’s replacement for him took him to court he would lose business because of it, probably the confidence of many of his clients too because they wouldn’t understand he took more care with their affairs than he did with his own, and if he went to prison . . . He’d closed both fists around the phone, because the plastic and his hands were aggravating one another’s slipperiness, and tried not to imagine battering his way through the crowd. There were still the walkways, and by the time he found the entrance to one it might make sense to head for the far end of the tunnel. He was trudging forward, each step a dull ache which bypassed his hot swollen body wrapped in far too much sodden material and searched for a sympathetic ache in his hollowed-out head, when the phone rang.
It was so muffled by his grip that he thought for a moment it wasn’t his. Ignoring the groans of the muscled duo, he nailed the button and jammed the wet plastic against his cheek. “Steve Blythe. Can you make it quick? I don’t know how long this will work.”
“It’s all right, Steve. I only called to see how you were surviving. Sounds as if you’re deep in it. So long as you’re giving your brain a few hours off for once. You can tell me all about it when you come home.”
“Val. Val, wait. Val, are you there?” Blythe felt a mass of heat which was nearly flesh lurch at him from behind as he missed a step. “Speak to me, Val.”
“Calm down, Steve. I’ll still be here when you get back. Save your energy. You sound as though you need it.”
“I’ll be fine. Just tell me you got the message.”
“Which message?”
The heat came for him again – he couldn’t tell from which direction, nor how fast he was stumbling. “Mine. The one I left while you were doing whatever you were doing.”
“I had to go out for some black and white. The machine can’t be working properly. There weren’t any messages on the tape when I came in just now.”
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