Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  He doesn’t like this one.

  ‘Oi, didn’t you hear me?’ the man calls, his voice an angry slur. Thornhill waits until he is approached, then steps back against the concave tunnel wall. Now he sees the reason for the man’s strange speech; he has no lower jaw. He is as repulsive and ridiculous as a ventriloquist’s puppet. His tongue hangs straight down, dry and useless, looking as though it belongs to a dog, or perhaps on a piece of luggage. He’s dressed in a purple velvet jacket, tall and bony-featured, also missing his right ear and eye—the wounds don’t look too bad because they’ve scabbed over—but he’s salivating unstoppably as he shuffles closer, something Thornhill finds personal and vaguely embarrassing. ‘D’you work down here?’ the man demands to know, seemingly oblivious to his terrible injuries. It’s hard to understand him.

  Thornhill can smell strong alcohol on his breath. ‘Yes,’ he admits, ‘but I’m not a doctor. I can’t help you.’ He assumes they only approach if they want something.

  ‘I’d had a drink, of course I had, but it’s the others you should be talking to.’ He’s very animated for a dead man.

  ‘What others?’

  ‘They were on the platform with me. Last train of the night from Bank station, we’d all been drinking at the Christmas bash. I didn’t slip.’

  ‘You mean one of them pushed you?’

  ‘I don’t know, probably. Yeah, I mean yes they did.’ It sounds like he’s had plenty of time to convince himself.

  ‘When was this?’ Thornhill asks, starting to understand the nature of his visions.

  ‘December 18, 1976,’ says the man, shovelling his tongue back up into his mouth without much success. ‘I hate it down here. I want to kill my mates for doing this, for pushing me. I want to go home.’

  ‘Where is home?’

  ‘West Harrow.’

  ‘You’ll need to follow the Metropolitan line from King’s Cross,’ says Thornhill. ‘Go back in that direction.’ For a moment he thinks the man will take a swing at him, but the poor creature turns around, almost overbalancing, and slams his hand into the wall, popping his knuckles. Then he heads away without another word. Something is leaking from his ragged jeans. Presumably he slipped from the platform and went under the incoming train. What a state to be in.

  Thornhill had always half-expected this day to come. He had thought—hoped—that perhaps he would see them, but had not expected them to speak, or be able to hear him. His heart is beating faster and he feels even more light-headed. He wonders if he is having some form of nervous breakdown, alone here in the tunnels, going quietly mad while the rest of the crews plug leaks and check the tracks for debris.

  He knows he should probably turn back and hand the remainder of the task to someone else, but he hates to leave a job unfinished, and besides—

  For some unearthly reason he finds himself crying. Once the tears start, it’s very hard to make them stop. He forces himself to think about the intermittent fault, checks the diagram and heads down beyond the Euston interchange in the direction of Warren Street. Plenty of tunnels around him now, gaping black mouths like bellowing monsters, who knows where they all lead? Some of them aren’t even marked on his map, as if they’re hiding secrets. They snake deep inside the soil of the city, burrowing beneath London in a dark carnival of stone. The arteries provide homes to who-knows-what, the dead lost and separated from the living.

  It feels like he’s been walking for hours. His boots are too tight and his legs are tired. He has checked eight boxes and found nothing wrong. Coming up to the ninth he starts to wonder if there really is a fault, or whether one of the controllers has simply misread a meter. But below this consideration is excitement and fear running like a fast-flowing river, the knowledge that everything he has dared to believe is being proved true.

  According to his watch it’s already 3:00 a.m., and he has yet to locate the fault.

  Something small and light brushes against his hair in the blackness, making him start. He swipes his right ear, batting it away, but there is another feather-shred flitting past, and another. And he can smell something now: the odour of cooking meat, as if he might enter the next tunnel bend and find a hamburger stand waiting to serve him. The specks touching his face and neck become more frequent. He grabs at one and rubs it between his fingers in the light of his helmet-torch. It is a smut, a drifting cinder. He sniffs it and knows at once that it is incinerated material of some kind, and his stomach shifts. He turns off the cage-lamp and his helmet-torch, and stands motionless in the pitch blackness, looking ahead. Sure enough, there’s a parabola of flickering light around the corner.

  It takes him several minutes to pass beyond the wide bend in the tunnel, and here the rails are tricky to negotiate because they pass through several sets of greased points. At first he thinks there are dozens of mattresses lying across the floor, but as he gets closer he realises there are bodies wedged between the rails. Some are burning softly from within, like dying embers in grates. At the far end he can see a wall of twisted grey metal torn apart and fused with the surrounding brickwork, fires burning brightly inside. The exploded train carriage entirely blocks the tunnel. Even the trunking, the bundles of thick cables that form necklace loops along the tunnel walls, has been severed by the force of the explosion. Heading this way, ghostly in the pulsing firelight, hands upon each other’s shoulders like Bruegel’s parable of the blind leading the blind, the commuters seek a way to the surface, but as he approaches they disappear in wisps of burning dust. After all, they are the living, and have no place here among the dead.

  Passing between the fallen bodies, ignoring the groans and the smell of roasting flesh, he walks on towards the source of the heat, knowing that it will disperse along with this apocalyptic vision. A temporal memory sealed beneath the streets in shafts of stone, forever trapped in the terrible moment of a July afternoon, the seventh day of the seventh month in 2005, when a terrorist bomb stole the lives of thirty-seven passengers and injured seven hundred more. The dead must stay down here forever. Only the living may surface.

  The present cannot exist for long with the past, and so the wreckage disperses, the wavering chain of survivors, each placing the next foot before the last with patience and determination, crumbles along its length and disappears, leaving only acrid dispersing smoke and the melancholy hubbub of departing spirits.

  Thornhill stands alone once more. What shocks him most is not the scale of destruction but the sheer caprice of it all. He imagines a thousand families asking the same question he has asked over and over: Why did it happen to us? Why were we singled out? But of course to provide an answer one needs to understand the workings of life itself. And life must remain unknowable for the spirit to survive.

  Beyond the crash site the tunnel is clear. He can see the eleventh junction box in the halo of his torch. He unlocks the door and with difficulty, pulls it open.

  There it is, right there, the fault. A winking crimson light on the second row, beyond which there are no more greens. Feeling in his tool-bag he locates a connector, snaps off the plastic end, flips the old one out and replaces it. Then he resets the switch and watches as the lines complete themselves. Job done.

  He’s running late. He’ll have to move faster if he wants to reach Warren Street in time to catch Sandwich. He’d like to linger back here. He senses the others are drawn upwards, if not exactly towards the light then at least to a point where the layer between the living and the dead is thinnest. But he can’t afford to keep Sandwich waiting.

  One thing puzzles him. There has been nothing before this night, no sign that they might appear around him, no reason why they should all turn up now. Perhaps he wasn’t ready before.

  He’s ready now.

  He once read that those who die by the hand of another are the easiest to see. At the far end of the scale are those who die natural deaths—they can never return. But what about the ones whose departures are simply accidental? What does it take to see them?

  T
he temperature is dipping lower and the air is slightly damper. He fancies he can smell the river, but at least four stations stand between him and the Thames. The tunnel twists to the right, then to the left. He is passing close to the southbound Victoria line and descending fast. That’s when he understands, of course. Finally knows what he is doing. He’s known all along but denial is a powerful drug that can erase almost any other feeling. He reaches the Victorian line sub-junction and descends via the service tunnel to the lower line.

  Time is getting short, but he dares not run; there are transverse pipes that can trap your boot and twist it. After three years of travelling through this subterranean maze he always knows exactly where he is. Right now he is branching off beneath Tottenham Court Road, moving in the direction of Warren Street. Above him are a pair of pubs, a shabby terrace of shops and houses that lead to Fitzroy Square. He remembers how the square looked when he was working nearby on an electrical installation in a bank; the pavements were all dug up. One had a hole running all the way down to the underground line.

  Down.

  It comes to him in a flash. The answer has always been right in front of him, but the time had never been right until now. He finally understands, and is ready. He looks at his watch. 4:23 a.m. The power is back on throughout the underground system. Sandwich will be up by now, angrily wondering where he is.

  Thornhill looks down at the rails. Without hesitation he steps up on them and hops from one to the other, crossing the track to the far side of the tunnel. Halfway across he stops, balancing on the third rail. Slowly and deliberately he plants his right foot down on the ground. He has a strange sensation, unpleasant but momentary. It leaves him with a feeling of transformation, of departure and arrival. Then he continues to the opposite wall and waits.

  It isn’t long before she appears on the other side of the line, outlined against the wet black brick. She has round brown eyes, dark hair cropped in a French bob, a chequered skirt, a navy blue sweater and knee socks, just as he remembered. So like her mother. She looks over and gravely acknowledges him.

  He loves the way children do that, the way they look when they’re counting and concentrating, taking everything at face value, being very serious. ‘Hello,’ he says.

  ‘Where’s Mummy?’

  ‘She couldn’t be here, Amy. She had to go far away. She lives in another country now. But I’m here.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming.’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do, but I’m here now.’

  ‘It’s boring. All the tunnels look the same. I can’t find Jasper.’

  ‘Jasper wasn’t with you when—Jasper was back at the house.’ Jasper is Amy’s teddy bear. On the day she had accompanied him to his job, he had made her leave it at home. There’s no room for Jasper and your bike in the car, he had told her. If only he had made her leave the bike behind instead.

  She had not been allowed to enter the bank’s hard-hat area, and had gone to cycle in the little green park, the one at the centre of Fitzroy Square. He remembered thinking there was something wrong and running out into the street. Her bicycle lay on its side, next to the workman’s hole. She had dropped something—a pendant from her bracelet, just a cheap little thing—it had fallen in, and she had gone to pick it up. At first he couldn’t see her. It didn’t seem possible she could have fallen so far.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Amy asks.

  ‘I’ve been working down here, looking for you.’

  ‘But I’ve been here all the time.’ Her tone is reproachful.

  ‘I know, sweetie, I just couldn’t reach you. If my boss knew I’d taken the job just to find you, he wouldn’t have let me come down tonight.’

  ‘Why do I have to stay here?’

  ‘The world above was just a dream,’ he murmurs. ‘I think this is where our real lives are.’

  ‘Are you going to stay with me?’

  His heart swells to bursting as he rushes back towards her. ‘Yes, of course I am. That’s why I’m here.’ He takes her hand and it feels just as it did when she was alive, warm and dry. Her touch completes him. ‘Where would you like to go?’

  ‘I don’t want to go any further down.’ She tips her head on one side, considering the question carefully. ‘Up perhaps. Can we go up?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admits. ‘We can try.’ Sweeping her into his arms, he holds her close, letting her warmth envelop him. Then he sets off with his lost daughter, heading back up the tunnel, towards the world that will always be just above, and only slightly out of reach.

  The Stretch

  We should never have got the stretch.

  It was meant to be a ten-passenger stretch Lincoln limousine with chrome wheels and opalescent pearl white paintwork, but the thing outside Sofie’s parents’ house in her street looked like a chop-job, even though it took up three parking spaces. Sofie didn’t notice. When she saw it she screamed and batted the air with her arms and jumped up and down. Sofie screamed a lot, sometimes when she didn’t get her own way, and other times when she did. It was kind of confusing. She screamed to us in the lounge, where we’d been doing the photos.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Her high voice rose to a level that could attract bats, climaxing on the added first syllable of God. ‘It’s here, the car’s here!’

  Her best friend Bethany joined her in a descant scream. She also waved her arms and jumped up and down at the window.

  ‘Aaaaah! It’s here!’

  The pair of them reacted to everything as if they’d just won a fucking game show, I swear. It was as if they thought there were cameras on them and five million people were watching.

  ‘This is going to be the best birthday ever after my own fifteenth, which was just so awesome.’ Last month Bethany went to Disneyland Paris dressed as an angel, albeit one with a bare midriff and a septic belly piercing, and she wasn’t about to let anyone forget it, ever.

  I could see Sofie toying with the idea of reminding her that this was just one part of the week-long celebrations paid for by her father, but then she decided to be gracious, which was a first for her. The pair of them copied their nanosecond-popular TV heroines in every way. This particular month they were over Hannah Montana and into The Veronicas, over the Jonas Brothers and into Black Eyed Peas again, over Pink and Beth Orton and into Ryder, over Twitter and into Kjangi, still loving Lady Gaga, back into Scott Pilgrim and hating everyone over twenty. They knew more about hair care, fashion, dating and the rites-of-passage rituals of teenaged girls than any style magazine could ever know in a million years, because style mags employed burned out jackal-skanks who were like twenty-two at least, and besides as teenagers it was their job, it was what they did, even though they were from Dulwich, a shitty composition of commuter-belt boredom arranged for angry families in mock-Tudor mansions.

  Sofie and Bethany were dressed in shimmering icing-pink and white, and thought they looked so hot. I mean. What they looked like was underage hos in need of parental deprogramming.

  See, girls like Sofie and Bethany aren’t cutting-edge, they’re not looking for the next big thing, they’re the majority. Individually they have no power, but they’re victorious through sheer weight of numbers. Like the Nazis almost were.

  Unfortunately they had to take me with them for the evening. We didn’t exactly relate, mainly because I wore black eye-shadow and read books. I was going through a phase where I liked movies with subtitles and German-sounding bands, and I guess I looked a little blankly at them when their conversation turned to boys or new methods of delivering lip gloss. I had to go along because my mother was getting frisky with Bethany’s father, if I can say that without having to stick my fingers down my throat, and her old man wanted someone sensible in attendance. Believe me, I wasn’t too thrilled to be going along with the Scream Sisters, either.

  The plan was to hire a stretch limo, drive around London and go to the Buddha Bar on the embankment, but it turned out we weren’t old enough to be admitted to a nightclub serving a
lcohol, so the itinerary had to be changed to include a stop at the Tropical Café and a visit to Glitterball, a skanky teens-only disco at the butthole-end of Camden Town.

  I could see the driver watching our approach with horror in his heart. He said his name was Korfa, which sounded like a Greek starter. He was tall and bony, and had a treeline of beard growth, and wore cheap-copy mirrored shades, and looked bored to death, as if he hated his work intensely, except I kept catching him admiring himself in the wing mirror. He looked Somali—I knew what Somalis looked like because I used to see them when I had a summer job in the supermarket. We don’t have black people in Dulwich.

  Unsmiling, he held open the door while we climbed into the stretch. The interior reeked of furniture polish. Sofie took ages to settle herself because she wanted the whole street to see us, but there was no-one around. The men paid for living in Dulwich by working a sixty-hour week, and the women were always off waxing themselves. I got this particular stretch from the internet because it was fifty pounds cheaper than anyone else’s. Most of Korfa’s clients were booked for hen nights or teenage birthday parties. It was probably a great job if you were a pedophile, but this guy looked as if his only fantasies involved getting off work early.

  I stared out of the Lincoln’s tinted windows with a sinking heart. I just hoped nobody could see me in such an embarrassing car. I would have thought it was cool once, but in the last few months I’d begun to feel separated from the others. I guess I was becoming more serious-minded and adult in my outlook. The antics of my so-called girlfriends were sweet and silly, but they belonged to a childhood I was leaving behind. There were probably still good times to be had together, but my interest in their world had evaporated. The endless chatter about sex, music and clothes seemed repetitive and pointless because they never drew any conclusions from what they were saying. I could see their futures; they would marry and remain in the neighbourhood, but I wanted to go far away as fast as I possibly could. I knew there would soon come a time when they’d look at me with total disdain, conveniently tagging me as part of a world to which they didn’t belong. But I thought, why shouldn’t we have fun for now? They were sweet kids underneath the makeup, kind of flirty, kind of flighty, but it was their age—the gap of a few months between us had become a huge desert, enough for me to look upon them as children. They knew it, and I knew it. I just hoped Sofie hadn’t worked out why it had happened.