by Mark Watson
‘Fuck it!’ Howard exclaimed, seemingly reminded by the text. ‘We’re meant to be at Park Lane!’
I stood in the shower thinking about Kathleen, allowing myself to daydream an Olympic future in which she was back here, or in which I was with a girlfriend whose imaginary form was heavily based upon her. By the time I got back down to the atrium, Howard was as battle-ready as if he had just woken from a long sleep.
‘All right, let’s make this happen. Madman reckons it’s going to be quicker on the Tube with the way traffic is at this time of the morning. Ready?’
This was something we had never done together; I had only ever done it with Kathleen, in fact, and it was inevitable that I thought of her again as Howard strong-armed me down the steps, down the escalators and into the throng. The platform was packed; on the train, bodies pressed in on all sides and there was sweat and irritation in the compressed air. Opposite us, Howard told me, a wall of Standard front pages proclaimed our win.
‘You wouldn’t know it from people’s miserable bloody faces,’ he added. ‘But give it time … ’
He was interrupted by a terrible noise, an explosion. The train stopped dead. The noise had been so loud that twenty or thirty seconds disappeared into it. There was no room for reaction or thought; there was just this moment, and now smoke, and now voices were raised.
‘Fucking hell.’ Howard had grabbed my arm with alarming ferocity. ‘What the hell was that?’
There was panicky talking and shushing and, eventually, as if by appalled consensus, a complete silence. More smoke, and Howard’s voice broke the quiet.
‘We have to get out of here!’ His voice horrified me. It was a plea. ‘We’ve got to get out!’ he said again. ‘Something’s happened!’
Words from different languages rattled against one another. A woman next to us was talking at ferocious speed and volume in a foreign tongue. There was Spanish from the other side. People were starting to cry. I reached out and found Howard’s arm; it was shaking violently.
‘We’ve got to get out,’ he said again, but once more in a voice which asked for somebody else to make it happen. I was hammered suddenly in the guts by fatigue, and by the cold-water shock of what we had walked into. I stood up for a moment, thinking I was about to be sick. A plan had almost emerged to break a window. A woman was saying that we should stay here, the track was dangerous. They’ll turn off the power, said one of the men. We should really wait to be told, said a different man. Howard was nowhere in this debate, and I had the horrible idea that he was contributing to the ongoing stink of shit which was all around us. I still felt nauseous. I tried to tell myself to take it one moment at a time, as Kathleen would advise if she were here.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said the driver over a crackling address system. The announcement died away again, intensifying the dread. It was a minute before the man’s voice came back. ‘I apologize for this,’ he said. ‘There has been some sort of incident which we believe is a power surge. As I say, there has been some sort of incident. We are going to evacuate the train and we would just ask you to remain patient until we’re able to do that.’
The voice vanished; conversations rose up again. My limbs were fizzing with pins and needles as I forced myself to take gulps of air. I had sunk back into my seat. I could hear myself breathing very loudly. But it wasn’t me; it was Howard.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked him.
‘Listen, son,’ he said, and I felt the touch of his leather sleeve on the back of my neck as he slung an arm round my shoulders. ‘I just want you to know. I’ve been a long way from perfect. I’ve let you down in certain ways. I’ve let you and Sarah-Jane and everyone down in certain ways. You need to know that.’ His voice was a notch above a whisper. All around it was a sort of drizzling half-noise which had replaced real conversation in the carriage.
‘I don’t care what you’ve done,’ I said.
‘I’m not everything you think,’ Howard said, ‘but I did my best.’
‘I know you did.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Howard, ‘I love you.’
I could hear a vestigial, worn-out snuffling like the light rain after a big storm. Eventually there was the sound of the doors being wrenched open and we were getting out of the train. Howard seized my arm and we stepped down onto the tracks. Ahead of us, people’s voices – giddy and weightless – ricocheted off the tunnel walls, plotting out our path. We were getting out. We walked in line, the strange hardness of metal planks beneath our feet. We were heading back to King’s Cross, said Howard. ‘We’ll just go back to the Alpha, eh. We’ll sack off the reception.’ And as he said it, with his hand on my arm, I could feel the hotel around me so strongly that we could almost have been there already. We would go back into the cocoon. I would have a coffee; I would let myself call Kathleen.
But as we came up the stairs towards air and the everyday, I was suddenly aware of the crush of people behind us, and, as the ground levelled out, ahead of us as well. Voices were being raised in what could be taken for aggression. ‘Let’s keep moving, please,’ someone was yelling into a loudhailer in the sort of monotone used to conceal official alarm. ‘Let’s keep moving, please.’ Sirens were keening in the street outside. We were pressed in among bodies on every side.
‘Oh my God,’ said Howard faintly.
‘What?’
‘Something’s wrong, mate.’
As he piloted me out of the station, there were noises everywhere: the buzz and hiss of two-way radios, people shouting for one another, instructions bellowed through megaphones. Somebody crashed into me and Howard pulled me away. Rain blew in our faces. Over everything was the wail of sirens coming from every direction at once and sounding like the city itself crying out in despair.
‘All right,’ said Howard, steadying his voice. His grip on my arm tightened still further and he set off at such a pace that I nearly tripped over. ‘Let’s get home.’
‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
There was an eruption of sound not far off. I writhed in fear and felt Howard’s body tighten. My legs felt as if there were nothing in them at all, no bone or muscle, just a mush of matter supporting the heavy rest of me. I slumped against him.
‘Come on, mate.’
With that massive bulwark power that he’d seemed momentarily to lose in the tunnel, he hefted me over his shoulder like an infant. We staggered on a hundred metres. I was half here and half nowhere, and we were going down a side street with a familiar taste in the air, and there were the cedars stilled by the city’s shock, there was the looming invisible front of the Alpha. I slithered down from Howard’s grasp and walked shakily alongside him through the double doors.
So often in these years it had been a place where London disappeared, but not today. Voices chattered at an urgent pitch. Feet fell heavily. From the big screen which had beamed the Olympic win down to us there was now state-of-emergency talk. ‘It does now look as if these incidents are the result of … and we’re just hearing reports, in fact, of another … ’
Sarah-Jane was on top of us, weeping as she grabbed my face, a hand on each side. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said, ‘as soon as we heard, I thought you two were dead. I just had a feeling. I just knew it.’
‘But we’re not, Captain,’ Howard muttered as she gathered him into the bundle and the three of us stood there listening to each other’s heartbeats. Sarah-Jane was trying to speak, but her voice kept breaking up. Graham’s clean smell came ghosting into the frame. He gave a sort of low, long groan of relief, the kind of noise I had never heard from him before. Somebody had turned up the volume on the big screen. ‘It does now look as if terrorists … ’ someone said in an efficient voice.
‘I would never have forgiven myself,’ Graham said. ‘I could have driven you.’
Sarah-Jane was talking on the phone; through the handset, not far from my face, I could make out the muffled responses of JD. ‘They’re here, they’re here, they’re here,’ Sarah-Jane sa
id. He told her not to panic, he wasn’t far away. He had ended up going home with the dancer last night. He’d come back. We would all be there.
We stood there with noise lapping at us like dirty water. I felt long, hard hands on my shoulders. Graham was holding me in a tight squeeze. I allowed myself to relax into his unaccustomed grip.
‘Oh, God alive,’ he said again, ‘I would never have forgiven myself. If you had never come out of there. If you … if you had not come out of there.’
‘Well,’ I said, it’ll take more than a few bombs to blow Howard up.’
‘Yes,’ Sarah-Jane came in, and I could sense her arms going round Howard, ‘say what you like about this guy, but he can certainly get out of a tight squeeze.’
I wanted it all to be true, that Howard was indestructible, and I was already dismissing what I remembered from the train: the panic in his voice, the childlike desperation. He had saved me. It was better like that. ‘That’s twice we’ve escaped from death,’ I said. ‘What have you got planned for the next one, Howard?’
Howard seemed, for a few seconds, not to have heard. Then he cleared his throat, gave a half-laugh. ‘I think we’ll leave it there,’ he said. ‘I think two of those is enough, mate.’
Among the partly zoned-out backbeat of TV commentary and the calls echoing around the atrium, Graham cleared his throat.
‘Actually, I was the one who saved you from the fire,’ said Graham.
There was a frozen moment before Sarah-Jane gave a little laugh, high and half scandalized, as if at a joke which was risqué but slightly too silly to cause offence.
‘I was the one,’ Graham said again. ‘Howard ran away. But we had to keep it a secret. We had to keep it a secret.’
A single word from Howard, that was what I was waiting for. Sarah-Jane too, and everyone else there, all the sudden listeners whose presence I gleaned from the changing of the air, from the Alpha sucking in its breath, the whole building seeming to freeze. We were all awaiting the magic word.
But I could feel what had happened to Sarah-Jane’s face as she realized. And I felt straight away as if I had always known.
14
GRAHAM
‘Breakfast is served in the restaurant between half-past six and ten. For service in your room, you need to fill this out and hang it on your door before two a.m. I’ll give you two key cards – here. You need to swipe it in the lift before you put your floor in. Did you need a wake-up call or a newspaper?’
‘I think we will be fine, thank you.’
‘If you have any questions or you need anything, we’re here twenty-four hours: just put a call down to reception.’
‘I certainly shall,’ I said, with a smile for the lady who looked extraordinarily young to be wielding this responsibility. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘And can I get someone to help with your bags?’
A beefy dark-skinned porter whisked away my suitcase and Chas’s things and loaded them onto a gleaming trolley. Chas and I got into the lift together.
‘What can we see?’
‘There are mirrors on each side,’ I informed him, so there are an enormous number of versions of us.’
‘An infinite number.’
‘Well, I couldn’t say for sure. I haven’t had time to count them. Ha, ha!’ At the second attempt, my card in the key-slot brought the flash of a green light and the lift began to climb. The doors popped open on the fourth floor and we were in a corridor whose carpet, patterned with red and blue zigzags like little lightning-strikes, sat uneasily beneath walls painted pale green and decorated with pictures of English stately homes.
‘And now?’
‘Now things are rather hard on the eye,’ I said, ‘but this is jolly fun.’
The plastic card sparked another green light on the electronic sensor. I pushed open the door and led Chas into the room, in this hotel that was not the one we knew.
No sooner had I heard whispers of a problem on the Underground than I was plunged into a depth of fear quite foreign to me: not because of Pattie or Ed, who had gone away together for a few days, but for Howard and Chas. I felt, as if it were already a confirmed fact, that they had been caught up in a disaster. Why had I not taken them in the Mercedes! It was precisely the sort of irrelevant decision to which hindsight gives a terrible weight. People were talking about further explosions. There was the ominous rise of conversation, and finally those first grim rain-spattered pictures of ambulances arriving only a hundred yards from where we were standing.
Sarah-Jane went out, charged up the Euston Road and came back again with frantic eyes and hair blown chaotic in the breeze. They weren’t letting anyone past. There were police everywhere. Something awful had happened on the Tube. They were down there, she said, her tone pleading to be contradicted; they were down there. It was my job to be composed, and I went into the appearance of composure as smoothly as I might switch into an exaggeratedly English voice to please an American visitor. But real calm existed nowhere in my body.
Minutes went by. Howard and Chas could not be contacted on their telephones. The front desk received a torrent of calls. ‘I know he’s in London. I know she’s at your hotel. I’ve just heard … I’ve just seen on the TV … I wanted to check … ’ Suzie was alongside me. We directed the calls to the desired rooms; I tracked a couple of guests down in the bar or not far beyond. ‘I knew you’d panic,’ said a girl with sentimental reproach into the reception phone. ‘I’m absolutely fine. I love you too,’ she said. ‘It’s all gone a bit crazy here but I’ll make it home by bedtime.’ I felt a sort of fury at her, her and everyone else who had survived. It had been a scare, but everyone was fine. Everyone except Howard and Chas.
So it went on in my brain. Sarah-Jane was calling Jonathan for all she was worth, but he was not responding. She was almost out of her wits that he had somehow got caught up in all this too, that all her boys were gone. ‘Where are they?’ she appealed to me, frantically tearing at the sleeve of my jacket. A fingernail caught the skin of my palm and nicked a graze. The strangeness of the red beneath the atrium’s spotlights made me feel unwell, and I realized I would have to go to the lavatory. Afterwards I caught sight of myself in the same mirror I had stared into on the night I let Kathleen in on the secret. Then, everything had been – as they say – to play for. Now I had left it all too late. Chas would never know what he was to me, just as Agatha probably never had.
I walked back into the atrium, sheepishly drying my hands upon my jacket and assembling a checklist of comforting things to say. It is too early to be sure. We must not panic. I was so busy rehearsing them, I did not even notice at first that Howard had walked back into the Hotel Alpha, flushed and wild-eyed with the glow of another successful escape about him. When I saw that he was alive after all, and Chas alongside him, I sank into my chair behind the reception desk.
The terror of the past hour was disintegrating, the shock would follow; but their by-products would not fade so easily. I watched Chas and Howard and Sarah-Jane embrace directly beneath the skylight, in the very heart of the hotel. Friends and admirers looked on with customary glee. Howard had done it again. I realized that I was distancing myself on purpose in order to let the Yorks have their moment. I was not a part of it. I was the man who stood by and allowed things to happen.
Howard might have got Chas home today, but he had not been the one who saved Chas when it really mattered. Yet Chas himself did not know that, he could not know it. He would always think of me as a well-wisher, a faithful old chum. I saw myself in the burning room that night, clutching him to my chest. I could see even further back than that, in fact: back to the time I threw a bouncing ball across the chessboard floor and watched him toddle intently after it and bring it proudly back to me. I wanted more than anything to grab Chas round the shoulders and steer him away from everything that surrounded him here: away from the story he had been told, towards the one that had really happened. I wanted to keep him close to me.
There wa
s one remark too many about Howard’s powers of survival, and I saw everything going on once more as it always had. Then I heard myself blurt out the truth, and it was the end of one life and the beginning of another.
The day of the bombing would have been a very peculiar one even without my revelation. The added twist of events made things stranger still, and as I walked out of the Alpha that afternoon and settled Chas into the passenger seat, my head was so woolly that I felt as if I were sitting behind the Mercedes’ wheel for the first time. It did not help that the streets were still full of improbable sights: people huddled, comforting one another, at zebra crossings and in shop doorways; a man with a briefcase trailing blood from a head-wound as he walked, slowly and without apparent acknowledgement of his situation, over the roundabout at Archway. Chas sat mutely next to me. I kept asking him if he was all right. He kept saying that he was.
I took him back to my house. Pattie was away for a couple of days; I made us some ham and chips. We sat and talked until well after midnight. Chas asked me many questions about the night of the fire; about my decision to go into the room on my own, and to go along with the story of Howard’s having saved him. He did not castigate me for having strung him, and the whole world, along; nor, somewhat to my relief, did he try to thank me for the fact I had got him to safety. He seemed to weigh up all the bewildering new information with a certain calm, as if he were a reporter investigating a matter not directly related to his own life. He remarked more than once that he had ‘almost seen this coming; that something had not seemed right’. I could not tell whether all this was what he really felt, or whether it masked a sense of betrayal. He slept in Ed’s room, latterly Christopher’s, under the map of the old world. In the morning – for the first time since I had met him as an infant – neither of us set foot in the Hotel Alpha.