The Spiral

by Gideon Burrows

  This was one of those situations that demanded a cigarette. Giles had headed down the stairs again, walking as far as he could bear, until he felt the walls closing in on him. The incessant repetition of step after step; light after light; tile after tile was pressing in on his skull. He’d turned on his heels in frustration, even anger, and by the time he’d begun to retrace his steps he was ready for a fag.

  He looked at his watch. It was now past 11 a.m., they’d been down here nearly two hours. Yes, this was officially one of those stressful situations. Underground regulations or not, he was lighting up.

  Actually, good idea. He might set off a fire alarm somewhere. Right now he’d welcome a finger wagging official in a London Underground uniform coming to tell him off. He’d have a few things to say himself: like why don’t you properly close off the old staircases.

  He checked the pack, tapped one of the eight cigarettes out and lit it using the lighter he kept in the box.

  As they came into view, Charles coughed from the cigarette smoke, first lightly then with more difficult breathing. Giles looked at Megan, almost challenging her to say something.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  Ah, look Giles, she desperately wants one too, you can tell. Not habitual. But easily persuaded to rekindle her teenage years.

  She said nothing about the cigarette.

  “So, I’m assuming it was the same deal?”

  “No,” Giles said. He took the Camel from his lips and blew the smoke at the ceiling. “The platform is down there. Along with rows and rows of tables stocked with food and booze and You’ve Been Framed are there to tell millions of viewers what mugs they’ve made of us.”

  “Okay, we need strategies,” Megan said. Giles felt a light punch in the stomach that she’d ignored his joke. “Charles here needs to go to the toilet. I wouldn’t mind myself, so I think we need to allocate a toilet area until we’re rescued.”

  “Be my guest,” Giles said, sweeping his hand down the stairs, with a grin on his face. “I’ve already relieved myself about 100 steps down, so might as well call that the toilet area. “Though, it looks as though Charles has already created one of his own.”

  They peered down at Charles’ crotch, where a wide damp patch had appeared on the outside of his cords.

  “Oh, oh dear, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t control it,” he said, a quiver in his voice. He pulled out a new handkerchief from his pocket and started dabbing away where the material of his trousers had turned dark.

  “Do you want me to help you down there,” Megan asked him.

  “No, oh gosh no. I’m so embarrassed. I’m sorry, I’m such an old fool. Sorry,” said Charles.

  I like the sound of that, Giles. Maybe she’ll help you down there, too.

  Giles shook the thoughts away. This was a serious situation. And it was getting worse. At least he’d remembered his cigarettes. Giles shivered, then made like he was shrugging his shoulders.

  “Don’t worry mate, it’s happened to us all.” He flicked the cigarette butt down the steps and sat down. The three of them sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “Well, I guess I can’t put off the inevitable.” Megan broke the stillness in a weak voice, using the bannister to pull herself up. “100 steps down, right?” Giles noticed she avoided making eye contact with him as she passed him.

  She’d only just gone round the corner before the images flashed up.

  Not the peeing itself, Giles, but you have to admit there’s something about her dropping her knickers down there?

  He tried to push out the image of her exposed white backside.

  You gotta give it to her, Giles.

  Fuck off with you. Giles stared down, stood, and looked around the chamber again, trying to shake thoughts from his aching head. He gripped the bannister. He stilled the thoughts for a moment. Calmed his headache.

  “So, what’s your deal, Charlie Boy?” said Giles, trying to make his voice jovial for the first time with the old man. “Where were you off to today?”

  “The British Library,” said Charles. The handkerchief was resting over his lap, hiding the wet patch. “I’m doing research, just some historical stuff. I used to be a history teacher, but I’ve stopped that now. I started going for my interest, I thought I’d write a book or something. I’ve not really thought about it too much.”

  Giles looked around him.

  “What kind of history? World Wars and stuff?” World War II was about the extent of his GCSEs. He knew how to blag essays.

  Then Giles had done politics, economics and human geography at A-level, with general studies, though even he didn’t call that a real A-level. Then it was human, social and political sciences at Cambridge, just like everyone who worked in this crummy City.

  “No, much older,” Charles said. “Seventeenth century stuff. Trade links between the UK and all over Africa. British protectorates, Barbados, the Caribbean, shipping routes.”

  Giles definitely wasn’t interested anymore. “Jamaica, and all that?”

  “Well, not really, but…”

  Giles welcomed the unmistakable clump of Benny’s boots from above their heads, followed by the steel-toed boots themselves, and then the stout figure of the man walking in them.

  As he came down, he was banging the tiles with a softly clenched fist and testing grouting with his fingernails, looking for a crack or something loose. Not looking for a way out, thought Giles, just trying to establish what we’re really up against.

  That’s how this spiral staircase was feeling like. A battle.

  “Where’s Megan?” he asked, his voice sounding dry and tired. Giles felt like Benny wasn’t surprised to see him.

  “Our newly appointed luxury lavatory,” said Giles. “All mod cons, just 100 steps down.”

  He never sounded as funny when he didn’t have a pint in his hand.

  Megan returned, and Giles spotted her taking a deep breath as she rounded the corner. As if she was steeling herself. Putting back on a different persona.

  “Okay,” she said, smiling up at Benny. “So, we’ve got a toilet and we now know Giles has cigarettes. What we really need is water and food, just in case. So, what have we got? Should we turn our pockets out?”

  “Who put you in charge?” said Giles.

  “Bah, just shut up man, my head hurts from your talk.” It was Benny.

  Giles was amused, only slightly offended. If the builder thought Giles was chattery right now, he just had to wait.

  The builder just looked tired. Grateful to be sitting on the step again. In fact, Giles thought, he didn’t seem to be worried by this entire episode. All that tapping on the tiles and running his fingers along the walls. He showed none of the creeping claustrophobia Giles was feeling. The same that he could see behind Megan's fake determined eyes.

  Charlie? Well, he looked resigned to the situation, too. But not hemmed in.

  Charles turned out his jacket pockets and placed them on the step beside him. An A6 sized leather notebook, a blunt pencil, his wallet, a glasses container for his spectacles - now removed.

  “No food. I usually take it at the library,” he said.

  Megan fished into her tiny handbag. It was an accessory for the now-defunct interview. Her Tube pass, a little makeup, a neatly folded CV she was taking to Rank and Tudor, a biro, a purse fat with coffee loyalty cards and her phone.

  “Less than half charged,” she said, putting it down. “No reception, obviously.”

  Benny fished into the deep pockets of his builder’s trousers. He brought out a thick leather pouch with a zip, a wallet, a pencil, and then held up his mobile.

  “Next to no charge,” he added.

  Giles laid his stuff on a step, too. Often he’d carry a man-bag to work, but he’d left it in the office last night, planning to collect it after he’d been for a few drinks. But it hadn’t worked out like that. It hadn’t worked out like that at all.

  His now empty bottle of Lucozade. A pocket full of loose change, h
is wallet and mobile - next to no charge. He patted his inside jacket pocket, felt something inside, hesitated for a moment, then found his brushed-chrome roller ball pen. He put it on the step.

  “So, we’re all good for writing our last will and testaments with all the pens and Charles’ pad,” he said. The group smiled, but no one laughed. Charles pulled his notebook closer to him.

  Giles added his cigarettes, “seven left”.

  Giles had left a few things out. He barely knew these people. It had only been a couple of hours. He suspected everyone else had left something out, too.

  Megan looked down at the paltry stash. “So, we’ve got no water or drink. And we’ve no food at all? And practically no mobile phone power between us?”

  “Not that it would be any use,” said Giles. “No one has a signal.”

  “We might need them for other reasons,” she said.

  “Tetris? Candy Crush?” Giles said. No laugh again.

  Scanning through your pictures, Giles. There’s some entertainment right there.

  “Anything else?”

  Giles felt her last question was asked with a deep quiver in Megan’s voice.

  She’s cracking, Giles. Just a matter of time.

  They all looked down at what they’d got. Megan turned away and stared at the floor between her legs. Giles knew she was weeping. He swore at himself for pushing her.

  And for not bringing water. I mean, that was basic. Lucozade, for God’s sake. After a night like last night?

  Weren’t the Tube posters always going on about taking a bottle of water with you when you travelled? All of them should have had a bottle of water.

  The thought was almost impossible to contemplate. They had nothing to drink. Nothing to eat. They could be down here for days until they were rescued.

  Giles swallowed deeply and felt only a smoky dryness pass down his throat. Maybe that fag wasn’t such a good idea. How long was it that someone could survive without food and water? Five days? Three? The silence told him the others were thinking along the same lines.

  You could always drink your own piss, ha ha ha.

  Benny stood up and for a second Giles imagined the big man was going to take the Lucozade bottle and piss in it. But it was just his warped and hungover mind playing tricks on him. Benny headed down the stairs.

  “100 steps for number ones,” he said. “One hundred and fifty for number twos.” He disappeared around the steps below them.

  “Jesus, we’ll all be super fit by the time this is all over,” Giles said, trying to show a smile.

  Charles breathed out heavily.

  7

  Nilam Dewan only worked evenings. Between 3 p.m. and midnight at the Monco fuel station off the Wanstead Road in East London. The rest of the time, well, he was catching up on sleep or trying to put in time at the English language college he’d come from Sri Lanka to study at.

  The Central London School of English Language had looked grand on the internet. The site had said it was on a quiet historic street off the Capital’s famous bustling Oxford Street. What Nilam had found wasn’t as advertised.

  The Central London School of English Language was found in an alleyway between a mobile phone cover retailer and a computer repair store. There was a glass door, where other shops dumped their rubbish.

  The door led to some stairs, and at the top of those were two tiny rooms with white boards at one end and a kettle at another. The pupils there - most as disappointed as Nilam to find themselves in less salubrious surroundings than they’d hoped for - had to choose between the faint smell of damp with the windows closed, or the smell of trash and the noise of the traffic rising from the roads below.

  But he was here now. He had to keep paying his class fees, and he needed somewhere to live. So he tried to attend class during the day, work late into the evening and to sleep in the student-packed shared house he’d found.

  The later part of the evenings were always quiet at the fuel station. Parents had long been and gone for the afternoon school pickup, where they’d often call in for fuel on their way home or to swimming lessons or play dates. Most of the sales reps would refuel during the day, then they’d sit in the car park behind the station chomping on pasties and cups of insipid coffee from the machine. Commuters always filled up in the mornings, taking a brief break from the relentless traffic heading West and into the city.

  By late evening, most had their evening meals and were settling in for the night. Those that were out to pubs and restaurants didn’t drive these days, now that police conspicuously rolled their squad cars up and down the Wanstead Road to kill time.

  Taxi drivers. That was more or less the total of Nilam’s trade once it had gone past 10 p.m. Most often those heading back into the suburbs after a busy day shifting City folk from tower to tower in the financial district. Though of course, he got a trickle of other cars pulling in for fuel, for a coffee or on a desperate search for milk, a loaf of bread or something overpriced and tasteless from the Monco’s ready meal section.

  The thin, waxy haired guy in an ill-fitting bomber jacket seemed unimpressed with the selection. He’d been browsing for five minutes, picking up punnets of mashed potato and microwave pork sausages, looking at the labels on lasagnes. He’ll probably go for a burger in the end, with a grab-bag of crisps. He certainly looked like he could do with some fat on him.

  The guy had either parked round the back or come on foot. Nilam hadn’t had to click the screen to allow a pump to dispense fuel and could see his car wasn’t parked round the front of the shop. It was close to 11 p.m., the time when Nilam would close the main doors and only serve customers through a serving hatch by the tills. Once this guy had got his food, that’s what he’d do.

  The door dinged and Nilam watched as two other customers entered the petrol station, one fat and wearing a cap, the other bulky and nervous looking, wearing a woollen hat. But they were both far from as indecisive as the burger man. They strode straight up to Nilam as he waited behind the till, and for a moment, both stared at him.

  Hats. In a petrol station, hats were not good. Two hats were worse. Just in time - just in time to see the burger man turn and stride towards the front desk too - Nilam clocked that two hats plus a bomber jacket were even worse. He felt under the desk as the smaller man began leaning over the confectionary in front of him, shouting in his face.

  “Get your hands from under the fucking shelf,” the man in a cap said. The man in the bomber jacket had left the ready meals far behind and pulled out a sawn-off shotgun.

  “Nice and easy, fella,” not quite shouting, but pointing the gun between Nilam’s eyes to make himself clear, “hand over the cash. Everything, empty the fucking till.”

  “NOW!” shouted the bomber jacket, flinging a black holdall at Nilam. The muscle man was now holding up a pistol, too. He was also pointing it at him. He was glancing at the forecourt every now and again, in case someone else came to fill up.

  Nilam was stunned, instinctively holding up his hands. This wasn’t what he’d come from Columbo for. To be shot over the chocolate bars for the sake of an evening’s worth of petrol station takings.

  “Fill the bag,” said one thug. Nilam couldn’t help an internal smile as he looked down at the bag, though he ensured he kept a terrified look on his face.

  What were these guys hoping for? This wasn’t a bank, and any big notes went straight down the metallic security chute that Nilam didn’t have a key to. Group 4 had cleared the shoot just before his shift started. Most paid by card anyway. What did the till contain? A couple of hundred quid?

  Part of his training when he started at Monco was that Nilam should simply do exactly as he was told in these situations. Do it slowly, no jerky movements. Monco could stomach loosing a couple of hundred pounds, but it couldn’t face losing an employee. Nilam had also learned about hidden CCTV, letting the robbers go and not trying to be a hero.

  And the panic button under the till.

  He moved slowly, ke
eping his right hand in the air and using his left to punch a no-sale code into the till, and pinged the drawer open. He noticed the white guy in the cap look into the drawer with a look of disappointment, quickly replaced by resolution.

  “Hand it all over,” he screamed at Nilam, who pulled out a handful of £20s and £10s, a couple of fivers, then stuck them in the black holdall where they looked embarrassingly small. The guy looked over at his accomplices.

  “And the coins,” said the black man, nudging the end of his gun in the till's direction. “Throw the coins in too.”

  Nilam dropped his right arm, again moving as slowly as he could, and with both hands scooped up pound coins and fifties in his fists, dropping them into the holdall. For a second he thought they’d might ask him to go for a handful of 20p coins too, even the coppers.

  “Now, drop to the fucking ground,” said the burger man. “Don’t fucking move until we’re out of here.”

  Nilam fell to his knees, but couldn’t help notice one guy grab a handful of Snickers bars and a packet of crisps, throwing them into the bag too. By the time he was lying flat on the shop floor, he was almost giggling. He heard the three run from the shop, and the door dinged as they left. Still, he kept his head to the ground with his arms flat out in front of him.

  He thought of the Sri Lankan civil war and how the last four minutes had been far from the first time he’d seen angry men waving guns. These guys were nothing compared with brutal paramilitaries, nor the Sri Lankan government troops when provoked.

  He heard a car behind the garage screech out onto the road, and just in the distance the jumbled up sound of two police sirens ringing out. The button he’d pressed right at the beginning of the attack had summoned them.

  He heard the Doppler-shift change in one of the sirens as it sped past the petrol station, while another came closer and he heard the police car as it skidded up within metres of the shop.

  8

  Giles’ smoking didn’t actually bother Charles. He used to be a big smoker himself, but gave up when he left the forces. It wasn’t his lungs that was the problem. It was his heart.