The Necropolis Railway js-1

by Andrew Martin

  'He is reputed to have written a letter to the board,' said Mr Stanley, still not looking at me, 'but they have never seen fit to give it any very wide circulation.'

  'Where is the founder today?' I said after a while, as though the fellow had been a great pal of the two of us.

  Mr Stanley's eyes flickered and then he put them on mine for the first time. 'He has gone beyond this world.' He continued to stare in a most unnerving way.

  'You mean that he is in Surrey, I assume… in Brookwood… that he is dead?' Mr Stanley gave me a sharp nod, then his eyes left mine, and I felt very relieved.

  'So they have you to speak up for the Necropolis, and speak this dead man's speeches?' I said after some little while.

  With no expression in his voice or face, Mr Stanley, looking now slightly to my left, said, 'At a rate of nine shillings per address, fifteen shillings and travelling expenses for any address that takes place outside London.'

  He turned around, and picked up the jug again. He filled the glass with his wide, shaking hands, and drank the water. 'Is there much call for addresses outside London?'

  'There is no call for it whatsoever.' And he switched his eyes back onto mine; I did not like it. 'And within this city the interest is not great?'

  'Not great.' Still the eyes were upon mine; and he had not put the jug down. 'You are speaking to one who has performed very great service on behalf of this company,' he said. 'You were speaking of all those poisonous gases.' 'Our founder did.'

  'But since his time, very shortly after the creation of the Necropolis, I think, there was an act of some sort.' 'There have been many acts.' Still the eyes; his eyes were like fires.

  'No, I mean an act – an Act of Parliament allowing the creation of cemeteries inside the city.'

  As I spoke, he looked down at the jug. It was a well-made, big thing, but it looked small in his hands. 'That has been one of the acts, yes,' he said, looking up again, 'and yet somehow a hopeful spirit is maintained.'

  Still staring at me, he now rapidly stood, and I thought: the death of Sir John Rickerby is where it starts; all else follows from that. With my right hand I felt the heaviness of the brake handle under my sleeve.

  'It is by written contract that addresses are supplied,' said Stanley, stepping out from behind his table and beginning to pace before it. 'Do not think that any individual, let alone a barrister of twenty years' call, would be so blind as to get into this sort of work without making stipulations pertaining to, for example, the minimum number of addresses to be given over any given period. Naturally there are to be more in winter than summer. The call for the addresses is greater in winter if only because the rooms in which it is given are -' And here he stopped his pacing. 'The rooms are what?' I said.

  'Warm,' said Stanley, and then he was off again, pacing back and forth.

  'But you just speak for money,' I said. 'You have no personal interest in any of what you say.'

  'Intramural burial is a grievous wrong, and one particular aspect of the company's operations is of special interest.' 'Which is what?'

  His eyes were on me again; they were not like fires, I decided, but like flowers. 'Trains.' He took another step towards me.

  'Trains?' I said. 'Oh, they're a bit of all right, aren't they? Quite exciting, you know.'

  Stanley nodded. 'As a means of conveyance for the dead, yes.' 1 am on the railways myself, on the London and South Western Railway, to be exact. I clean the funeral engines.' 'I know,' he said.

  His eyes stopped dancing and went dead. He seemed to be in the grip of a fever; he was sweating freely – and this with the coldness of the night coming through the open window.

  'It is written in the minutes of the Necropolis that you sent requests to the directors at their meetings of August, November and December.'

  He was looking down at the jug again; he was very intent on the place where the handle joined the body. Then he looked up to me and his eyes were full of orange flame.

  'What was your request?' I asked, letting the brake handle slide a little way into my palm. 'I asked for an increase in pay.'

  As he swung the water jug, I said, 'You're off your onion,' and the water and the glass exploded against my head as he said in his fast voice: 'I did not receive it on the first occasion, and nor did I receive it on the second or the third, by which time the company's indebtedness to myself for services provided had… oh, it had not decreased, oh, it had most certainly not decreased, and yet I was to be content merely with the restoration of the Tuesday Address as a weekly -'

  I had sunk to the ground as Stanley raved, and that wasn't the end of the matter. I was sinking through the floor as my murderer spoke, and the blood in my eyes turned into the red flowers among those that the board of the North Eastern gave 'I. 'I. Crystal for his shows. No, the certificates. They gave him certificates for the flowers that were everywhere. You couldn't see out of the waiting room for them, and you couldn't properly see out of the signal box either – they were dangerous, those gardenias. On the platform you can see very well, though – the hills of Eskdale rising and rising, and here is the bird train coming down from Whitby at half-past eleven on a summer Saturday morning: 137, that silly little dock shunter that would have been better off banging cod waggons about at West Cliff, two waggons full of pigeons, and my old favourite, Mr Saul Whittaker, the pigeon conveyer, who tells no end of yarns, and is semi-drunk at all times.

  Number 137 stops, and this time there is a flat-bed truck tagging along behind, with something under a tarp. In the first pigeon waggon, Mr Saul Whittaker rolls open the door and slides down onto the platform like a heap of brown sand. 'Bugger me!' he says – I don't know why, maybe it's the smell of Crystal's blooms hitting him – and then, squatting down against the truck, sweating Old Six and breathing hard, he says, 'Sporting challenge, lad?'

  'I'm on for any mortal thing,' I say, while pulling the baskets for Grosmont out of the vans. I set them up in a dead straight line along the platform, having a look onto the footplate as I move towards the 'up' end. All is too dark inside, the firehole door being closed: just two pairs of boots, maybe, one fellow singing a Moody and Sankey hymn in a little voice.

  'Ow do,' I say, but nothing comes back, and the singing doesn't even stop.

  Behind me the station clock goes clunk, which is twenty-seven past eleven, which is no good because it is Whittaker's watch that counts, and this he is holding high in the air while tipping his head backwards, looking about ready to sneeze. The silence carries on as I watch old Father Whittaker, whose thin red head is tipping ever backwards… 'Go!' he shouts.

  'Hold on, you rotter!' I shout back, but I'm pelting along that platform in any case, lifting the lids, with the birds flapping and crashing straight up into the air like bombs going off behind me. At the end of the line I stop, gasping in front of Whittaker and his watch, with the birds in a cloud above us. He's nodding, grinning all around his head, and I am blowing my nose on my sleeve, even though it is a North Eastern Railway coat and I'm proud to wear it. I've let the birds go within one minute. The two of us look up and see them, still hanging over the platform like a Piccadilly Circus in the sky. As we watch they make a bigger circle, turning fast before beginning to go off in all directions like sparks from a Catherine wheel at a bonfire carnival.

  I start to load the boxes, and when I've finished Whittaker seems to be sucked rapidly backwards into his van; he doesn't exactly stand up. I move along to the back waggon, where I see, underneath the tarpaulin, the shafts of a yellow gig rocking on its blocks in the sunlight. As 137 starts barking and pulling away from Grosmont, I say goodbye to that old gig, because very soon there will be no more of its kind. I am seventeen years old, and it is a very special time. High-speed is coming. But then I somehow moved my head again. There was a shortage of secondary air; people were appearing and disappearing at a great rate all around Nine Elms, and I was dragging my feet, which sounded like rain. But then I had to go on a railway journey in Portugal to meet
a man who wrote an article in The Railway Magazine, and if only the wind had died down I might have been in with a chance. I was staring into the firebox on Thirty-One, closing my eyes but it was still light. Every time I closed my eyes the music hall began, for I had that damn firebox leaping in my head.

  I wanted three more on the right side, three more on the night side. 'It's Welsh coal,' said a voice in my head: 'damned slow to ignite.' The voice went and I found that half of my face was my face and the other half was joined on to something else. When I tried to move, my mouth was dragged into a kind of smile. All was darkness and there was again a shortage of secondary air. I moved my hand up and something at the same time hard and soft came quickly down upon it. I lifted my hand again but not so high, then higher again and the thing came down swiftly once more. So I slid one of my hands up towards the half of my face that was still there, moving my fingers until they touched a rock, which was what joined me to the hard and soft. The voice came back again and this time gave me three words in the softness and the darkness: dart, pricker, paddle. Well, they were the fire irons to be found on any engine. I was grateful for the words because I liked them, but did not know why they had been given to me.

  In a funny sort of way I went back to sleep and in a funny sort of way I woke up – I did both, I mean, without really doing either. All was the same as before, but I was being shaken in a way that I had been shaken before.

  'I am on a train,' I said, and I realised that the whispering voice had been mine all along. The rest of it came to me quickly: I was now in Mrs Davidson-Hill's coffin, or Mrs Lampard's, and heading for the grave of the one or the other in Brookwood, and when this knowledge came to me I found I could not suck in enough air to keep alive, and sweat began rolling off me in an instant. I jerked and there was a tearing in the rock, and a great boiling of the blood underneath it. I thrashed at the solid darkness, only I could not thrash. And yet I was not blind, at least, for there was a very thin line of light going all around me like a halo, happily around and around and around like a song being sung. The sight calmed me somewhat, and I started on smaller breaths, which seemed to serve, and with them came a return to the state of semi-sleep into which I let myself go gladly, until I heard my own voice speaking. 'First class,' it said, and I felt the water from my mouth that those two words had produced trickling across my cheek towards the rock, where I stopped being able to feel it.

  First class. Saturday Night Mack could be standing guard over me. For a second I could not recall whether he was a bad man or a good man, and then it came to me that he was good, that he was off the hook like the men of the half-link. If I carried on living they could be my friends and my landlady could be my best girl, for this all made my mistake in visiting the night-house seem a very small matter. It was the sort of thing a fellow might do because he was alive, and being alive was good.

  I slid my hand under my coat and into my waistcoat pocket. My landlady's advertisement was in there. I wanted to go back to the summer pictures of Grosmont in my head, but Saul Whittaker had gone, and the whole of the North Eastern Railway with him. I was alive until I died, and stuck with it.

  The journey to the Necropolis – and the hole in the ground waiting for me there – was one of forty minutes, and I must have had most of those. My one hope was Saturday Night Mack. I slid the advertisement from my pocket, then through the crack of light, and waited. But as the minutes passed a terrible picture came before my mind's eye: of Saturday Night Mack reading Hoity Toity Bits with the paper so close up to his face that all was quite blocked out but 'PRIZE OF AN EIGHT-ROOMED HOUSE: ANYONE CAN WIN IT AND LIVE RENT-FREE FOR LIFE'. I felt myself sinking into the softness of the velvet, and becoming rather velvety myself. My head was going away again and I did not mind. I seemed only to be able to breathe out, as though in small soft gasps. I felt a change in the heartbeat of the train, and we came to a stop, and it seemed as though I too had come to a stop. I did not breathe, and I could not tell what was me and what was not me in the world of the coffin.

  The train started again, but I was beyond thinking why, or wondering which signal had halted us. Was it the trains that were scared of the horses or the horses that were scared of the trains? The question kept going round and around, and I could not answer it, and it did not matter. There was a train somewhere, far away on the cliffs, but I was down on the beach with a crazy person and the tide coming in. Sometimes I was under it and sometimes on top, but the crazy person it did not affect. After a while I began to be more under it than on top, and I seemed to become uncoupled from the train because it went on its own way, and the question stopped being a question but became just words, before long becoming only sounds, after a while becoming not even that.

  The noises slowly returned, becoming words again, but this time they were the words of Saturday Night Mack, muttered between panting breaths, 'Diamonds… diamonds… big as beans!' he was gasping, but then in a different voice, a worried whisper, he said, 'Half a mo,' and it was with the wrenching cry of a rooster and a great upward surging feeling that I seemed to shoot out of the coffin when the lid came off.

  In fact, it was not at all like that: I remained exactly where I was, stuck by blood, watching Saturday Night Mack with his screwdriver in his hand swerve and fall across me before rolling away onto the carriage floor.

  The head of Mack came back up after a while, and looked very ill indeed. 'No diamonds,' I said, but I believe it did not sound like that to Mack because of the way that my mouth was.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Wednesday 30 December 1903 -Monday 4 January 1904

  I was in a green ward so full of plants it was like a garden. There were three pillars in amongst the plants which in fact were chimneys with firesides front and back. Ladies in white walked between the plants carrying medicines, and the ladies were so beautiful they made the medicines look precious. Other people moved around on wheels, and everybody kept quiet most of the time, but it somehow came to me that I was in St Thomas's Hospital, which was where the London and South Western always took their accident cases if they could. I was in Purvis Ward, called after the sister, Elizabeth Purvis, but which of the beauties she was I could not say, although again it came to me that she had arranged for this ward to have the biggest of the hospital Christmas trees, and that there had been presents from it.

  Over my head was an electric light that moved – all for me. All the time beneath my bandages there seemed to be distant violins, which in the middle of the afternoon and the middle of the morning would fade to almost nothing, but at meal times were joined by louder instruments, drums, and the sight of everybody moving much more. But I did not eat for two days.

  The side of my head was all sewn, and painted with carbolic. A man came several times to see it. He was called Dr Stone, and I did not like his name in case he hit me over the head with it. Once he came and lifted the gauze and said, 'We had a marathon of sewing with you, Mr Stringer.' There had been so much, they had given me ether – of which I remembered a thing that was rubber with metal behind: a dream machine (for it had given me plenty) that had fitted over my face so well it might have been made for me.

  Later Dr Stone told me he had had to do more than just sew me. He had had to dig a hole in my head to pull the bones away from the brain, and I had had more ether for that.

  I sat up one morning and there were the Houses of Parliament, with the boats racing back and forth in front of them, all in complete silence. After a while I got the idea that there was a visiting hour, but I went to sleep in the middle of all nonetheless.

  The Houses of Parliament had disappeared when I woke up, and there was a supper of boiled ham next to me, along with a glass of beer. There were white screens around my bed, and the electric light was on. I had the feeling of late evening, and of Sister Purvis being close by. Standing at the end of my bed was the Governor, my landlady, and the policeman I had talked to at Nine Elms – the one who looked like a sea captain. Across all the years since then,
I have always thought of him as the Captain, and it is possible that he actually was one – a captain of police, I mean, because they do have them.

  At the moment I opened my eyes, he was looking at my boiled ham and beer so hungrily that he smiled when our eyes met. I started to tell all – for now I seemed to have everything straight – but I had only got over that it was Stanley who had crowned me and put me in a coffin, when they told me to stop, probably because things weren't coming out very clearly.

  'Put it down as points,' said the Captain, and his voice was much lighter and less of a growl than I would have guessed. 'Give each point a number.'

  They all went away, and a little while later the Captain came back with a pencil and a piece of paper which he put by my bed. It was funny to watch him creep towards me and creep away again, thinking that I was asleep. It was very good paper that he gave me. Across the top it said in fancy letters, 'From St Thomas's Hospital', and I thought about using it to write to Dad. It will just about make his day if I do that, I thought, but then I decided that he would probably not like to learn that I was in hospital, however beautiful the paper.

  The next evening the same thing came about, except that I was eating my supper – steak and kidney pudding, this time – when the Captain and the Governor came along. I had my list of points but I think I went from one to three, so they stopped me again.

  The third day brought hot pot, and it was all gone and the glass of beer was empty when the Governor and the Captain appeared again, and this time they had a third person with them – a man whose job was to write.