Or maybe they don’t care about facts. Maybe they only care about statements. Versions.
‘July of last year?’ I repeat, playing for time.
‘Yes. 2018. The last time you were involved with the police.’
He makes it sound as if I’m some serial offender, in and out of Wormwood Scrubs. ‘If you mean the business on the Tube, I don’t see what that’s got to do with this.’
‘I would say it suggests a certain impulsive streak in you that very well may have reared up again on Monday night,’ Parry says.
I flush, angry now. ‘“Impulsive streak”? You’ve got to be joking? What is it you want to know about it that you can’t read in the statement I made to the police at the time?’
He isn’t backing off. ‘Just give us the highlights, Jamie. Or do I mean lowlights?’
I glower at him. I don’t like the edge of disrespect to his tone, which echoes, if anyone, Kit. Not a generational fault, however, since his partner is casting him a glance that suggests a level of disapproval of his own.
‘Mental illness isn’t like that,’ I say in a flat tone. ‘It’s complex, personal. Different for every sufferer. Weren’t you taught that in training? Half the people you deal with must have mental health issues.’
Parry bows his head in apology. No doubt he’s remembering warnings of the myriad new ways members of the public might complain about how they’ve been misspoken to or wrongly defined by police officers. The organizations that will rally to support them, the activists and the trolls. He tries again: ‘Let me rephrase. Please would you tell us how any mental health issue you suffer from specifically affected your actions last July.’
‘Do I have a choice?’ I direct the question at Merchison, but it’s Parry who has the baton and he’s keeping a tight grip on it.
‘You always have a choice, Jamie,’ he says. ‘A man like you.’
14
July 2018
It had been building, I knew that. But the problem with phobias involving commuter transport is you either face them or lose your job. You have to get to places at a time that suits other people’s preferences, not your own.
I didn’t work at the Comfort Zone then, I was still in my ‘real’ job, an erroneous distinction if ever there was one, since standing for nine hours serving coffee feels a lot more real than nine hours sitting in a meeting talking shit, drinking coffee served by someone else. Anyway, the office was in North London and to get there for 9.00 I’d catch the 07.35 overland train into London Bridge and then take the Northern Line to Chalk Farm.
The train was without exception overfull, but at least you could position yourself at the window facing out, deceive the brain into thinking you could touch the world beyond. The Tube offered no such trickery: look out of the window and you’d see only how terrifyingly close you were to the black walls of the tunnel, tunnels built for compact trains intended for a working population a fraction of today’s size. No walkways, no escape routes; only the popping veins of the cables and the blackened, peeling panels.
As for overcrowding, the Tube made the overland train look like the Orient Express: bodies were crammed into every last column of vertical space, the necks of those who’d pressed on last bent painfully forward in line with the curve of the doors – doors that locked like a crocodile’s jaws.
But I had no alternative. The roads were clogged, making driving as slow-moving as walking. The bike I’d bought was stolen from outside the Hope & Anchor even before I’d had a chance to test my fitness for it, and still so new it hadn’t yet been insured. And now, in July, there was a heatwave. The papers were full of the soaring temperatures, the inhumane conditions. Tube Hotter Than Legal Limit for Cattle! The older, deeper lines took a hammering: close to forty degrees, with explanations of how the extra heat was caused by a combination of friction from braking and inadequate ventilation.
The Northern Line is the oldest and deepest of all. It is also the longest continuous tunnel on the network at over seventeen miles.
The day it happened, I had a gut instinct there was something different about the journey. I was like the birds that bolt when the earth quakes ten thousand miles away – except I didn’t bolt. I couldn’t. I was trapped.
As the train swung between Euston and Camden Town, the mass was swaying towards me, forcing me painfully against the protruding flap of the emergency lever. I’d read so much about crush dynamics, I was practically an expert. A crush is seven passengers per square metre, when bodies are so jammed together they start to move as one, like fluid. A typical Northern Line train of six carriages had a capacity of eight hundred, but there were thousands on this one, and now it was happening – it was really happening: I couldn’t inflate my lungs.
Cheek flat against the partition, I gasped a plea to anyone who would listen: ‘Please can you move a bit, give me some space.’
‘No chance, mate. It’s sardines in here. Same for everyone.’
I thought, I need a doctor, I’m going to die.
A press of hot faces, hot chests, hot breath. My vision red and black, crinkling at the edges. Scrabbling waist height with my right hand, without even being able to see what I was doing, I lifted the flap and pulled the emergency lever. At once, an alarm rang out, though the train continued to move. Dozens of low voices asked the same few questions:
‘Has something happened?’
‘Did someone just pull the alarm?’
I know now that when the alarm sounds while the train is in a tunnel, the driver will override the automatic brake and continue towards the next station; he’ll call ahead for help but must get his train to the next platform before that help can be administered. Obvious, when you think about it.
But what happened that July morning was that the train did start to brake, about five seconds after I pulled the lever, before coming to a halt in the tunnel. Instantly, I understood that I had made the situation much, much worse, and now I was assaulted by hate-filled voices:
‘Was it you?’
‘For fuck’s sake, why did you do that?’
The cause of our captivity passed through the carriage and into those beyond, provoking a thousand muttered curses, the collected humidity of that human breath raising the temperature. My ears were primed to pick out the most frightening comments, the ones that served my own catastrophic thinking:
‘There’s literally no air in this thing.’
‘It’s like an oven, isn’t it?’
‘When are we going to get out of here?’
The shock of what I’d done receded and in its place roared a need to escape that was so extreme, so fanatical, I lost my mind and began scratching at the partition with my nails. My hearing was briefly fuzzy – I must have been on the verge of passing out – before returning with hideous clarity at the sound of my own roar, a wild, animal response to captivity. A babel of voices and accents:
‘He’s a maniac, what’s the matter with him?’
‘Fucking idiot.’
‘Don’t be so horrible. He’s having a panic attack, he needs help. We need to give him some space.’
‘There is no space.’
I thought how unexpected it was that the angriest voices were female and the only helpful one male. It was he who appealed to seated passengers, calling out, ‘Will someone give this guy a seat. He needs to calm down.’
‘Don’t look at me, I’m pregnant!’
‘Someone else, then!’
No one would do it. Even in my hysteria I knew not to succumb to the instinct to drop to the floor, which would create a hole in the crush into which others would fall on top of me. I managed to keep standing, legs juddering, eyes screwed shut – if I couldn’t see, the brain might forget the confinement! But the image of the carriage and its hellish press of bodies remained on my retinas.
Above the arguing, the driver’s voice droned through the PA system: ‘We’re being held behind another train. Can the person who pulled the passenger alarm please hang on, we’ll be on
the move again soon and we’ll get assistance to you as soon as we reach the next station.’
The commentary altered:
‘He didn’t make the train stop, it was stopping anyway!’
‘They’ll be queueing for the platform. I was once trapped for twenty minutes.’
‘Twenty minutes?’
That was when the lights went out, a marginal relief for me, but a development received with universal angst by the others.
‘Oh my God, is this some terrorist thing?’
‘Is this guy in on it?’
‘Don’t be stupid, you heard what the driver said.’
But the ‘T’ word had been released and all down the carriage people were losing their minds. Someone began sobbing and the voice I recognized as the pregnant woman’s grew wild and raging:
‘This is unbearable! I feel faint! It’s so hot!’
‘Should we force the doors and let some air in?’
‘There is no air, we’re a million feet underground!’
‘Here, I’ve got some water.’
I opened my eyes, childlike in my gratitude, but the water was being offered to the pregnant passenger.
‘D’you think there’s been a power cut above ground, as well?’
One of the hundreds of things I knew about the Tube was that forty-seven million litres of water are pumped from the system every day and if there had been a mass power cut above ground, or an earthquake that caused the power to shut down indefinitely, then the pumps would have been down too. Would putrid water arrive at our feet and slowly rise?
I won’t relive it minute by minute, but we were in that tunnel for half an hour with no power, no messages from the driver. My skin burned as if I’d been shovelled into a furnace and yet somehow I stopped myself from passing out. Light radiated from torch apps, but all I could think of was the heat of a thousand devices turned on at once.
At some point, news arrived, passed from carriage to carriage: we were to be detrained. The train in front had broken down and was now being evacuated. We would have to walk through the tunnel and through this other train to reach the platform at Camden Town.
There was a gradual easing of the crush as the doors between carriages were opened and those further up began shuffling towards the front of the train. Then came the first sight of London Transport staff in hi-vis vests and directing powerful torchlight. ‘Is this gentleman all right?’
Gentleman. I remember that. A low calm voice, fractionally consoling. My throat was dry as tinder. Water was passed to me and my hands shook as I tried to drink, so I spilled it onto my shirt front.
‘We need to start moving to the front of the train, sir.’
I was escorted, hands gentle on my arm, through the evacuated carriages, past the faded seats littered with newspapers and discarded garments. Being on the tracks was even worse. It was just as airless but with the smell of scorching. We were rats in a clay oven. As I began to groan, my escort reassured me. ‘It’s just a bottleneck at the back of the train in front. Stay calm. We’ve put down boards to make it safe for you to climb up onto it.’
Breathe, breathe. But the air was so thin. My head throbbed, out of time with the thudding of my heart.
At last, we shuffled through the train in front. It had broken down just outside the station and light was visible from the platform, onto which we were assisted via a ramp. I was deemed capable of taking the escalator on foot and not stretchered to the area above ground, where those needing medical assistance were being assessed in the ticket hall. The northbound service had been temporarily suspended and at the barriers a crowd waited. Among the general rubbernecking, there were a fair few unkind looks and comments.
‘People get very agitated in this weather,’ a uniformed officer said to me.
The pregnant woman, coming up the escalator behind me, was mouthing off: ‘It’s got to be a criminal offence to use the emergency lever without a proper reason? He could be a terrorist for all we know!’
‘We will need a statement from you,’ I was told, just loudly enough for the nearer reaches of the waiting crowd to hear.
There was a fresh outbreak of jeers.
*
I wasn’t charged with anything, of course, but who needs police prosecution when we have our fellow citizens?
Someone had videoed the ‘action’ in the carriage, others the aftermath at Camden Town, and it was all over social media the rest of that day.
In the press coverage, my name was given, along with an erroneous attribution of guilt:
Mass Panic in Crush Hour as Train Evacuated in Tunnel
Overheated commuter James Buckby, 47, brought the Northern Line to a standstill today when he pulled the emergency lever and set in motion a complex sequence of delays. Three trains were evacuated and passengers led through darkened tunnels to safety. Emergency services treated Buckby and several others on site in temperatures of almost forty-degree heat and a woman thought to be eight months pregnant was taken to University College Hospital with suspected dehydration.
‘It was hell. Mass panic, started by this one bloke. If he’d just hung on, he would have been out of there in a couple of minutes. Instead we all had to suffer,’ said Abbie McClusky, a 26-year-old software consultant.
‘We were trapped in the tunnel for almost an hour,’ said Charlotte Silva, a working mother of three. ‘I thought we were going to die. We had to walk single file because of the live lines. I didn’t see the man who started it, but if I was him I’d go into hiding.’
A spokesman for TfL explained that Mr Buckby’s call for help was incidental to the factors that led to the emergency evacuation. ‘Extreme heat conditions caused the train in front to break down less than twenty metres from the station platform. Trains were backed up at stations and in tunnels all down the line. It was a perfect storm, I’m afraid.’ He added that rumours that Buckby’s act was in any way related to a foiled terrorism attack were entirely false.
Even so, commuters have continued to round on Mr Buckby for the inconvenience he has caused, many using #CommuterHell to share their anger. Were YOU trapped on the train? Contact us with your eyewitness account!
Twitter went into overdrive, if overdrives can be distinguished from the general tone of emergency, and one #CommuterHell tweet went viral: a picture of me balled up in a seat, hands crossed over the top of my head, the carriage having half-emptied around me, with the single-word caption: This.
An email came to my personal account that gave me palpitations: I went into labour after what happened. The baby almost died! No name was given, only the email address [email protected].
‘There must have been some pre-existing medical condition,’ Clare said, when I showed her.
‘It was very hot.’ Even talking about it made my lungs burn.
‘But that wasn’t your fault, Jamie. You didn’t control the temperature down there. It’s basically a clay furnace, you said it yourself.’
‘Should I reply? You know, ask about the baby?’
‘I wouldn’t. It might be interpreted as an admission of guilt and she’ll come after you with some civil lawsuit. It might be some sort of scam.’
On medical advice, I took a week off, and my GP helped me book a course of CBT sessions. Returning to work, I took a cab, but the traffic was so bad my commute took almost two hours. Next, I tried a complicated route involving only surface trains, but panicked after a stretch through a tunnel and had to leap off at the next station, making my way on a succession of crammed and crawling buses.
I resigned. While procrastinating about setting up as a freelancer and working from home, I looked for a job, any job within range, and, failing that, widened my net to within walking distance of London Bridge. The Comfort Zone was hiring.
I’d already begun there when another mail came from my antagonist: Too much of a fucking coward to get back to me? Should of known.
‘Not a grammarian, then,’ Clare said.
You shouldn’t be allowed to
get away with this, said the next.
And then: What goes around comes around. Remember that.
‘You need to close that email account,’ Clare advised.
I did. ‘Weird that it’s a woman who’s got so angry. It was the same at the time, as well. The men were fine.’
‘The tide is turning,’ she said, and perhaps because I was still mid-breakdown she didn’t add what I was fairly sure she was thinking: Get used to it.
15
May 2019
It was hardly a surprise to learn that Melia had googled me and read about my disgrace. What was surprising was how long it took her, given that I’d searched her name as soon as our affair began. This was what lovers did in 2019, they coolly investigated each other. No more subtle gleaning, no more telling your backstory in your own time. Privacy was a setting now, not a human right. And so I’d scanned various three-line reviews of her acting performances from years ago, as well as out-of-date employment listings. Instagram was her favoured form of social media, her activity veering from wild enthusiasm one week – #LoveLondonLife – to total abstinence the next (#HateLondonLife, I guess).
‘We read about that Tube thing,’ she told me. It was about two months into the affair by then, late May. Another workday evening, another one of her apartments, sleek and impersonal crucibles of intense human passion. I lived for our assignations now; I was a trained animal. ‘We didn’t realize you’d made the news.’
We. Kit and her. I imagined the two of them propped on their pillows, sharing the iPad, dark heads side by side. Did he cradle her head the way I did, the way I was right now, my thumb stroking the soft down of her hairline?
‘Sounds like a real drama,’ she added.
‘Yes, it was. And a lot more of a drama because people tweeted about it. The Standard totally stoked it.’
The Other Passenger Page 9
