by Tobias Hill
‘Oy! ‘Kin’ ‘ell.’
‘Slow down, mate! She’ll wait if she loves you.’
The alley beside Al Araf Saunas is deserted. Casimir goes quietly anyway, watching for police, Line Management, any of the authorities who could stop him. The door to the yard is closed with a new padlock of layered steel. Casimir leans up close to the corrugated-iron fence. Its wet surface is stained black and yellow and steel-blue, like a wall of mackerel skin.
He closes his hands around the padlock and takes a step backwards. Held up by rotting wooden palings, the metal warps and rattles, rust cracking off it. Casimir has taken four steps when it comes away, crashing and booming towards him across the concrete. He hauls the metal to one side, mouth set with the effort. Looks up at the door of the abandoned station.
There is a figure hunched up beside the door. Indistinct from the piles of rotting carpet and linoleum around it, face turned down so that the hair drips away from the eyes. Casimir doesn’t recognize the man until he goes close, up to the mottled white-metal door. The figure’s neck is wrapped in pink Elastoplast, its facial features flattened out like a boxer’s.
‘Bill.’ Casimir’s voice is deadened by the downpour. He tries again. ‘Bill.’
The man looks up. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ His eyes are dull, scrunched up against the rain. Now they go wide and starey. ‘Well, you’ve been living in interesting times, ain’t you?’
Casimir squats down next to the older man, catching his breath. He sees there is a tiny dog curled up inside the man’s woollen coat, black and tan with attentive black eyes. Rain shines against Casimir’s face and he wipes it away with the back of his hand. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Waiting for Hilary. This is our emergency rendezvous. Have you met my friend? He’s called Snog. Snog the dog, see? It’s a joke, you can laugh. Go on, it’s good for you.’
‘The police had you.’
‘Nah.’ Bill smiles the word out, his face lit up with something, pride or pleasure. Burnt with it. ‘This old Bill’s quicker than that Old Bill. The hospital had me, but not for long. Bill has just left the building. I got out through the Place of Rest, down where they take the bodies away in the Black Marias. I know the hospitals, see. I’ve been there before.’
He leans closer. ‘Where is Alice?’
Bill puts out one fist, thumb up. Turns it down. ‘She was under the platforms. Creeping around in the crawl-space. They never came out with her. I watched.’
‘She is still down there?’
Their faces are inches apart. Now the man leans back from Casimir, whining, his head banging against the old brick wall. The dog looks up at their faces and away, panting into the rain.
‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I didn’t want them to find her. But it’s all cocked up now she’s locked up.’ The homeless man begins to rock on his haunches, his voice fast, hissing. ‘All locked up underground, it’s ironic. It’s practically pharaonic, like Rameses, that’s what she is, look on my doors, ye Mighty, and despair. Down below the station’s bright, but here outside it’s black as night – do you remember? Billy Brown of London Town? Back in the war, that was. Back in the blackouts.’
‘Quiet now. Try to stay quiet. Will you do that?’
‘Yes. Right.’
Casimir leans his hands on his knees, pushes himself upright. There is no guttering on the abandoned station building, and water pours down the wall and the Underground door in slow sheets. The metal doorframe is set flush into the wall. Around it, the brick is scored with unused drill-holes. Casimir reaches out and pushes a finger into one hole, up to the first joint. The soft stone crumbles against his skin. Red, like mincemeat.
‘Are you going underground?’
‘Yes.’
He feels around the doorframe. There is nothing to get hold of and not all the bricks are rotten. He digs at them, feeling clay collect under his broken nails. Making purchase.
‘You should get a move on. Time flies but aeroplanes crash. No, that’s not right, is it? Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana? No, that isn’t it either.’
He leans his head forward, resting it on the cold metal. Taking the strain with his shoulders, rolling them back. Air cracks between his teeth as he pulls. Once. Twice.
‘Time flies when you’re having fun. That’s it. Nice to know we’re having fun, isn’t it?’
The door doesn’t move. Casimir begins to swear between his teeth in English, in Polish. Stops himself. He holds the breath inside him, a hard belt of it in his belly. Steadily, he begins to yank at the doorframe. Hauling against it with his arms and feet, like a big animal in a small cage. As if it’s him who is trapped underground, not Alice, who lied to him. Who is not Alice at all.
The door warps once, booming like a drum, and immediately there is a squeal of metal as the first bolt comes loose. Casimir works at it with quick, hard tugs. Using his weight, a hundred kilos of muscle and bone forcing itself inside. When both upper bolts are loose Casimir reaches up, pulling the entire doorframe downwards. Inside is the staircase, lit up bright and dull, neon tubes coated with dust.
On his wrist the watchstrap is tight, the veins of his arms swollen with blood. Casimir takes the watch off, folds it carefully into his jacket pocket. Looks up. The homeless man is standing ten feet away. Quiet, well back, the dog still cradled in his arms.
‘Well. No hiding from you, is there? What big hands you’ve got, Granny. Long arm of the lover, that’s what you are.’
‘Are you coming down?’
‘No. No, we’ll stay up here, thanks. Got to wait for my other half, my Hilary. Dear Hilary, without her I’m rather ex-Hilarated. Nice to get out of the rain, though, ta. I’ll see you when I see you, eh?’
‘Goodbye.’
Casimir steps over the flat ramp of the door and goes inside. He takes the stairs at a run. Making long jumps down them, eight or nine steps at a time. He remembers the feeling from childhood; the delight of motion through trees, the sensation of flight.
At the bottom of the spiral stairs he waits, listening to the sound of himself echo away. In the core of the staircase the substation door has been shut. Casimir tries it but the heavy metal is locked and his arms ache to the bone. Two arches lead off into light through the curved walls. Casimir looks down for his own footprints, but the dust has been trampled away. He turns left, into the side-passage with its bricked-up lift doors and wartime graffiti.
The lights are brighter now and Casimir can see pale linemarks on the walls, as if furniture once stood against them. At the passage’s dead end he can make out a pile of wooden planks and three sets of bunk-beds, their skeletal frames leant awry.
He stops still. From somewhere in the abandoned station comes the buzz of loose electricity. He can smell it in the air, frazzled and sour. He wonders if the generators are damp with groundwater or simply overloaded, unused to so much activity. There are other sounds too: the cacophony of a car alarm filtered down from the surface, the hush of tunnel air from further underground. Nothing human.
‘Alice?’ His voice sounds small in the ruined station.
The hush of tunnel air intensifies, gains sound. Its murmur builds to a roar as a train goes through the derelict platforms below. Casimir takes out his wristwatch. It’s still before ten, hours until the Underground closes down.
There are four storeroom doors further down the passage, their old wood glossed with strip light. A metal bar has been set across each door, nails drilled into the passage’s cracked tiles.
‘Alice?’
He comes to the stairs with their luminous wall-stripes. Walks down through the radium light, past the last locked door and the light bulb still swinging on its flex, out into the railway. Silver parallels curve off into the dark, clean and perfect and beautiful.
She is at the far end of the southbound platform, sitting on a pile of Underground signs between high stacks of ironwork litter bins. Casimir is less than a dozen feet away when he sees her. She is
smoking a cigarette, leaning back against the platform wall. Her face is still in profile, not turning to look at him.
He sits down beside her, not speaking. The smooth enamelled metal is cold against him. Rat’s-tails of unwashed hair fall straight past the curve of Alice’s cheekbones. He can’t see her eyes or ears, only the downturn of her mouth. From where he sits, it is hard to tell if she breathes.
‘Are you hurt?’ She doesn’t answer, his lone voice whispering, away. He tries again. ‘I have been looking for you. What are you doing?’
‘Waiting to get out.’ She takes a drag of the cigarette. The tobacco pops and crackles. Like electricity, he thinks. ‘What do you want?’
‘I found him. It is a man you knew, a foster carer –’
‘I know who he is.’
She looks round at him, forehead pinched between narrow eyes. Casimir remembers the Line Manager. It is a cruel face. He goes on talking.
‘The lines shut down in two hours – we could walk to Camden. Or you can leave now, with me. I have removed the entrance door.’
‘I have removed the entrance door. Christ, you even talk like Arnold Schwarzenegger. You told the police I was here.’
‘Yes.’
‘You cunt.’
He sees the way her throat and jaw and face move, bringing up the word. Her voice breaks on its harshness and she turns away.
‘You knew it was him. The foster carer. You never told me.’
‘So? You know now. Carer!’ She spits the word out, disgusted by it.
‘What is his name?’
‘What does it matter? All that matters is he doesn’t find me. I’ll never let him find me.’
He is looking at her hands. The nails have white crescents of calcium deprivation. They are bordered with black dirt under the broken edges. Casimir imagines her at the entrance door, panicked. Scrabbling at the metal, trying not to be heard.
‘You thought it was me who killed them. Didn’t you? I thought you believed me. You should have. We were lovers.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She leans back. Takes a long drag of the cigarette, breathes it out. Casimir sees that her face is wet. He holds himself back. Wanting to touch her, not yet touching.
‘You’re stupid, Ariel Casimir. You’ll never find someone like me again. And that policewoman too, what a mad cow. You know what’d be funny?’ She smiles at him but the expression is weak, already fading. ‘If they locked me up, he’d never get to me. All the years he’s been after me, and then they’d lock me away. Don’t you think that’s funny?’
‘We can tell the police –’
‘No!’ Her voice rises over his, shrill and strong. Bruised with anger. ‘He doesn’t even know what I look like, not really. I haven’t seen him for years. He used to tell me he wasn’t a real dad. He told me lots of times. So it didn’t matter what he did to me, that’s what he said; because he wasn’t real. Still hurt though.’
The cigarette is burnt down to the stub. Alice puts her arm out straight and flicks it. Casimir hears her nails click. The butt sparks off the far wall, trailing down to the catch pit.
‘Care! He was careful though. He took care that no one knew. When I was little I was scared of butterflies, I hated summer. Because I thought they’d hurt me. Like butterfly knives. He liked knives. It was all right when it hurt, though. Because what we did was wrong. It was worse when it didn’t hurt any more. When it stopped hurting was when I left.’
‘There are other places to go. Away from London. I can take you to Poland.’
‘And then there were the posters. They were everywhere, it was like –’ Her voice is weaker now, and querulous. ‘He’s crazy. I don’t know how he does it. It feels like he’s everywhere.’
‘He was in Lower Marsh. In the restaurant.’
She looks round at him quickly, as if she had forgotten he was there. It reminds him of Adams, but the supervisor’s private voice was quiet, thoughtful. Alice’s is different. Cold and clean-cut, like raw meat.
‘He sent me a warning. To stay away from you.’
‘No. He sent you something to scare you, and then he waited for you to find me. He’s clever like that. He’ll be here soon.’
She stands and reaches a hand back down and he takes it. There is almost no flesh on the hard bones of her fingers. It is the hand of an old woman and for a moment he feels the urge to pull away.
‘It’s not your fault. We should go now. Are you coming with me?’
‘Yes.’ He grins with the effort of standing, the muscles of his thighs and shoulders aching around the joints and bones.
They go together up the green-lit stairs, along the tiled passages, between locked doors. The light bulbs gutter as power spits and hums above them. Alice talks fast, breathless with movement. Close to him, so that their fingers connect and catch, and then they are walking like lovers, hand in hand through the abandoned station.
‘How old are you, Casimir? It doesn’t matter, though. My grandad was fourteen years older than my nan. She had cataracts, all white. You’ve got nice eyes. You kept looking at me on that train, and then I saw you in Camden. And he was there already, my carer. I knew you’d help, though. I could see it in your eyes. We can go somewhere, can’t we? Poland. What’s it like? Casimir? What’s Poland like?’
He walks slower, head bent forward as he comes to a standstill.
‘What?’
‘There is someone here.’
She stops. From ahead and above comes a scuff of friction, echoing down the stairwell. A soft clicking of movement, like dominoes falling. The rhythm stops, then begins again, faster and deadened as it approaches. As if the runner is barefoot, racing down the spiral stairs towards them.
In one movement Alice crouches and turns, fast as a sprinter off the blocks. From the stairwell come two claps of sound, almost together; the sound of feet hitting the shaft floor.
Casimir stands quite still, facing the entrance arch. His eyes hurt in the flickering light and he blinks once, twice, clearing them.
No one comes out of the archway. From where he stands Casimir can see a section of stairwell core. Beyond that the second lit archway, leading down. A current of air susurrates through both archways as another train comes closer, along the Tube tunnels.
There are two ways down, he thinks. Panic begins to rise inside him and he forces it back, turning, running on the turn. One of the strip lights has gone dead and he sprints through its band of darkness, down the staircase, out on to the southbound platform.
‘Alice!’
He can see her, way ahead of him and still running, down towards the southern tunnel mouth. The noise of the train is building up now and Casimir’s voice is drowned out as he shouts again.
He looks round. A hundred feet back up the platform is the flickering light of a second cross-passage, orange Portastor units piled high around its mock-Tuscan archway. Casimir stares at it as the tunnel air begins to roar around him. But there is no one there – he can see no one, no movement of shadows. Lit up red and grey, a fold of newspaper is blown past him towards Alice. She is at the platform’s end wall, kneeling by the tunnel mouth. He runs to her. The newspaper catches at his feet, tearing apart.
‘Told you. I told you. He made you come to me.’
‘I didn’t see him.’
He kneels beside her and she reaches up, kissing him. Hands around his head, feverishly stroking the back of his skull. The train batters by next to them, a flickering arcade of light and faces.
Her mouth tastes of cigarettes, hot and rancid. She breaks the kiss and whispers up at him, mouth to mouth. ‘How long until the next train?’
‘Not long. Maybe five minutes.’
‘I don’t care, if he’s here. I’m going through to Camden. Will you come with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘We won’t get hurt, will we?’
‘No. Stay away from the tracks.’
‘Help me down.’
‘Wait. Please.’
But she doesn’t wait. On the platform’s end-wall is an aluminium socket cover and Casimir flips it up and clicks the switch underneath. There is an echo of sound like hands clapped once and lights come on along the curved tunnel wall, strung out towards Camden Town. He can see Alice moving away through the bands of illumination, leaning against the ribbed metal wall.
Casimir climbs down, finding his footing between ballast stones. He enters the tunnel a dozen feet behind Alice. Instinctively, his shoulders hunch forward. The light here feels more temporary than at South Kentish Town, the dark closer and more permanent. For the first time tonight, he is glad to be with Alice. There is no sound except the clatter of their feet on tunnel ballast, their breathing carried off in the tunnel’s wind.
‘The nearest track is a signal line. The next is the negative current.’ His voice echoes oddly, struck off the Tube’s metal walls. ‘Stay away from both. Even the signal rail has some power. If you fall, keep away from the furthest track. That is the most dangerous. Alice? The furthest track.’
‘I heard you the first time. Is he behind us?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So listen. You’re closer. Do you hear anything?’
He slows, head cocked. He can hear nothing but the slight hollowing of air currents as they fill out into the abandoned station, two hundred feet behind them.
‘No. There is –’
He stops speaking. From around the tunnel’s northern curve comes the clatter of stones on the wet concrete. Only once; then there is quiet again. His mind races, trying to picture causes. But there is nothing animate in the tunnel. Nothing to move or fall, except them.
‘I hear him.’
‘Oh no.’ Alice’s voice sounds miserable. Like a child, knowing what is happening, not wanting it, and without the power to change it. Casimir takes hold of the wall’s metal ridges and begins to haul himself along. Tunnel stones clack around him as he closes the gap with Alice.
A step away from them the signal rail shines, curving south-west.
‘Say something, Ariel. Tell me something nice.’
He tries to think of what to say. The effort of speech and movement takes his breath away. In his head he counts the line-lights, measuring off distance. Twenty-nine, thirty. ‘I had a dog. When I was a child. It was called Bison.’ Thirty-two, the bulb flickering in its bracket. ‘Because in Poland there are great forests full of bison, they are big as Russian tanks and the steam comes off them like the smoke from Russian trains –’
