by Unknown
Then he smiled, which I had not seen him do, and gently patted me on the hand. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I do not mean that you are unkind. Already you’ve done more than anyone else on this station. You stopped, and you listened to me, and you stayed behind when your train departed. Almost no one does that, in this place. Thank you.’
My eyes rose as he said this last, and met his, and in that instant I understood, and opened my mouth to shout, reached out my hands to grasp, but he was already on his feet, pushing through the crowd, running for the platform’s edge. The platform manager, sluggish and uninterested, responded too slowly, staggering after him, arms out-stretched – and missing – before with his mouth open in a silent scream Jeffrey tumbled across the yellow line at the end of the platform and, arms open like a parachute diver, threw himself onto the track.
The Northern Line comes in fast to Bank station, and only slows at the very last.
I saw the driver’s face, pale and broken, as the train came to a stop, too late.
***
I try not to change trains at Bank, now.
Not that I ever enjoyed it, for the place is an over-crowded maze of misleading signs, confusing exits and bewildering ramps. Only the foolish or the foolhardy brave Bank during rush hour, and I count myself as neither of these things.
Yet one day, not so long ago, my journey took me through its curving platforms and twisting corridors, and as I walked, head down and shoulders hunched against the pressing of my fellow passengers, I thought I caught, out of the corner of my eye, the shape of a man, drifting too slow, too idle for these station halls, his head bowed and his mind lost. I turned at once to call his name, but he was swallowed by the crowds who stop for no man. Yet in his face I thought I recognised him – the man who had raged and lost, when the Inspector called.
The Song of the City
Alison Littlewood
It was when she saw the little girl’s face that Eleanor smiled for the first time that morning. The child was small and blonde and when she grinned she showed her gappy white teeth. Eleanor smiled back, already wondering whether the family was just arriving or about to leave.
She was on the fifth level of the multi-storey car park, and it was dark and shady under its low flat ceilings; almost as dark and shady outside. It was autumn, and the clocks had already gone back; daylight saving hadn’t seemed to do her any favours. Her commute had been grey and a little dismal, and no doubt her drive home would be just the same.
The girl was holding her mother’s hand. She twisted so that her face came into view and she smiled again. She was a beautiful child. She probably knew it too, thought Eleanor: No. Don’t be such a misery.
The child’s father was half in-half out of the bulky Volvo estate. The mother stood by the passenger side, waiting to get in or leave, Eleanor wasn’t sure. She frowned and leaned over the wheel. Why couldn’t they decide? She needed a space. She couldn’t be bothered to go up to the next level, the highest; it wasn’t roofed and would be open to all of the darkness and cloud and rain she’d no doubt encounter on her way home again from the office.
The father emerged, clutching a briefcase, and they all turned to walk away. He saw Eleanor waiting and she shrugged, forcing a smile. Not her day.
She got the car moving again, then saw one last space, tucked into a corner behind a white Transit van. She hurried around the rows of cars, clunked the gearbox into reverse and slotted into it.
She saw the family again as she walked towards the lifts. The mother had stopped, was searching for something in her bag, something she’d forgotten maybe. Eleanor headed towards them and when the child waved at her she gave her a smile back, a real one this time.
Then she heard it; she couldn’t help but hear it. The sound struck her, at once seeming distant and next to her and inside her mind. It echoed as if through passageways and yet scratched inside her ears, tearing at the skin, vibrating the delicate bones until it seemed they must shatter, and Eleanor didn’t think about what it was or where it came from: she only doubled over, as if that would help, her mouth falling open. It was a screech. It shrieked. It was at once alien and familiar, the sound of pain, the sound of loss, but unbearable loss, not a sound any person would ever really make. It hurt, and it went on and on. She could hear it even with her hands pressed against her ears. It seemed a long time before it stopped.
When it did, she slowly straightened. She couldn’t quite believe the silence it left behind, though gradually, everything came back. There was the sound of traffic on the road outside, the distant rattle of the train station, the squeak of tyres on the smooth tight bends of the car park ramps. She couldn’t have heard what she thought she had: it wasn’t possible.
She heard something else, then, multiple footsteps walking towards her. She whirled to see the man and the woman and the little girl, the child skipping along, pointing her toes with every step. They looked quite unconcerned, until the man looked at Eleanor and noticed her face.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked, and they stopped and waited for her to answer.
After a moment, she did. She smiled. It was not a real smile, not this time. She looked down at the little girl. Had they heard nothing?
But she couldn’t have heard it herself, not that awful sound. She grabbed her bag and rummaged in it as if she’d forgotten something, although she hadn’t; she just didn’t want to follow them into the lift, to have them look at her in that appraising way. She walked a few steps back towards her car before turning, making sure the lift had taken them down before pressing the button that would call it back again.
***
Because of a particularity of the positioning of the company offices within the high-rise, the location of the accounts department, the angle of her desk and the location of the nearest window, Eleanor could actually see the car park from where she worked. It wasn’t much of a sight. Brutalist, aggressively utilitarian, it thrust from the banks of the canal and into the leaden rain. She could see the dark blots of cars lined up across the topmost level and was glad, now, that hers was not among them.
She spun her chair around and got up and went for a closer look.
There was a towpath by the canal. It was narrow but not unkempt; people walked along it pretty regularly. There was someone walking there now, hurrying as if they couldn’t get to the end quickly enough, but that wasn’t what she was looking at. There was someone else leaning over the canal, sitting on the bank so as to get closer – no, they were kneeling on the bank. She couldn’t see their face. Their long grey hair hung down towards the surface in a matted twist. They were dabbling something in the rank grey water that was hazed with rain, the droplets soaking into the woman’s clothing, pasting it tight to her arms, sculpting it to the limp dragging dugs of her chest. She straightened, reached down once more, then repeated the motion. The thing she was dipping in the water appeared to be grey, though that could have been only the rain, the light, the air: then she made out a flash of red.
She caught her breath just as a voice at her side said, ‘Look at that. Mad old bag.’
It was Mary, a lady in her fifties who handled the debtors’ roll. She was relentless – few debts at A. C. Newland overran for long.
‘I suppose she is,’ said Eleanor. ‘What’s she doing, do you think?’
‘Probably escaped from somewhere. Better be careful. You hear what happened there last week?’
‘Last week?’
‘They found some kid in the canal. A student. They’re saying it could have been an accident, but who knows? You’d have heard about it if you lived round here. Heard the jokes, an’ all.’
Eleanor was only half listening. The old woman by the canal had finished whatever it was she’d been doing. She held the greying cloth in front of her face: it was streaked red-brown, from rust, perhaps. It looked too small to be something she could wear. The rain fell. The woman was drenched. Above the cloth Eleanor could see that she was raising her head, and that the hair was
falling back from her face.
‘Not that funny really,’ Mary said. ‘Our Sophie says he was ’armless.’ She paused. ‘You really haven’t heard, have you? He had no arms, see. It must have been a boat, a propeller or summink, though you don’t get many through here. Both of ’em – his arms, I mean – ripped straight off. Mebbe she knew ’im.’ She nodded back towards the window.
‘We – we should maybe tell someone,’ Eleanor said, but Mary was already walking away, and anyway, she wasn’t really concentrating on her words: she was too busy watching the grey-haired woman. Slowly, she had begun to lower the cloth. In a moment, Eleanor would see her face.
And then Mary called ‘Mind yourself,’ and Eleanor turned to see her colleague as she collided with Andrew, the payroll clerk, two cups of coffee spilling over his hands. He cried out.
Eleanor glanced at the window to see a small figure, her grey hair spilling down her back, already walking away.
***
The evening news had started when Eleanor got in and threw her coat over a chair. It was damp, despite the umbrella she’d carried on her walk to the car park; the rain had been swept almost horizontal by an ugly wind. Her cat came up and sniffed, disdaining to rub itself against her legs.
The news wasn’t talking about a body in the canal, though, or a crazy woman dunking her clothes in the water. It was showing the traffic on the motorway that ran out of the city, the metal packed in and motionless and trailing back for miles, the rain falling steadily on lorries and vans and cars alike.
The incident occurred at 3.15, the newsreader said, her vowels clear and her consonants crisp, but the repercussions lasted long into rush hour.
Thank goodness Eleanor didn’t take the M62; she lived to the north, not the east or west.
The accident resulted in all three lanes being blocked.
The camera panned back, higher, more of that stationary traffic coming into view, and Eleanor realised it was being filmed from a helicopter. Then it started to move forwards, over the rows of red cars and silver cars and white ones, as if in mockery at the motion they should have had. It pulled back further and the front of the line came into view. Beyond it, all three lanes of the motorway were empty. Between, though, a fracture: something that should not have been. A lorry was skewed across the road, the cab facing back towards the queuing traffic, its windscreen shattered. Tucked into the gap between its side and the snub noses of the cars waiting to continue their journey was something else: too small, too malformed, too mangled.
The scene gave way to the face of the newsreader.
Dominic Bradford, his wife Amelia and their three-year-old daughter were killed instantly when the lorry jack-knifed into their path.
A photograph. Eleanor froze; she couldn’t even blink. It had been taken in better days, that picture. There was no hurrying, no rush, no hassle; she could see it on their faces. It had been done in a studio, the background a soft mish-mash of beige-coloured clouds, and they wore identical smiles, all three of them. She remembered the child, the gap in her teeth, the way she’d twisted in her mother’s hand so that she could smile at Eleanor. In the photograph she wasn’t showing her teeth. She was showing her blonde locks, though, and they curled prettily about her face. Eleanor let out a small sound, somewhere between a choke and a sigh. She hadn’t known she was going to make that sound and she looked around her room; it was empty. It was odd to make a sound like that in an empty house.
That reminded her of the other odd sound, the one she’d heard after parking her car that morning, such a short a time ago; and yet so long for the Bradford family, a day they never knew was going to change everything, end everything, for ever.
Eleanor slumped back onto the sofa, wishing there was someone else there, just to hold her for a moment. But of course, she wasn’t alone. Her cat jumped lithely and silently onto the seat, and she reached for her, burying her face in the little creature’s neck.
***
This time, Eleanor chose the highest level of the car park. It was different up here, lighter: she wouldn’t be reminded of the family she’d seen on the next floor down. She thought of them anyway as she stepped out into the pale dawn that was lightening the city and saw the girl sitting on the ledge.
She had the lithe posture of a teenager, reclining with one leg stretched in front of her on the concrete, the other dangling over the drop. She didn’t appear to be afraid. She chewed on something clasped between her lips: a hair grip, maybe. She supported her body with one arm and with her other hand, she combed her hair.
Her hair was long and red. For a moment it glowed, and Eleanor found she couldn’t look away from it. It was as if it trapped the light, sending it back brighter and richer and somehow changed, each fine strand glowing with its own fiery shade.
Beautiful, Eleanor thought, and realised she was walking across the space, not towards the lift but away from it, towards the girl, who looked up, her expression half questioning, half amused.
‘Want something?’
‘I – no. I just wanted to see if you were all right.’ Eleanor felt foolish now, out of place. Of course the girl was all right. She wasn’t about to fall or to throw herself off.
But the girl didn’t laugh at her. She only said, in a low sweet voice: ‘I wasn’t waiting for you.’
‘No, I – I know. Sorry.’ Eleanor was about to turn away when the girl rolled onto her back, towards the empty air.
Eleanor caught her breath, but the girl didn’t fall. She gestured towards the whole spread: the grey offices and the greyer streets, the high-rises, the station, over towards the town hall with its remnants of grander and more opulent times, the clouds that covered them all. Then she sat, her legs spread across each side of the ledge, and pointed straight down.
Eleanor stepped towards her. She could smell the muskiness of the girl’s skin, her sweat.
‘Closer.’
Eleanor leaned out. A small red car was pulling out of the car park exit. Office workers were walking down the street. A white van was parked halfway across a kerb. When she looked back at the girl she saw her following the car with her eyes as it merged with the traffic. Then she smiled, revealing bright teeth; the amused look was back in her eyes.
‘Did you see the man?’ she asked.
Eleanor nodded, though she didn’t know who she meant; and now the girl was lounging again, ignoring her. She gathered herself enough to wave before walking towards the lifts, pushing her from her thoughts; and then the sound came, a long heavy wave that rose and fell, a hundred tones hidden within it, tones that made Eleanor’s ribs vibrate with its passage and lifted her and threw her down, so that when it faded she was on her knees, blood leaking from them, her bag next to her with her things spilling from its mouth.
She put a hand to her head. She wasn’t sure she had really heard a sound at all; not a real sound anyway. It made her think of tumours, disorders of the hearing, of the mind. Now she realised she could hear nothing at all. She couldn’t even hear her own breath passing in and out of her lungs, though she could smell the taint of petrol on the air. She glanced up to see metal, grilles and bonnets and headlights. She focused on the nearest. A nasty crack bisected the plastic. She closed her eyes, rubbing them, and pushed herself to her feet.
She blinked a few times. For a second the concrete, the cars, everything was grey; then colours flooded back, metallic paint, red, green, yellow. Everything looked a little brighter than before. She frowned. The car she was looking at had a jagged crack across its windscreen.
She looked around; there were others too. A silver Corsa’s window sagged inward, hopelessly shattered. A Mondeo’s rear screen had reconfigured into a starburst.
She hurried towards her own car. The rear window was fine; so was the side. She edged between it and the next car, to check the front. That, too, was all right, but of course it was; they couldn’t all have cracked just now, could they? She would have heard the glass shatter. Then she noticed the splinter hanging f
rom the side mirror. She leaned in closer, refocusing on her reflection, at the cracks that cut and etched their way before her face.
It was only when she turned to leave, nothing else to be done, that she remembered the girl. The ledge where she had been sitting was empty. But how long had Eleanor been kneeling on the floor, then staring into her own reflection? She could hardly be surprised, now, to find her gone.
***
The damage in the car park had made the Evening Post, under the heading of mindless vandalism, but that wasn’t what Eleanor was looking for. She wasn’t really sure what she was looking for, but she could hear words in her mind as she riffled the pages, and she could picture the girl: the girl with the shining red hair.
Did you see the man?
Then she saw something that made her pause, just a snippet, too prosaic for the front pages, too old a story. A man had been killed when his car, a small red Nissan, had collided with a lamppost in the city centre. No one else was hurt. There had been no discernible reason why he had mounted the kerb. No one had seen the accident. He’d only been collecting the car, his wife had said. He’d left it in town after a heavy night, and the unspoken words lay heavily across the page; that he had still been drunk that morning when he’d driven it away. Eleanor remembered the car she’d seen. It hadn’t seemed to be driven erratically, but what would she know? She’d barely glanced at it. She’d been distracted by the redheaded girl.
Did you see the man?
She closed the paper, crumpling it in her hands without looking where she was walking, and barged into someone coming the other way. She blurted an apology, glancing over her shoulder to see deep red hair spilling over the woman’s shoulders. It wasn’t the girl she’d seen earlier; this woman was too broad for that, but the word mother sprang unbidden into her mind. She shook her head, resumed walking towards her car and the long road home. She hadn’t even seen the woman’s face.
