The Spiral

by Gideon Burrows

  Giles pulled himself up by the bannister and stretched his legs. He looked around at Megan and Benny, whose faces now showed they were working it out for themselves.

  The lights had gone out after midnight last night, now they’d come on again at five. The times the London Underground shuts up its stations, then opens them up again next day.

  Light means people. There must be someone sitting in a control box somewhere, flicking switches, bringing the underground to life. Giles looked around for a camera. Staircases and escalators had cameras, didn’t they? But they’d all checked for them, for anything, for hours yesterday. Still.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he whispered, almost to himself. Then louder, “Jesus, I thought we were dead, but it’s going to be okay.”

  Megan pulled herself up too and rearranged her skirt at the waist. She wiggled her toes, one by one, as if she was working pins and needles out of her feet and legs.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said.

  “Ha, no need for that,” said Giles. “We’ll just walk up. Like I say, we’re part of the network. There has to be a top to this.”

  “No Giles, I’ve really got to go. I didn’t, well, you know, I didn’t. Yesterday. I couldn’t.” She dipped her head low and looked away.

  Not my cup of tea, Giles, but hey: whatever you’re into, mate, whatever you’re into.

  It wasn’t what Giles was into. He forced the thought away, and gently banged his hand against the wall, enjoying the distraction the pain offered.

  “I need to get out of here,” Giles said, breaking the discomfort. “I’m going up, further than any of us have been before. The lights show that the world is out there. There must be something: an emergency exit, a camera.”

  Time to lose these losers.

  Benny shook his head. He’d been up and up and up.

  “The lights had come back on, but none of this changes things,” he said.

  “Well, I’ve decided I’m going to keep on up until I find something.” Giles blew out smoke, turned, and headed upward.

  “Do you think Giles is right?” said Megan eventually. “Could he find something up there and just not come back?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Benny. “He might be right about us being trapped and the outside world going on without us, but I don’t think he’s going to find the top of this spiral. Things just aren’t looking that way.

  “Going up and down these steps isn’t going to change our situation.”

  “Like a ship lost far out at sea,” said Megan. “No one knows you’re missing, don’t even know where to look for you, until they pick up your S.O.S. signal. Like yesterday, banging on the rail. Then suddenly everything slots together.”

  “Yeah, and then you’re rescued,” he turned around and looked down the corridor before him. He looked up at the lights lining the top of the corridor, grubby black circles of glass sunk into the tiles. He stood and reached up, easily tall enough to touch the lights. He fingered the cold discs, running his finger around the circles. His fingers were grimy when he withdrew them.

  “The lights went off last night and back on this morning,” Benny said. “They could be on a timer, or someone is switching them off. Either way, if lights go out when they’re not supposed to, it must make a signal somewhere. A flashing red light.”

  “So, you want to smash the light and plunge us into darkness on the off chance?”

  “No,” said Benny. “But I could take the light out, look at the wires. Maybe break the connection, at least for a moment. Or for a couple of moments, one after the other: S.O.S. again.”

  “God, it’s worth a shot,” Megan said. Benny noticed in her a hint of excitement.

  “S.O.S.,” said Charles from below, now awake. “The old ones are the good ones.”

  A voice came from above, as Giles rounded the corner: “And exactly how do you propose to do that?”

  “With this,” the builder replied. He was holding up a large screwdriver.

  16

  Giles shouted: “What the fuck, Benny? Why didn’t you tell us you had a screwdriver? We could have been digging ourselves out of here.”

  “Digging out?” said Benny, his voice sharp.

  “Yeah, yesterday. When we were all running round like maniacs, banging on walls, trying to scratch off the tiles with our fingernails. We could have been smashing through them with that.

  “What else do you have in that little tool bag? An axe? A fucking crowbar? We’ve been here for 24 hours hours, and only now do you reveal you have brought a Black and Decker workbench to the party?”

  “Don’t you think I’ve thought about that,” said Benny, stern again. “All I have is this screwdriver. Don’t you think I’ve spent every moment down in this pit thinking about getting out of here?

  “But dig where, Giles? Dig with a screwdriver? This isn’t The Shawshank Redemption. This is real life.” Benny stopped, as if reconsidering what he’d just said.

  Benny continued, more wearily now: “There will be three feet or more of concrete behind the tiles, and then beyond that just solid earth. There’s no getting out that way, and definitely not with a screwdriver.”

  “How do you know that? It could be just a foot?” said Giles.

  “Man, I know about walls. Thick ones. There’s no digging out.” He held up the tool. It was a hand’s breadth long, slightly thicker than a pencil and tapered into a flat head at the end. Giles had to admit it was hardly a pneumatic drill.

  “Well, cards on the table, Benny, what else have you in your builder’s bag of tricks?”

  Benny pulled open his little leather bag and showed it to Giles, then to Megan and Charles. There was nothing. A few screws, some long plastic cable ties, a blunt pencil. Not much of a builder.

  “I’m not allowed to take tools home,” he said. His voice was uncomfortable. “I took the screwdriver and some screws from the site this morning to fix a railing at home. Nothing much gets done where I live. I was going to return it.”

  Benny sounded like a school kid, the tone of apology in his voice as if he’d stepped out of line.

  Poor Benny. Please don’t give me detention, Miss. I’ll be a really good boy.

  If he was honest with himself, Giles was jealous that he hadn’t thought to exploit the lights. He was supposed to have the brains, Benny the brawn.

  Nice one, Brain of Britain. Yeah, real clever.

  His workmates had said it to him, jokingly - it was always a joke, wasn’t it? - after a team meeting last week. He’d suggested a new way of time-managing that had fallen flat with Andy Asswipe.

  At least he’d tried, instead of hanging round doing the same old thing, taking every opportunity to bunk off or to look busy while doing nothing.

  “So, how’s this going to work, Benny,” said Megan. “I don’t see any screws in the lights.”

  “No, the light will be cemented in behind the tiles. Tamper proof. That way they last longer. That’s why there are no wires either. Someone could pull them down. The wires will be behind the tiles too.”

  He stood and reached up to poke around the light above him with the screwdriver, seeing if there was any crack he could jam into, to get some purchase.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing,” asked Giles. “Because if those lights go out for good we’re totally stuffed.”

  Benny sat down again, obviously reconsidering. Giles and Megan looked at each other.

  “I don’t think it’ll work like that,” said Benny. He didn’t sound convinced. “They should be on a parallel circuit. Who knows how many lights are on the line, but you wouldn’t normally have all of them in the whole staircase connected. Just a dozen or so at a time. If one goes out, we take out that many lights. But not the whole staircase. So, the worst case would be that we just move 100 steps up the staircase and use the light there.”

  “Yeah, what he just said,” said Giles, admitting defeat.

  “You’re a clever man, Benny,” said Charles. “It’s good t
o have you on board.”

  “You learn these things, where I’ve been. In the trade. And elsewhere.”

  Benny stood again and held the screwdriver up to the tiles surrounding the light. He used the palm of his hand to bang the point of it into the grouting between them, but nothing came away. He tried different angles and started to hammer in heavy blows with his palm. But still the screwdriver made just tiny dents in the grouting, or just slipped off the tiles with a painful-to-hear screech.

  Benny sat down again, his arms hurting from holding them above his head. But he untied a shoelace on the hefty boot on his right foot. He pulled it off and stood up again.

  This time he had more power behind the screwdriver as he brought the heel of the boot hard into the handle. A few screeches more, a few more dents, and then a shard of grey tile flew away and hit the wall. Benny brought the tip of the tool to where the shard had come loose, and hammered again, this time causing a crack about an inch long.

  Benny took a breath, then raised the boot and the screwdriver again. More and more chips and shards were coming away from the tile, allowing Benny to get underneath them. With one heavy boot blow, a whole tile came away revealing - in just one corner - the rusty edge of a small circle of metal.

  “We’re in,” he said.

  Benny sat down.

  “Should I have a go?” Giles asked, limply. He knew he wasn’t tall enough. Benny was struggling to keep his own muscly arms above his head.

  It went unsaid.

  Benny continued, taking rests every couple of minutes. He had been right: behind the tiles was just grey concrete and that was staying fast as each boot blow tore away chunks of tile. But as the tiles fell away around the light fitting, more of the rusted metal collar came into view.

  By the time enough collar had been revealed for him to prise the screwdriver underneath it, he was sweating, breathing heavily and his attacks at the tile had become shorter. The metal moved and bent slightly where Benny had stuck the tool underneath it. With a bit more force, it would come away. He gave the metal another lever, a final bit of tile moved and the light casing popped out.

  Benny pulled his hands down, dropped the boot and massaged his biceps, flexing his hands, which had become stiff from the work.

  The three of them looked up to the ceiling. The light hung there. It was a cone of metal, with the glass disc at one end still lit. The cone tapered into two flat edges, where it met two thick black wires, which ran back into the hole the light had fallen from.

  “So, now we just break the glass and unscrew the lightbulb,” said Giles.

  “I don’t know,” said Benny, looking up again and handling the light. “I don’t think it’ll be as simple as that. They look like LEDs. They’ll be soldered in. I’ll need to disconnect then re-connect the wires.”

  For the first time, Benny thought this was madness. But he knew too that if he didn’t do something, Giles would probably have a go and might end up killing himself.

  His plan was to tear away the rubber on one cable. There, it would connect with the light bulb by either being soldered to it, or running through a hole and tied off.

  If Benny could get one wire disconnected from the bulb, the light would go off. And hopefully a dozen or more lights, signifying to the outside world they were down there. Touch it back onto the plates, and the light would come back on again.

  S.O.S.

  But if he touched both the metal light casing and the uncovered wire at the same time with bare hands, his arms might become the conductor of who knows how many volts of electricity. And he didn’t fancy finding out.

  “I need something to hold the light with, to stop my fingers touching the metal.”

  “Why?” asked Megan.

  Benny decided not to tell the truth: that one wrong move might not only electrocute him, but would also plunge them all into darkness for many metres all around, with next to no chance of reconnecting the light in pitch black without getting electrocuted. That’s if he could even find the light.

  “The bulb will get hot when I’m working with it,” he said.

  Giles held up his tie.

  “Something thicker,” he said. “How about your jacket?”

  “This is Shepherd and Woodward, it would be a crime,” said Giles.

  “Just pass me the damn jacket,” Benny said.

  Giles took it off and passed it up. Benny stuck the screwdriver into one sleeve and tore a hole. Then with some tugging, he ripped the whole sleeve right away.

  He flung the jacket at Giles.

  “Here, you can sell it at a 25 percent discount.”

  Giles rolled it into a ball, apparently embarrassed to put the jacket back on.

  Benny passed his mobile to Megan, and showed her how to turn on the screen torch. When the lights go out, she’d need to shine it where Benny was working so he could connect the wires back again to create the S.O.S.

  He put his arm through Giles’ sleeve, making a kind of glove with his fingers. He reached up for the light.

  17

  Megan Lisk looked in the mirror and considered her outfit.

  She’d been trying on different skirts from seven a.m, and if she didn’t do something radical and actually decide pretty soon, she was going to be late for her interview.

  She eventually went back to the first skirt she’d pulled on that morning, over skin colour tights. The skirt was tight, but at least it wasn’t faded and bobbly like the ones she’d been wearing to her job - her old job, she hoped - for the last month or so.

  She couldn’t be late for today’s interview. Not a minute. In fact, she needed to be 10 minutes early, looking pristine and ready to take on the world.

  Megan wasn’t naturally confident. At school in Epping, she had spent much of her life in other people’s shadows: at school, she was a quiet girl who diligently got on with her work, trying to ignore the boys who seemed to become more rowdy and crude as their voices became more grimy, their hair more greasy and their face speckled with grubby patches of fluff and puddles of red spots.

  But as hard as she tried, and as much as she tried to act like them, she couldn’t match the grades some of the other girls achieved. Or receive the attention - was it affection? - the teachers lathered them with.

  Her dad urged her not to push herself too far. He said she should do things normal for her age, not always be studying or reading in her room.

  Find a boyfriend (but not a drop out), go for a day out (but only to where I tell you), be a rebel (but do what I tell you). What was education for anyway, when there were so many local jobs around?

  Dad didn’t have to have any ‘aspiration’, as the school posters were always telling Megan she needed. He had been a general builder, just like his own father. He’d grown up on the tools. Had no training, an interview, or had even got close to a CV in his life. Anything else, well, that wasn’t even on his radar.

  Dad knew nothing about the jobs market. Particularly for young women. He pictured women behind shopping tills, in beauty parlours, serving at Iceland or the ice cream shops. It never occurred to him Megan might wish for something more.

  And if he even considered it, well, she knew where that was going: he’d hate it. Megan would leave Epping. College. University. Maybe a job in London. She wouldn’t be there for dinner each night. She wouldn’t sit on the sofa with him, watching the TV programmes he wanted to watch. She wouldn’t have to tell him her every move, get approval for every time she went out, with a clock ticking for her return.

  She had only got her own house key when she was 15.

  So, of course, Megan did exactly what her dad didn’t want. She was rebelling. She was determined to work hard and get out of there. The suffocating home. The oppressive lack of expectation.

  So Megan worked. She worked really hard. Months before her GCSEs she buried her head in her books, skipping TV so she could keep pushing.

  “You can study too hard, you know,” Dad said. “Then it’ll stop going in. Ther
e’s only so much your head can cram.”

  What did he know? His parents had always had an improbable amount of money. Dad drove around in his little white van fixing people’s toilets, tut-tutting at their boilers.

  How could you fill up your day with that, when there never seemed to be enough time for Megan to get all the study in that she wanted? Yet Dad lived in a comfortable semi-detached in a quiet leafy street. No debts, no mortgage.

  No desire to see what lay outside his little suburb, let alone the world.

  “I’m comfortable,” Dad would say. “I just look after my girl and my precious collection of chilli plants. What else does a Dad need? You don’t need to do anything. Waste of your time. Waste of my money.”

  It was a different message from what Megan was hearing at school. The teachers were always on about succeeding, the challenge of getting a job, bright new futures for those who got their heads down.

  Only so much of that stuck. What was more worrying was the occasional conversations among her friends: about brothers and sisters who were at university, racking up debt, not knowing how they were going to get rid of it, nor what they were going to do afterwards with no money to start their life with.

  Dad didn’t know the half of it. Megan was glad.

  And so she continued to study. But it wasn’t enough. Not without someone pushing her, like the other kids’ folks did.

  Megan missed out on the GCSE grades she needed to continue onto A-levels. The teachers had assured her it would be fine, but Megan didn’t feel they backed it up with the encouragement they offered the more ‘promising’ girls. Dad was right. Better get her details dropped into Superdrug.

  Instead, Megan left school and the sixth form behind. The just-missed GCSEs fired her up. She wanted to prove her teachers wrong. Her Dad too.

  Mostly, herself.

  She headed for the local vocational college. It was far from what she’d hoped: all courses in hairdressing and nail work, car mechanics for the boys. A bunch of NVQs in secretarial skills.