A Lovely Way to Burn

Nine

Rachel had spoken as if London was in meltdown, but the Jubilee line showed no sign of crisis. The carriage was full and Stevie was forced to stand, her body just one of many sardined together, hurtling through the depths. Perhaps the trains were brightly lit to take people’s minds off how dark the tunnels outside really were. The Underground carriage’s fluorescence drained the passengers’ complexions of any lustre. The dark skin of the business-suited man beside her had turned grey, and the woman leaning against the pole by the door had taken on a jaded sheen that reminded Stevie of the print of Tretchikoff’s green lady that had hung in her grandmother’s hallway.

Stevie felt the weight of the city above her and wondered how deep beneath the ground she was. West Hampstead . . . Finchley Road . . . Swiss Cottage . . . St John’s Wood . . . The automated announcer declared the stations in her machine-plummy voice, not bothering to warn them to mind the gap. Londoners didn’t dwell on the people who had died on the Underground: the navvies sacrificed to its construction, the suicides and careless drunks crushed against the tracks, the terrorist bombings, Jean Charles de Menezes murdered by police marksmen. They walked past the memorial to those who had died in the King’s Cross fire without a glance, because to remember too often would be crippling. Londoners were the blood of the city and the city went on, regardless of the Black Death, the Great Fire, the Blitz, and terrorist bombings. It was only occasionally, when the train stopped between stations, that passengers caught each other’s eye and wondered if their luck had run out.

Simon’s laptop was in a satchel slung across Stevie’s body. The weight of it pulled at her shoulder blade. The carriage shuddered to a halt and an elderly man’s hand grazed her right breast. He gave her a half smile that might have been an apology or an invitation. Stevie’s foot tensed with the urge to stamp on his toes but she merely shifted her bag to her other side, making a barrier between them.

Stevie thought she could scent the lingering smell of her illness beneath the blend of body odours and rubber that permeated the carriage. A droplet of sweat slid down her spine and she hoped her shirt wouldn’t cling to it. She noticed an ex-member of the Cabinet further down the train. Cartoonists had made a feature of his hair, which was usually gelled in a blond quiff, but it had lost its bounce and was slumped greasily against his forehead. Stevie wondered how he dared to use public transport in the wake of failing wars, austerity and job cuts, and then she spotted the trio shadowing him, men whose sharp suits needed no padding to broaden their shoulders. They looked tired, as if a life of being on the alert had taken its toll.

The Underground train dashed to a halt and the robot voice announced: Westminster. Stevie squeezed from the carriage, joining the stream of bodies making their way along the platform and into the corridors that led to the escalators. The station was a hundred or so years old, but the original interior had vanished beneath a monumental steel-and-concrete façade designed to remind travellers that this was a feat of engineering, a miracle to rival flesh and blood.

Stevie stepped on to one of the upward-bound escalators, aware of other bodies being ferried upwards and downwards in the vast hallway. The whoosh and rattle of the trains was still audible beyond the hum of the escalators, but otherwise the station was surprisingly quiet, as if this was a place where machines held sway and men and women held their tongues.

She imagined the noise that would fill the station if all of their thoughts became words, the racket of it. The idea felt like a hangover from her fever. Stevie gripped the moving bannister and looked up towards the exit. The angle of the stairwell was dizzying.

Then, suddenly, the hum of the machine world was fractured by shouting. Stevie looked across the rows of escalators and saw a man tumbling down the metal steps, limp-limbed and flailing. Somewhere, someone must have hit the emergency button because the staircase stalled. People reached towards him, trying to stop his progress, but the man’s body had gathered momentum. He crashed into a woman on the stairs below; she fell too, and then it seemed that a shoal of people were falling.

A couple of youths managed to leap on to the bannisters, but gravity was faster than even gym-fit commuters and other people were caught in the descent. Stevie had watched countless movie villains tumble to their deaths, but cinema hadn’t prepared her for the chaos of it, or the sound of bone on metal that seemed to rise above the shouting. Her escalator juddered to a halt and she stood, frozen, unsure of what to do. The screaming died into sobs and agitated chatter, and she heard a train rush into the station. Down below, people were gathering. Someone was crying. Someone else shouted for a doctor. And then slowly, unbelievably, the queue of people on the stairway ahead of Stevie started to move, and she moved with them, climbing out of the Underground towards the light.

She overheard a passing teenager, who might have been Italian, say, ‘He was swaying and then he fell. I saw him. It was too quick to do anything. What could I do? I was on the other staircase.’

A cockney voice answered, ‘Nah, mate, he was pushed. I saw it with my own eyes. A white man pushed him down the steps.’

‘He’s got the sickness,’ said an elderly lady. ‘That’s how it hits you. One moment you’re okay, the next you’re dead.’

‘It was gravity got him,’ the cockney youth said. ‘It never lets up for a moment.’

Then they were outside, embraced by the ever-present rumble of traffic and the stale city air that not even the river could freshen. For an instant the commuters, newly released from the world below, were distinct from the pedestrians aboveground, as if their mortality had risen to the surface with them and left its mark. Then they dispersed, and were absorbed into London’s careless anonymity, taking the memory of the falling man with them.

Stevie wove her way between the tourists who crammed the streets around Westminster, viewing the sites through the lenses of their cameras. The satchel containing the laptop banged against her thigh. An ambulance was trying to force its way through the traffic towards the Underground station, its sirens screaming. It was agonising, the sound of the sirens, its thwarted progress. She looked away, at the Thames and the looming Houses of Parliament. They seemed unreal, like a backdrop rolled out for a budget movie that needed a quick establishing shot. This was what tourists imagined when they thought of the city: Big Ben and red buses, the London Eye and bobbies with silly helmets. And it was all there waiting for them.

But did they see the rest? Stevie wondered. The rough sleepers and kettled demos, the cheap chicken fryers whose sleeping bags lay bundled in the back of the shop, the men and women hanging around King’s Cross with a kind word and the offer of a bed for the night to runaways they would soon put to work?

Maybe the tourists did see, and felt as helpless as she did. It was a globalised world after all, and there was no reason to imagine that their capital cities were any different. The screams of the people falling were still in her mind. Stevie felt a sudden urge to go back, but didn’t break her stride as she crossed Westminster Bridge. Simon had trusted her to deliver the laptop. It was the only service she could do for him now.