Underground

by Tobias Hill

  He walks towards the benches, trying to remember more. But already the vividness is gone and he is unsure. He has walked home this way many times, and the images of the homeless are dulled by familiarity. The memory seems uncertain now, or imagined. The face of the girl becomes blurred with that of Rebecca Saville. For a moment he thinks of going up to the child standing on the benches, asking her – what? She would have nothing to say to him.

  He is nearer to the benches now. The child is still standing, pale and unmoving. From here Casimir can see there is something wrong with her neck, the shoulders hunched forward. He steps towards her. A gentle man, needing to help.

  The child’s neck stretches out as it turns to look at him, white and long as an arm. In the gloom Casimir stops, the fear jerking him back before he can understand what he sees. The figure is a heron, not a child. It angles its head away again and bends at the knees and leaps, opening out, colourless in the half-light. Casimir watches the slow beat of its wings, eastwards along the river.

  He waits for the fear to pass. Then he turns towards the southern exit, away from the subway. In his pocket he can feel the watch on his wrist, small and hard and certain. He walks on towards Waterloo Road.

  ‘Casimir. It’s a nice name. Is it Polish?’

  ‘It’s just a name.’

  Crunch of boots on ballast stones. Echo of voices in miles of tunnels, a city under the city. Casimir makes himself go on talking. It is good to talk, in the tunnels at night.

  ‘My middle name is Ariel. It means Lion.’

  ‘Polish lions?’

  ‘No. Hebrew.’

  ‘You don’t look Jewish.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are there many Jews in Poland?’

  Aebanyim walks ahead of him, bulky in her bright orange overalls. Between the rough gravel are track sleepers, wood flush with the tunnel floor. There is the smell of damp and creosote. The white bowls of track insulators gleam in the line-lights.

  ‘No. It’s not a good place to be Jewish.’

  The tunnel walls are riveted plates of iron, crusted with grime. Their raised edges arch overhead, like ribs, and the grime itself is creased and ridged, layer on layer of coal dust, exhaust and limestone glittering black. Cables run along the wall at shoulder height, thick as Casimir’s arms. Parallel to the cables are two thin lengths of copper, clean and bright: the old clip-on telephone wires, still kept live for emergencies. On Casimir’s belt his cellular coughs and mutters on its open radio line. Garbled snatches of conversation. Interference from other lines and works.

  ‘You must miss it. Poland.’

  ‘Sometimes.’ He thinks of zúr soup, its taste of hot rye bread and soured cream and garlic. The forest, pine trees intersecting like helices. Birches, their pattern repeated again and again; spindles of some pale and cold organism. The forest’s dark, which he almost loved. ‘Not often.’

  ‘Oh, there’s always something. Not your family?’

  ‘No.’ Watered light against his mother’s drawn features. Just the two of them, playing. He tries to recall where and cannot. ‘Aebanyim is also a good name. Where is it from?’

  ‘Nigeria. But my first name is Sarah, you know? You forgot. I told you before.’

  Her voice is full of gentle laughter. They trudge on, measuring distance by the ten-foot space between light brackets. What colour there is down here stands out, vibrant against the coal-pit background. There is a single apple-green wall cable, spiralling between grey wires. The red headlines of a tabloid front page, blowing from station to station.

  ‘What is it like? Nigeria.’

  ‘Oh –’ She laughs. ‘Well. There are lions there.’

  ‘What about Oluwo? Where is he from?’

  ‘Nigeria.’

  ‘The same? Did you come here together?’

  Short laughter between closed teeth. ‘No. Nigeria is big. Not like Great Britain.’

  Casimir thinks of the staff list, the eclectic muddle of names from Africa and East Europe. The Underground has always been a place for immigrant workers. There are never enough people willing to work the tunnels. It is part of the reason he is here himself.

  ‘Oluwo is Yoruba.’

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘Not Yoruba.’

  He smiles. The air is warm and stale under the weight of earth, streets and buildings. Between the harsh illumination of line-lights are bands of dark, curving around the ceiling and walls. There is always darkness waiting, underground. He tries not to think of it, to concentrate on their talk. Their voices are a thread of sound against the background hush of air.

  ‘Just a moment.’

  Aebanyim stops by a track join, squinting in the bad light. She kneels, reaching out with her hands. The long lines of metal are eroded where they meet. She reaches into her jacket, takes out a can, shakes it to loosen the spray paint. The can hisses as she marks the fault for the engineers. A circle of fluorescent yellow on the discoloured steel. They walk on.

  ‘Are you married, Casimir?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The tunnel walls shine with water. The cell phones crackle again, in unison. Casimir slows to turn his receiver down. Taking careful steps even now, when the track is dead. The black box of the voltage tester bangs against his thigh.

  ‘Why aren’t you married, Casimir? I am. Don’t you want to be with someone?’

  ‘Yes, I want to.’

  He can hear the care in his own voice. A careful man, the way his mother took care. He tries to say something, a real answer, but it is impossible. He shakes his head, three steps behind Aebanyim. The next line light shines up ahead. The runners curve away north-west, four gleaming steel parallels.

  It is what he likes best about night shifts, the tunnel-walking. If he can, he comes down here alone. Not because the proximity of the dark doesn’t scare him. Once, he has been here when the lights have gone for less than a minute. The fear was so strong it felt as if his breath no longer reached to his brain. Then, he stopped, bent double, taking in great ragged lungfuls of the black air. But only if he is alone; sometimes it’s better for him to be alone here.

  He walks in the tunnels because he can. They are the place he has taken on the dark. He has been trying for eight years and the fear is still with him. But he has learned to manage it. Now he walks against it, leaning slightly, as if into a slight gradient.

  It is why he came here, to the Underground; one of the reasons. Not because he needed a job – there was other work he might have done, on building sites, or the seasonal farm work undertaken by many immigrants. He remembers the first time he travelled on the Underground, in from the Heathrow air terminals. Besides the spread-map view from the aeroplane, the train was his first image of Britain. The suburban surface stations, plant-pots hung in a grey mizzle of rain. Then the shock of descent, under Hammersmith and the West End. He couldn’t take his eyes away from the windows. The pressure of air rattling against them, the tunnel roaring past outside.

  For Casimir the dark is the Underground. It is a place where light has no real place. He is here because the dark is here, because he will not run away from it. He has never turned away from what scares him. Because the fear is too great for him to ever turn his back.

  ‘Listen. Can you hear?’

  He stops. From up ahead comes the sound of voices. Laughter, raucous and high-pitched.

  He shrugs. ‘Cleaners. Or the Camden engineers. Maybe they are lost.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Aebanyim’s voice sounds uncertain. Down here the laughter sounds eerie, hollowed out by the tunnels’ acoustics. He thinks of children’s stories in Poland, the frightening ones. The Ohyn, babies stillborn with cauls and teeth, who came back at night to eat their grieving parents. Voices speaking from underground.

  They wait by the track side, listening as the sounds come closer. Casimir can make out a female voice, an Australasian accent.

  ‘So I told him New Zealand, and he said, Oh, sheep co
untry, ha ha. I said, Right, ha ha. And then I said, Actually I do have a sheep, and he said, Really? I said, Yeah, it’s like a house-pet sheep, lots of folks back home have them. He says, Really?’

  Four figures appear around the next corner, bent double under giant plastic sacks. A cleaning team, Casimir thinks. Aebanyim looks back at him, smiles. He sees her teeth catch the light, their bleached whiteness.

  ‘I said, Yeah, they’re kind of like dogs back home. People walk them around the city centres. And the guy keeps nodding and going, Oh right, right. I mean, Jesus, I felt sorry for him. Hello, who’s that? Is that gorgeous Mick Adams from Camden?’

  ‘No. Mick Adams is absent tonight.’

  The cleaners stop talking at the sound of Aebanyim’s voice. The odd choice of words, textbook English spoken out loud. Casimir can see them properly now. Four women, none of them young. Their hands and forearms are covered by thick rubber gloves. He recognizes the New Zealander, a stocky woman, her frizz of red hair tied back with a metal hair-grip. Her name is Muir, Anne or Anna. She doesn’t recognize him.

  ‘Mick? He’s never off. What’s wrong with him?’

  The cleaner is looking past Aebanyim at Casimir. As if the black woman isn’t there. After a moment he answers, not stepping forward, ‘Adams is not well. Supervisor Leynes will be on his shifts for a few months.’

  ‘A few months? Shit. Tell him to get well, will you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The cleaners move past, stepping across the track to make room. The last woman’s rubbish sack bumps against her side, half-open. Inside Casimir can see the mass of tunnel refuse. Neon-yellow crisp packets, bundles of human hair, torn scratchcards, golden credit cards.

  As she passes him, the woman grins and thrusts her hand out. Something clacks between her fingers and Casimir steps back. She is holding a pair of false teeth, yellowed and dusty.

  ‘Look what I found!’ She turns away, small and anxious. The other cleaners have already gone on southwards. She grins again and then hurries after them.

  They walk on. Now there is no sound except the crunch of their feet. Two rhythms, not quite in time.

  The wall beside him gives way to space. Casimir steps sideways, ducking under the loops of cables and the line-telephone wires. Beyond is another track, an adjoining tunnel curling away. He looks up and down, checking for damage to the walls, track, signals. Moisture shines on the tunnel’s curvature, so that it looks like a giant sewer.

  ‘Why was Mick Adams sick? Was it because of the woman who fell?’

  The woman who fell. He turns back to Aebanyim, frowning at her choice of words. Not an accident, or a suicide. Just the woman, falling out from the crowd. He shakes his head.

  ‘I don’t know. Does it matter?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She turns to walk on northwards and Casimir follows, two steps behind. ‘He is a careful man. Maybe it matters, if he leaves. Once I was with him down here. The line was not working, because there was water coming in from the big sewers, the old rivers. We came to the break – I was in front. I saw black things moving in the water. They were – fish like snakes.’

  ‘Eels.’

  ‘Yes. From the underground rivers. Like snakes. I wanted to move them but Mick said they bite. He said they were dirty inside, like rats. He was very careful of them. We went back to the station, and cleared the lines, and he turned the power on –’

  There is a rattle of loose stones as Aebanyim stumbles. She falls over towards the track, her hands going out, twisting down. Casimir bends and reaches out, instinctively quick, so that she falls into his arms. She is heavy but surprisingly thin, the uniform flapping around her torso. Casimir lifts her upright, stands back.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  He watches the worker feeling her hands and left arm, checking for blood or broken skin.

  ‘Not another accident.’ She smiles up at Casimir, teeth very white in the dark between lights. ‘Thank you.’ Then she turns away, walking on more slowly. She doesn’t talk again.

  Casimir follows her, moving carefully on the wet ballast stones. They come to another junction, their northbound tunnel opening briefly into a southbound. The line-light has shorted out here. There is the sound of water everywhere in the near-dark. Casimir listens to its musical drip-drop, trying to place the source of the leak.

  ‘I was working when it happened. The accident.’

  He stops and looks round. It is impossible to make out the other worker’s face properly, to see what she is thinking.

  ‘In the control room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You saw it on the monitors? When Rebecca Saville fell?’

  ‘Yes.’ Aebanyim steps closer. Now Casimir can see her eyes, their whites, staring. She talks quickly, the accent making it hard for Casimir to understand. ‘They are video cameras. So it is all recorded.’

  ‘Photographs. I saw.’

  ‘No. Not photographs. They are video cameras.’ She is nodding, as if agreeing with Casimir.

  ‘There are videos, of course. Where are they kept?’

  ‘The police took them.’

  Casimir feels the urgency go out of him. ‘The ones who tried to talk to Adams?’

  ‘Yes. One police. A policewoman. She took all the tapes from that day.’

  He swears in Polish: Cholera. Aebanyim’s cellular crackles into life and she unclips it from her belt, talking into it between bursts of static.

  ‘Yes? Aebanyim. Yes. I will come back. Casimir … I will come now.’ She clicks off the radio, looks up.

  ‘Go. I can manage here.’

  The black woman smiles. ‘See you soon.’

  Casimir watches her walk back along the tunnel towards the Camden Town platforms. Long after she is out of sight there is the sound of her footsteps, echoing back along the empty line.

  He looks down at his watch. It is past three-thirty, less than an hour before he has to be clear of the track. He can hear the soft tick of the mechanism as the watch-hands move imperceptibly, thin and black against the luminous dial.

  He holds the small light up ahead of him briefly, like a beacon. Then he lowers it, curls up his hand. The next line-light is close; he can see illumination diffused around the gradual north-east curve. He is almost at the midpoint between stations now. Somewhere ahead are the disused platforms of South Kentish Town, where he can turn back towards Camden. He knows the distance in line-lights; there are a hundred more. His radio volume is turned down and he switches it back up before he starts to walk.

  When he reaches the next light he stops in its bluish illumination, breathing a little fast. It is very warm here; he can feel sweat running down the sides of his torso. There is the sound of water too, the drip and echo of it.

  The line is straight here and he keeps his eyes on the patches of illumination, measuring off the steps. The ballast stones have been scattered away and his rubber-soled boots slap on the bare concrete.

  He has been hearing the music for some time before he registers it. It is very faint – a voice, guitars, echoes. Out of place among the hushed sounds of the tunnel. Casimir feels for his radio, lifts it to his ear. There is no sound from the receiver now except the soft hiss of static.

  The sound is coming from up ahead. Turned down low or played softly or simply distant, echoing back along the tunnel. They are playing music at the next station, Casimir thinks, but as the idea comes to him he already knows it is wrong. The Kentish Town platforms are nearly half a mile away. If I am hearing music from there, he thinks, I should be hearing the engineers working at Camden.

  He starts walking again, trying to tread without sound. He is closer now and the music is perceptibly louder. He frowns, trying to remember if there are any ventilation shafts from the surface here, anything that might carry the sound of music down from an all-night restaurant or dance hall.

  It is at South Kentish Town, he thinks. There is someone at the abandoned station. Briefly he can make out sung
words and a female voice, clear and low.

  ‘Let me ride… Let me… ride on your grace for a while…’

  Then the sound is carried away again. He moves forward and immediately there are ballast stones under his boots. He is not ready for them. Gravel clacks and skitters against the track metal. There is an echo of movement ahead and then the music stops abruptly. Another sound, regular, almost too soft for footsteps.

  Casimir breaks into a run, through the last barred sections of light and dark. Then the tunnel walls widen around him and he is at South Kentish Town. The derelict platform is almost chest high beside him. Rows of tiny stalactites are forming from the platform’s lip, gleaming grey. Broken equipment is piled against the far wall. Sixty feet away a single light bulb shines in the platform’s only side-tunnel, swinging slightly on its flex.

  He puts his hands out on to the platform, vaults up and stops still, listening, dirt cool on his palms. There is no sound now except his own breathing. The light from the side-tunnel fans out across the platform, filtering away between the crates of equipment.

  The smell of limestone is strong here. Sweet and damp, like church stone. Casimir tries to remember how long ago the station was abandoned; seventy or eighty years, sometime between the wars. Now it feels more like a great natural cave than a place dug and built. He kneels down, looking away across the black platform grime. Deposited in thick ridges, it is too uneven to keep much sign of movement.

  He moves forward along the platform, stopping to look between teetering stacks of wrought-iron benches, fourteen cracked-faced platform clocks, enamelled cigarette sand-trays, great rotting scrolls of posters for THE UNDERGROUND: ALWAYS WARM AND BRIGHT and MASKELYNE’S MYSTERIES – ST GEORGE’S HALL. Letting his eyes adjust to the empty dark between objects.

  At the side-tunnel he stops. The bare bulb shines off the tiled walls. Casimir can make out old serif lettering, EXIT THIS WAY, the words defaced by graffiti. Down the passage he knows there must be other platforms and tunnels, staircases, an old cage-lift. He remembers that a worker was once trapped in the lift shaft for three days; he wonders if there is still a surface exit. On the floor by the corner of the wall, something catches the light.