Underground Read online

  Casimir shakes his head, embarrassed by the other man’s sudden irritation. It comes to him that this is the edge of something in Adams, some larger anxiety or hurt. The girl matters to him. Casimir wonders why.

  ‘S something, Sarendon, Savallas, I don’t know.’ The supervisor has stopped again, still frowning. ‘Nice girl, she looked. Done up nice. Training to be a foot doctor.’ He grins at Casimir, suddenly relieved. ‘I never knew there was doctors just for feet, you know?’

  They go on out on to the platform. It stretches away from them, long like a church nave. The three entranceways are Victorian mock-classical, bas-relief architraves and columns curved round the tunnel’s proportions like images seen through a fish-eye lens. Casimir feels a momentary familiar sense of dislocation at the subterranean space, its scale and lack of natural light. The black platform surface is reinforced with steel chipping and edged with white. Beyond that, the four track rails shine. Under them is the deep gutter of the catch pit. Casimir thinks of the Tube workers’ slang: suicide pit. He sees the gutter as that; the term feels accurate. Suicides are what it’s made to catch.

  The news of the accident touches him, but he is also relieved. He knows how bad accidents can be on the Underground and this is not a bad accident. The electricity in the negative rail is only as strong as the current in a household socket. And there was no train collision. A minimum of blood.

  He blinks once, looking back at himself, feeling his own unease. It jars with him, the way Adams has told him the news. The supervisor has always been quick-witted and quicktempered, but the nervousness is new to Casimir, the sense of strapped-down anger. As if the accident were more serious than it is. He feels a faint current of air along his left cheek and the broken line of his nose. A train is coming, still far off in the dark.

  Casimir feels shifting motion around him. Not the tangible matter of air, but a moment of dizziness, more inside him than out. A perception of change, a loss of control. It is a kind of fear he has not felt for a long time, not for years. He goes on talking, willing it away.

  ‘Did she call for help?’

  ‘Oh yes. Plenty of noise.’

  ‘You don’t think she jumped?’

  Now the train is audible, the sound of it warbling through the tracks. Like a stone thrown across ice.

  Adams looks away northwards, the direction from which the train will come. After some time he shakes his head, no.

  ‘That doesn’t make it an accident. She could have been pushed.’

  The supervisor looks back up at him. His reddened face and blue eyes are cocked like the head of some bright, sharp bird. ‘It’s an accident until Line Management says otherwise. D’you get me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s good. Right then, son.’ He slaps Casimir’s arm. A friendly movement but also automatic, without affection. ‘We should be going. Rush hour in no time.’ He has to shout a little over the roar of the oncoming train.

  He wakes up in the dark. The muscles of his shoulders ache from overwork. The window is open but the room is hot, and from outside comes the sound of a car alarm, streets away.

  His left hand is raised on the mattress, next to his upturned face. He can hear the tick of his watch, separating the dark into measured time. He turns to see. On his wrist, the watch-face emits its faint, definite light.

  His mouth is dry and he gets up for water, asleep but not asleep. The hallway carpet is a numb fur under his feet.

  He was dreaming of the girl. Already he can’t remember the colour of her eyes. He tries to picture her clearly, letting nothing else fade as he wakes. The muscles of his erection are still drawn out hard and aching, warmer than his inner thigh. He clicks on the bathroom light and the bulb goes with a dull pock.

  The flash of light stays on his eyes. He turns back into the hall. The light switch is by the staircase, away from his rented room. There are no windows, only a square of pinkish London cloud through a skylight. He gets to the switch and the bulb is dead.

  He can feel a familiar, drowsy panic rising in him and he stands, waiting for it to pass. Light bulbs go together, he tells himself, because they are bought together. He tries to think rationally. It is possible to control the fear this way, he has done it many times. The dark looms over him and he arches his bare shoulders forward against it. His hands cross at the wrists, holding on to the indistinct light source of the watch-face. It is no more than five feet to the staircase. He makes himself go forward and down.

  Outside the car alarm stops, long after he has ceased to hear it. The silence jolts him fully awake and he misses a step, keeling forward in the stairwell. He reaches out for the banister and swings upright, breathing badly.

  At the bottom of the stairs is the first-floor kitchen. The sweet smells of frying oil and raw chicken-meat seep up from the shop below. Casimir clicks on the light and stands in its abrupt illumination, the dark pushed back outside small windows. He puts his head back, glad of the glare on his eyes.

  The wall clock ticks loudly towards four-thirty. He has another hour before he will leave for Camden Town. He turns on the radio and sits down at the Formica table. The air is warm against his bare legs. After some time he closes his eyes and sleeps with his head on his folded arms. The news whispers behind him.

  He closes the scuffed side-door and stands outside on the pavement. Taking a breath, getting his bearings. The plate glass next to him is smeared with rain and grease. Above its window, the shop’s name is printed in red: DON’T FRY TONIGHT PHONE CHICKEN DELITE.

  Casimir looks up, shading his eyes against the dull light. The early-morning sky is grey and clear and the moon is still rising, a northern summer crescent that reminds him of Poland; the flat, cropped fields of Silesia and the moon over them at midday, unnatural in the blue sky. The eye of a fish beached in the Russian waterlands. Out of place; out of its place. He looks down and starts to walk, up Lower Marsh towards Waterloo station.

  The shops he passes – Tribalize Body Piercing, Honour Exclusive Ladywear – are unlit behind chain-links. Only the cafés are already open. Market stall-holders smoke and chat outside Olympic Sandwich and Maria’s. Casimir walks between their vans, the scaffolds of half-erected stalls and the crates of jogging bottoms, dusty plastic geraniums, bruised green bunches of plantain. His work clothes chaff against the skin of his neck and thighs.

  He has lived in this place for eight years. The smell of the weekday market is intimate to him; diesel and fried onions, like a fairground. The soot-black brick houses have become his mental neighbourhood. It is the nearest thing he has to a sense of home. He walks with his head down, uncurious, black hair hanging forward past his temples.

  Outside the Fishcoteque Bar, a man with birds tattooed on each hand is unloading painted eggs in glass boxes. One of the boxes falls as Casimir passes. He turns to watch without stopping. The man carefully picks up pieces of red eggshell, glass and black lacquer in his faded-ink hands.

  Casimir knows his face and his name, Weaver. His memory is good and he knows many of the people here, sellers and buyers. But few of them know him. He likes it that way. He turns left up the incline of Spur Road, towards the high arched windows of Waterloo terminus.

  At the top of the road he stops to catch his breath. Tower blocks loom overhead, nearer the Thames. Already the sky is lighter; he can feel the changing warmth of it on his face. Below him, Lower Marsh is a row of sallow net curtains, extensions built in brick the colour of new skin. The rear views make him think of city hostels in Poland, cheap back rooms with windows looking out on to nothing but other windows. Casimir would watch people eating alone at small tables, old men brushing their teeth, young women walking up and down behind blown-in curtains. Humanity crammed in together; he always liked that, except when he caught people looking back at him.

  He searches for the window of his own room, but there is nothing to mark it out and after a moment he turns away.

  There are steps up to the terminus and he hunches forward as h
e climbs, too lanky for their measure, taking them in twos and threes. A dog skitters down past him, white with pinkrimmed eyes, quiet and alert. Casimir turns right along the foot of the terminus building. The side-entrance is a brick arch, small and ordinary as the house doorways of Lower Marsh.

  He goes through, into the arched concourse. Pigeons whicker around the four-faced station clock, jostling for resting space. There is a young man by the W. H. Smith, slumped against newspaper bundles. His head rests on his T-shirted chest and one inert bluish arm lies outstretched, as if asking for something. Casimir can see no one else and there is no sound of people yet, only the hushed echoes of arrival boards and cooling engines. Casimir feels a need to shout, to fill the place with the sound of voices. He smiles at himself. The expression works against the drawn lines of his features.

  He walks across the white-tiled hall to a descending shaft, over-lit and loud with machinery. There is a London Underground map on the entrance wall, a knotwork of tunnel lines, purple and brown and black: Metropolitan, Bakerloo, Northern. Casimir steps on to the down-escalator and stops walking. Behind him, a telephone starts to ring, faint but insistent in the huge interior space. Casimir turns to look back at it as he is carried down.

  ‘All this time the guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope. At last he said, “You’re travelling the wrong way,” and shut up the window and went away. Look. Can you see the guard in the picture?’

  ‘No. Lie, lie. Lie-lie-lie.’

  He is sitting opposite a woman, a suitcase, a dog and a child. The woman is reading to the child. The dog tugs at the worn-down seats. Behind them is his own reflection in the Tube windows. Today the seat next to him is empty. His uniform jacket is open. He does it up.

  ‘But the gentleman in white paper leant forwards and whispered in her ear, “Never mind what they all say, my dear, but take a return ticket every time the train stops.”’

  ‘Lie, lie. Mum, I’m tired.’

  ‘Are you listening to this?’

  ‘You did a lie.’

  ‘What lie?’

  ‘There ain’t no gentleman in white paper.’

  The boy is frowning across at him, dark irises under lowered brows. Casimir smiles back. He remembers the story, the soft Polish of his mother’s voice. Now the woman looks up at him quickly. Not worried, just watching. Her eyes are shadowed, the skin bruised with lack of sleep. He thinks how early it is to be down here, with a suitcase and child and a dog.

  He looks away at the tunnel going by. After some distance it opens out, losing definition. Through his own reflection, Casimir watches another train go past. Faces at the window turn slowly to look back. The boy cranes round in his seat, but the other train is already gone.

  At Camden Town he gets out. The train pulls away beside him as he walks down the platform. The air today smells wet and warm. Casimir guesses it will rain, and he regrets that he won’t see it. It’ll be ten hours before he is outside again. He has always enjoyed summer rain.

  Half-way down the platform, a black sphere hangs from the tunnel ceiling. Casimir can make out the shapes of closed-circuit cameras inside the translucent plastic. He nods at them, half-raises a hand.

  At the southern end of the platform he turns down a side-passage. The lighting here is poorer, less public; signs point off to other platforms and the deep well of the emergency stairs. The right wall is lined with dirt-clogged grilles, 1930s panelled wooden doors and extractor fans from the Camden take-aways. There is a thick, sweet smell of junk food in the lowceilinged hall. Casimir feels his stomach turn over with hunger.

  At the corner of the passage is a blank modern door. Off to one side is a sign:

  STATION SUPERVISOR: ASSISTANCE. PLEASE ENTER.

  ! FIRE DOOR: KEEP SHUT.

  Casimir stands for a moment, unbuttoning his jacket. He can hear the sound of static and voices through the door, faint and serious.

  An old woman comes round the passage corner. Two lean grey dogs strain ahead of her, tongues lolling out in the underground humidity. The woman’s mess of dull hair has become tangled with the dog leashes knotted to her belt. She stares up at Casimir, at the door and then away. She is talking under her breath and Casimir has the impression she is asking him for help. He leans forward instinctively, trying to hear.

  ‘Why are church roofs green? Because they’re eyes because they’re cheese because they’re grass –’ She looks up at Casimir, puzzled and urgent. ‘Because they’re sunglasses.’

  She begins to move again, keeping to the far wall, away from the figure and the door. As if they are out of place or somehow dangerous. Casimir watches her go. His face shows almost no emotion. He turns back to the door and goes in.

  ‘Casimir! Good morning. Are you well?’

  Aebanyim grins down at him. She is standing on a swivel chair by the ventilation shaft with a black rubber torch in one small hand and a screwdriver in the other. The chair wobbles and half-twists under her. Her teeth are stained bleach-white. Casimir grins back despite himself.

  ‘Well, thank you. And you?’

  ‘Oh, well, I am well too, of course.’

  The office is a sparse, L-shaped room, cut in two by a plyboard counter. The paint on the walls was cream livery in the 1940s; now it is discoloured by decades to an uneven yellow. Casimir is always struck by the absence of windows here, the feeling of airlessness. Outside and above the walls there is nothing but water and power in pipes and shafts, and the density of London clay. The air smells of burnt coffee and the sour dirt of tunnel clothes.

  Behind the counter Oluwo is leant back, watching the closed-circuit monitors. The screens flicker, as if their reception is almost lost. Oluwo’s eyes are very white and unblinking in their dark sockets. Sweat silvers his face along the flat of his forehead and the angular three-scarred cheeks. He lowers his eyes to Casimir and nods once, without smiling.

  From round the corner of the room, Casimir can hear Adams on the station-to-station telephone. Between bursts of static and distant conversation, his voice is harsh, losing patience. Casimir shrugs off his jacket and hangs it behind the door next to the racks of cellular phones, voltage testers and fluorescent waistcoats. He walks to the counter, opens it and edges through. Round the corner where Adams stands, the room is illuminated only by monitor screens. Adams’s skin is lit the colour of newspapers.

  ‘I don’t care what they do on the Vic. Oy. Oy. Are you listening to me?’ Adams is bent towards the wall phone so that his face almost touches the wall. One hand is leant out to support himself, the other grips the receiver. His face is screwed up with emotion. To Casimir he looks like a man in pain. He doesn’t notice as Casimir finds a plastic chair and sits down.

  ‘I don’t care what they do on the fucking Vic or the fucking Pic. On this line you get your men off the track by switching-on time, all right? Because it’s not even seven now and already the trains are ten minutes late because you and your lot were still fucking around in the tunnels at five-thirty. All right? Have I made myself clear? That’s good then, and you fuck off too.’

  He shoves himself off the wall and back upright. For a moment he rocks on his heels, staring up into space. Casimir watches the anger going out of him or back into him.

  ‘Adams.’

  The supervisor flinches and turns. ‘Cass.’ He rubs his eyes with the knuckles of one hand. Smiling, tired. ‘You’re early.’

  ‘So are you.’

  ‘So I am, yes. We catch the worms. Who else is on today?’

  ‘Sievwright and Leynes. Oluwo is on double shift.’

  ‘Is Aebanyim leaving?’

  ‘No. She is also early.’

  He knows all this, Casimir thinks. He is just talking for the sake of it. It is not like him. Casimir watches as the supervisor eases himself into a seat.

  ‘Really.’ He looks over at Oluwo, then smiles at Casimir again. ‘What you got for breakfast, Mister Oluwo?’

  The black man stares balefully at A
dams, clicks his tongue and looks away.

  ‘No, really, what is it today? Pork pies? Jam tarts?’

  Casimir shifts uncomfortably. Everybody knows about Oluwo’s superstitions. He remembers the man’s slow voice. You eat underground, you stay underground. Casimir has seen him drink black tea, and nothing else. The man consumes nothing here, as if being underground, the food will grow roots in his stomach.

  Still, this is a delicate matter. He is surprised by Adams’s teasing. After all, there are other beliefs about the Tubes. They all have superstitions. The supervisor is smiling, trying to catch Casimir’s eye. He meets the man’s gaze and tries not to frown. ‘What needs doing?’

  Adams sighs, reaches for a clipboard schedule. ‘All right, all right. Take your pick. There’s water getting into the substation again, the monitors have been on the blink all day, you could get on to Thames Water.’ He leafs through pages of scrawled notes. ‘What else? The vendor deliverers are coming with eight hundred units of Wispa, whatever that means; they’ll need keys and that. There was a whacking great Rastafarian fellow around yesterday, nearly as big as you – Leynes caught him painting coloured stripes on the platforms, he said it was to make the doors open. So if the station starts turning green and gold, that’ll be why. And there’s blue graffiti all over the old cross-tunnels. The stuff’s like fucking mushrooms, it comes up by itself overnight. A couple of the new lads are down there cleaning up. Unsupervised. So if you’ve got a minute –’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good. No hurry. Aebanyim!’ His voice rises to a yell as he looks past Casimir.

  ‘Yes, I am up here.’ There is a clang of grille metal on concrete. ‘No mice.’

  ‘I heard them. Look again.’ Adams has put the clipboard down. He is picking through a pile of Traffic Circular magazines, timetables and large photographs. Arranging them on the counter. His head is turned down to one side; Casimir can no longer see his face. Only the forehead, the deep frown lines. ‘If I’m going to sit a hundred feet under the ground all day, I’m not going to breathe mouse shit too. Do you see them now?’