More people than he was prepared for stared at him, and he felt bound to say "Just my phone" twice. So much for the ticket seller's notion that it wouldn't work in the tunnel. Blythe drew it from his pocket without breaking his stride and ducked one ear to it as he unfolded it. "Hello, love. Thanks for saving my—"
"Less of the slop, Stephen. It's a long time since that worked."
"Ah." He faltered, and had to think which foot he was next putting forward. "Lydia. Apologies. My mistake. I thought—"
"I had enough of your mistakes when we were together, and your apologies, and what you think."
"That pretty well covers it, doesn't it? Were you calling to share anything else with me, or was that it?"
"I wouldn't take that tone with me, particularly now."
"Don't, then," Blythe said, a form of response he remembered as having once amused her. "If you've something to say, spit it out. I'm waiting for a call."
"Up to your old tricks, are you? Can't she stand you never going anywhere without that thing either? Where are you, in the pub as usual trying to calm yourself down?"
"I'm perfectly calm. I couldn't be calmer," Blythe said as though that might counteract the effect she was having on him. "And I may tell you I'm on the charity walk."
Was that a chorus of ironic cheers behind him? Surely they weren't aimed at him, even if they sounded as unimpressed as Lydia, who said, "Never did begin at home for you, did it? Has your fancy woman found that out yet?"
He could have pounced on Lydia's syntax again, except that there were more important issues. "I take it you've just spoken to her."
"I haven't and I've no wish to. She's welcome to you and all the joy you bring, but she won't hear me sympathizing. I didn't need to speak to her to know where you'd be."
"Then you were wrong, weren't you? And as long as we're discussing Valerie, maybe you and your solicitor friend ought to be aware she makes a lot less than he does now he's a partner in his firm."
"Watch it, big boy."
That was the broader-buttocked of the women. He'd almost trodden on her heels, his aggressiveness having communicated itself to his stride. "Sorry," he said, and without enough thought, "Not you, Lyd."
"Don't you dare start calling me that again. Who've you been talking to about his firm? So that's why I haven't had my check this month, is it? Let me tell you this from him. Unless that check is postmarked today, you'll find yourself in prison for nonpayment, and that's a promise from both of us."
"Well, that's the first—" Her rising fury had already borne her off, leaving him with a drone in his ear and hot plastic stuck to his cheek. He cleared the line as he tramped around more of the prolonged curve, which showed him thousands of heads and shoulders bobbing down a slope to the point almost a mile away from which, packed closer and closer together, they streamed sluggishly upward. On some days that midpoint was hazy with exhaust fumes, but the squashed crowd there looked distinct except for a slight wavering which must be an effect of the heat; he wasn't really smelling a faint trace of gas through the wake of perfume. He bent a fingernail against the keys on the receiver, and backhanded his forehead as drops of sweat full of a fluorescent glare swelled the numbers on the keypad. His home phone had just rung when a man's voice said loudly, "They're all the same, these buggers with their gadgets. Can't be doing with them, me."
There was surely no reason for Blythe to feel referred to. "Pick it up, Val," he muttered. "I said I'd ring you back. It's been nearly fifteen minutes. You can't still be doing whatever you were doing. Come out, there's a love." But his voice greeted him again and unspooled its message, followed by Valerie's giggle, which under the circumstances he couldn't help feeling he'd heard once too often. "Are you really not there? I've just had Lydia on, ranting about her maintenance. Says if it isn't posted today her boyfriend the solicitor, who gives new meaning to the wordsolicit, will have me locked up. I suppose technically he might be able to, so if you can make absolutely certain you, I know I should have, I know you said, but if you can do that for me, for both of us, nip round the corner and get that bloody envelope in the shit."
The last word came out loudest, and three ranks in front of him glanced back. Of them, only the woman whose T-shirt ended halfway up her midriff retained any concern once she saw him. "Are you all right, old feller?"
"Yes, I'm… No, I'm… Yes, yes." He shook his free hand so extravagantly he saw sweat flying off it, his intention being to wave away his confusion more than her solicitude, but she advanced her lips in a fierce grimace before presenting her substantial rear view to him. He hadn't time to care if she was offended, though she was using the set of her buttocks to convey that she was, exactly as Lydia used to. The ticket seller had been right after all. The tunnel had cut Blythe off, emptying the receiver except for a faint distant moan.
It could be a temporary interruption. He pressed the recall button so hard it felt embedded in his thumb and was attempting to waft people past him when a not unfamiliar voice protested, "Don't go standing. There's folk back here who aren't as spry as some."
"When you're my dad's age, maybe you won't be so fond of stopping and starting."
Either might be the disliker of gadgets, though both appeared to have devoted a good deal of time and presumably machinery to the production of muscles, not only beneath shoulder level. Blythe tilted his head vigorously, almost losing the bell, which was repeating its enfeebled note at his ear. "Don't mind me, just go round me. Just go, will you?"
"Put that bloody thing away and get on with what we're here for," the senior bruiser advised him. "We don't want to be having to carry you. We had his mother conk out on us once through not keeping the pace up."
"Don't mind me. Don't bother about me."
"We're bothered about all the folks you're holding up and putting the strain on."
"We'll be your trainers till we all finish," the expanded youth said.
"Then I ought to stick my feet in you," Blythe mumbled as those very feet gave in to the compulsion to walk. The phone was still ringing, and now it produced his voice. "Valerie Mason and Steve Blythe," it said, and at once had had enough of him.
All the heat of the tunnel rushed into him. He felt his head waver before steadying in a dangerously fragile version of itself, raw with a smell which surely wasn't of exhaust fumes, despite the haze into which the distant walkers were descending. He had to go back beyond the point at which his previous call had lost its hold. He peeled the soggy receiver away from his face and swung around, to be confronted by a mass of flesh as wide and as long as the protracted curve of the tunnel. He could hear more of it being tamped into the unseen mouth by the jabbing of the megaphones. Of the countless heads it was wagging at him, every one that he managed to focus on looked prepared to see him trampled underfoot if he didn't keep moving. He could no more force his way back through it than through the concrete wall, but there was no need. He would use a walkway as soon as he found some steps up.
Another wave of heat, which felt like the threat of being overwhelmed by the tide of flesh, found him, sending him after the rhythmically quivering women. As far ahead as he could see there were no steps onto the walkways, but his never having noticed them while driving needn't mean steps didn't exist; surely a trick of perspective was hiding them from him. He narrowed his eyes until he felt the lids twitch against the eyeballs and his head ache more than his feet were aching. He poked the recall button and lifted the receiver above his head in case that might allow him to hook a call, but the phone at home hadn't even doubled its first ring when his handful of technology went dead as though suffocated by the heat or drowned in the sweat of his fist. As he let it sink past his face, a phone shrilled farther down the tunnel.
"They're bloody breeding," the old man growled behind him, but Blythe didn't care what he said. About three hundred yards ahead he saw an aerial extend itself above a woman's scalp as blond as Lydia's. Whatever had been interfering with his calls, it apparently wasn't present in tha
t stretch of the tunnel. He saw the aerial wag a little with her conversation as she walked at least a hundred yards. As he tramped toward the point where she'd started talking, he counted the slabs of light overhead, some of which appeared to be growing unstable with the heat. He had only half as far to go now, however much the saturated heat might weigh him down. It must be his eyes which were flickering: not as many of the lights as seemed to be. He needn't wait until he arrived at the exact point in the tunnel. He only wanted reassurance that Valerie had picked up his message. He thumbed the button and flattened his ear with the receiver. The tone had barely invited him to dial when it was cut off.
He mustn't panic. He hadn't reached where phones worked, that was all. On, trying to ignore the sluggishly retreating haze of body heat which smelled increasingly like exhaust fumes, reminding himself to match the pace of the crowd, though the pair of walkers on each side of him made him feel plagued by double vision. Now he was where the woman's phone had rung, beneath two dead fluorescents separated by one which looked as though it had stolen its glare from both. All three were bumped backward by their fellows as he jabbed the button, bruised his ear with the earpiece, snatched the receiver away and cleared it, supported it with his other hand before it could slide out of his sweaty grip, split a fingernail against the button, bruised his ear again… Nothing he did raised the dialing tone for longer than it took to mock him.
It couldn't be the phone itself. The woman's had worked, and his was the latest model. He could only think the obstruction was moving, which meant it had to be the crowd that was preventing him from acting. If Lydia's replacement for him took him to court, he would lose business because of it, probably the confidence of many of his clients too because they wouldn't understand he took more care with their affairs than he did with his own, and if he went to prison… He'd closed both fists around the phone, because the plastic and his hands were aggravating one another's slippiness, and tried not to imagine battering his way through the crowd. There were still the walkways, and by the time he found the entrance to one it might make sense to head for the far end of the tunnel. He was trudging forward, each step a dull ache which bypassed his hot swollen body wrapped in far too much sodden material and searched for a sympathetic ache in his hollowed-out head, when the phone rang.
It was so muffled by his grip that he thought for a moment it wasn't his. Ignoring the groans of the muscled duo, he nailed the button and jammed the wet plastic against his cheek. "Steve Blythe. Can you make it quick? I don't know how long this will work."
"It's all right, Steve. I only called to see how you were surviving. Sounds as if you're deep in it. So long as you're giving your brain a few hours off for once. You can tell me all about it when you come home."
"Val. Val, wait. Val, are you there?" Blythe felt a mass of heat which was nearly flesh lurch at him from behind as he missed a step. "Speak to me, Val."
"Calm down, Steve. I'll still be here when you get back. Save your energy. You sound as though you need it."
"I'll be fine. Just tell me you got the message."
"Which message?"
The heat came for him again—he couldn't tell from which direction, or how fast he was stumbling. "Mine. The one I left while you were doing whatever you were doing."
"I had to go out for some black and white. The machine can't be working properly. There weren't any messages on the tape when I came in just now."
That halted Blythe as if the phone had reached the end of an invisible cord. The vista of walkers wavered into a single flat mass, then steadied and regained some of its perspective. "Never mind. Plenty of time," he said rapidly. "All I wanted—"
A shoulder much more solid than a human body had any right to be rammed his protruding elbow. The impact jerked his arm up, and the shooting pain opened his fist. He saw the phone describe a graceful arc before it clanged against the railing of the right-hand walkway and flew into the crowd some thirty yards ahead. Arms flailed at it as though it was an insect, then it disappeared. "What was that for?" he screamed into the old man's face as it bobbed alongside his. "What are you trying to do to me?"
The son's face crowded Blythe's from the other side, so forcefully it sprayed Blythe's cheek with sweat. "Don't you yell at him, he's got a bad ear. Lucky you weren't knocked down, stopping like that. Better believe you will be if you mix it with my dad."
"Can someone pick up my phone, please?" Blythe called at the top of his voice.
The women directly in front of him added winces to their quivering and covered their ears, but nobody else acknowledged him. "My phone," he pleaded. "Don't step on it. Who can see it? Look for it, can you all? Please pass it back."
"I said about my dad's ear," the man to his left rumbled, lifting a hammer of a fist which for the present he used only to mop his forehead. Blythe fell silent, having seen a hand raised some yards ahead of him to point a finger downward where the phone must be. At least it was in the middle of the road, in Blythe's immediate path. A few raw steps brought him a glimpse of the aerial, miraculously intact, between the thighs of the singleted woman. He stooped without breaking his stride, and his scalp brushed her left buttock. His finger and thumb closed on the aerial and drew it toward him—only the aerial. He was staggering forward in his crouch when he saw most of the keypad being kicked away to his left, and several other plastic fragments skittering ahead.
As he straightened up, a grasp as hot and soft as flesh yet rough as concrete seemed to close around his skull. The singleted woman had turned on him. "Whose bum do you think you're biting?"
Any number of hysterical replies occurred to him, but he managed to restrain himself. "I'm not after any of that, I'm after this." The words sounded less than ideally chosen once they were out, especially since the aerial in his hand was rising between her legs as though magnetized by her crotch. He whipped it back, the grip on his skull threatening to blind him, and heard himself shouting. "Look at it. Who did this? Who smashed my phone? Where are your brains?"
"Don't look at us," said the woman with the increasingly bare and moist midriff, while the son leaned his dripping face into Blythe's. "Keep the row up if you're after an ear like my dad's." All at once they were irrelevant, and he let the aerial slip from his hand. There was at least one working phone in the tunnel.
As soon as he attempted to edge forward, the crowd swung its nearest heads toward him, its eyes blinking away sweat, its mouths panting hotly at him, and started to mutter and grumble. "What's the panic? Wait your turn. We all want to get there. Keep your distance. There's people here, you know," it warned him in several voices, and raised one behind him. "Now where's he scuttling off to? Must be afraid I'll report him for going for my bum."
The obstruction to his calls was about to turn physical if he couldn't find a way to fend it off. "Emergency," he murmured urgently in the nearest unmatched pair of ears, which after hesitating for a second parted their bodies to let him through. "Excuse me. Emergency. Excuse," he repeated, stepping up the intensity, and was able to overtake enough people that he must be close to the phone. Which of the clump of blond heads belonged to it? Only one looked real. "Excuse me," he said, and realizing that sounded as if he wanted to get by, took hold of its unexpectedly thin and angular shoulder. "You had the phone just now, didn't you? I mean, you have—"
"Let go."
"Yes. What I'm saying is, you've got—"
"Let go."
"There. I have. Excuse me. My hand's in my pocket, look. What I'm trying to say—"
The woman turned away as much of her sharp face as she'd bothered to incline toward him. "Not me."
"I'm sure it was. Not my phone, not the one that was trodden on, but weren't you talking on the phone before? If it wasn't yours—"
She was surrounded by female heads, he saw, all of them preserving a defiant blankness. Without warning she snapped her head around, her hair lashing his right eye. "Who let you out? Which madhouse have they closed down now?"
"Excuse me.
I didn't mean to…" That covered more than he had time to put into words, not least the inadvertent winks which his right eye must appear to be sharing with her. "It's an emergency, you see. If it wasn't you, you must have seen who it was with the phone. She was somewhere round here."
All the heads in her clump jeered practically in unison, then used her head to speak. "It's an emergency, all right, an emergency that you need locking up. Just you wait till we get out of here and talk to someone."
That made Blythe peer at his watch. Sweat or a tear from his stinging eye bloated the digits, and he had to shake his wrist twice before he was able to distinguish that he would never reach the tunnel exit in time to find a phone outside. The crowd had beaten him—or perhaps not yet, unless he'd failed to notice it sending a message ahead that he was to be stopped. "Emergency. Emergency," he said in a voice whose edge the heat seemed determined to blunt, and when he thought he'd sidled far enough away from the woman who wanted to persuade him he was going mad, he let his desperation grow louder. "Emergency. Need to phone. Has anyone a phone? Emergency." A shake or a wave of the heat passed through bunch after bunch of heads, and each time it did so his right eye blinked and smarted. He was trying to sound more official and peremptory when his voice trailed off. At the limit of his vision the packed flesh beneath the unsteady lights had come to a complete stop.
He could only watch the stasis creeping toward him, wavering into place in layer after layer of flesh. It was his worst possible future racing to meet him, and the crowd had been on its side all along. As he heard a murmur advancing down the tunnel from the direction of the unseen exit, he strained his ears to hear what it was saying about him. He was feeling almost calm—for how long, he couldn't predict—when words in an assortment of voices grew distinct. The message was past him before he succeeded in piecing it together. "Someone's collapsed in the middle of the tunnel. They're clearing the way for an ambulance."
The Collected Short Fiction Page 119
