Underground Read online

  ‘I’m not going back down. The shipyard was better than this.’

  ‘We need the money.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘We need the money, love.’

  ‘Money again! Money is all you think about. And why should I be surprised?’

  My mother moves around the kitchen and says nothing. Her dress has flowers the colour of new leaves. It makes her look pale. It is usual, her not talking, Father talking. This is an ordinary night. My life is not good, not bad.

  ‘As if you’ve got nothing stashed away. Such a good little miser. I know, love, we’ll get you a job, how about that? How would it be if you got your hands bloody for a change? Your precious white hands. I’d like to see that. Blood! I need more cigarettes.’

  Father looks at me and he sees me. Blood is the worst curse, the most secret. Sometimes he looks at me and doesn’t see but now he smiles again. I take a step back, nearer the door.

  ‘Where’s your grandfather, son?’

  ‘In his room.’

  ‘See if he’s got any cigarettes.’

  ‘OK.’

  I go out. In the hall I sit down like I am playing and I listen. It is not hard.

  ‘They won’t have me back anyway. The Black Trout Shaft foreman said so. Says I’m a danger with the machinery, so that’s that. I’ll travel again.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you hear about Latek? Three months ago all he could buy was soap, now he’s selling leather jackets. Do you know what he gets on those?’

  ‘You could find other work.’

  ‘And the Party worker in Katowice, didn’t you hear that? A million dollars from nothing worse than tractors, and now he’s disappeared to Cuba! Cuba. It drives me mad, Anna, watching them. I feel stuck here.’

  ‘Don’t go.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Don’t leave us.’

  ‘I didn’t say that, did I? Why, would you miss me?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know. I don’t.’

  ‘Ah. You look so much better when you’re sad. Say it again. Nicely.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  They stop talking. Now there is only sound and movement. It is stupid and I am bored. I can hear Monika in the hall now. If I tell her about her mouth she will run away. I think I will do it. I run.

  Karol has a red Brando. Monika has a green one. They click them in their mouths. Clickety-click. I have no Brando but I see everything, I watch the day happen. The Chorzelski brothers have a motorbike but there are four of them so they take turns. The sky is yellow at the ends and blue on the top and the grassy dust is warm. It’s a good day. It would be better with a Brando.

  This is the list of frightening things. It is still in my head. I am not scared of so much as Piotr or Monika but more than Wladislaw.

  Piotr doesn’t write the list for me. He is at school now. I am alone.

  • The statues at the Hall of Local Government which are devils, they have horns and no cocks and their knees go backwards.

  • Wallpaper flowers.

  • Lighting cigarettes from candles because it means you’ll die at sea.

  • My father’s blood.

  • Writing.

  • Meat tokens. Mother got liver for a month.

  • Wax dropped in water which tells fortunes.

  • Turning lights.

  • The burnt flat.

  It happened at night and we went down and stood on the steps in rows, all of the neighbours in Strug C Block, hundreds all big and small and fat in coats and blankets and pyjamas and sometimes nothing, just pink. The firemen’s ladder went up five floors and they waved.

  I never saw this myself but Mother tells me it was so. I was mostly asleep. I only remember stairs and turning lights.

  My father drinks winiak brandy at breakfast. It is to thin his blood. He went on an aeroplane and brought me back three lemon wipes. I keep them wrapped up in brown paper with red writing on it. The first wipe stopped smelling, so now I’m on the second wipe. It smells better than real lemons.

  Games are good. I play the Anywhere Game with my mother. We do it on the bicycle.

  ‘Now where?’

  ‘Left.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes. Faster.’

  ‘All right. There, this is pretty. And now?’

  ‘Left. No. Right. Right.’

  ‘Leave the – Sit back! Back. Or we stop.’

  One time we came to a road with no other roads at the end, only sunlight striped down a wall and big crows eating from rubbish bins. In the wall was a door and we went through and there was a garden. It was beautiful. There were trees and water.

  ‘Can I play here?’

  ‘Of course. It’s for everyone.’

  Her face was all ripply with light from the water. I laughed back at her like an echo. I ran into the trees, where I could be her echo.

  Or there were riddles. They can be done anywhere.

  In the cheese and shoes shop: ‘Why are birches white?’

  ‘Because they’re whitewashed, like apple trees?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because they’re hiding in the snow?’

  ‘Yes.’ She’s quite good at riddles. In the bath: ‘What is red the colour of?’

  ‘I don’t know. Mind your eyes. Here it comes.’

  ‘People with cars. Why does Dad go away from us?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘To get money?’

  ‘Maybe he just likes going away. Careful. Ariel –’

  My mother sneezes when she gets wet. Three times, then a breath, then the fourth. She always sneezes the same way.

  When she cries it is like coughing, like something breaking. It is small sticks breaking under the trees when I run. When I dream of running under the trees I know this, that Mother has been crying while I sleep.

  I hate music. It gets in the way of thinking. There is a hole in the radio’s back where a button came off and I get a little stone and push it inside to stop the music but it doesn’t.

  I go to the road where the new flats are going up, high and hollow. There are loads of little orange stones and I take them home. I put more little stones in through the hole in the radio. It takes 226 stones to stop the music. I go and smell my lemon wipes. It is quiet in my room and the sun comes in through the open window, bright and sharp like the smell of lemons.

  Now Father is at the kitchen table with the radio and a winiak brandy and Grandfather’s tool box. There is nothing to show it was me with the stones. I stay with him anyway. I stand close and talk fast.

  ‘Did you eat food on the aeroplane?’

  ‘Sure. Food, drink, cigarettes.’ He frowns. When he lifts up the radio, the stones go shuffling around inside.

  ‘Can you fix it?’ Mother comes in with her hands up to her blue-black hair, winding it around itself.

  ‘Damn thing sounds like a concrete mixer. I don’t know what’s wrong with it.’ Now he opens out Grandfather’s tool kit. I play the Question Game to slow him down even more.

  ‘Did everyone have lemon wipes?’

  ‘Eh? Everyone did, yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To clean their hands with. There –’ He notches the driver into a screw. The first one comes out straight away.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mm? I don’t know. Because they were dirty people.’ There are only three screws. The second one is in hard. Father grunts through his teeth and it gets loose.

  ‘Why?’

  He swings his face round at me and away. The third screw rolls off and he catches it in his hand and grins. ‘Why? Because they were on dirty business, that’s why.’ He takes the back off the radio and lifts it up to look inside.

  ‘Borja!’

  Little orange stones come rattling out over Father and the kitchen table. He drops the radio and jumps backwards. The glass of winiak cracks like ice on a waterbutt. I watch it drip gold before I run.

  We went to Krak
ow to see soldiers. It was the first time. On the train there was a tunnel and my father said we had to hold our breath, it is the Breathing Game. I held my breath as long as I could, but when I opened my eyes we were still under the ground. My father held his breath right out into the light.

  When I came back my town was different because I could smell it. The smell of my town is of coal. I like it. Coal smells like under the pine trees in summer, but sweeter.

  We are making supper but I am thinking of the names of trees I have learned. Birch, larch, sycamore. I stand on the stool and she is behind me. We are four hands. Our hands clean the potatoes. Our hands take them out of the sink. The potato skins are grey and shiny, like aluminium.

  ‘You’re quiet.’

  ‘Yes. I’m making secret lists.’

  I can feel my mother laugh through my back. Laughing is a feeling.

  ‘Are they good secrets or bad?’

  It’s not a clever question. How can I tell her? If I did I wouldn’t have secrets any more. We go on cleaning. The big windows are open and the blue-green curtains are open and the net curtains belly inwards, full of light. Outside children are screaming. I wonder if they are hurt or playing.

  ‘Do you have secrets?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you make lists with them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you do with them?’

  She lifts out the potatoes. They are drained and almost dry but they still shine.

  ‘What do you do with them?’

  ‘I try never to think of them, or say them. That way I forget. Then I have no secrets. Arms out.’

  She dries our hands on the blue towel. Next I will go and play.

  ‘Like middle names.’

  Her hands stop drying. Her arms go hard round me. I look up with my head right back.

  ‘Like Ariel. No one says it so they forget.’

  Her face is upside-down and I smile at it. I can’t work out if she smiles back. She puts her wet hands on the sides of my face and she leans down to me.

  ‘That’s right. It was your grandfather’s name.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ Grandfather’s name is Pavel. I heard him say it to a Militia man.

  ‘Your other grandfather. Mine. Now it’s our secret, yes? It belongs to both of us.’

  ‘Yes. And to Father. Your hands are wet.’

  ‘Not to Father. Just us.’

  She kisses my face. Breathes in my ear, Shhhh. It feels nice.

  ‘Do it again.’

  Laughter. Shhhh.

  ‘Again.’

  She bends low. Darkness. Haaaah.

  Winter. I am watching at my window. The world is black and white with snow. Down there I see my mother. Her footsteps go small and black down the centre of the white path. In the distance she stops. She has forgotten which way she is going. For a long time she stops. Then she goes on again.

  I turn back from the high place. The trees are all quiet and listening. One, I put my head right back on the flat of my shoulders. Two, I open my mouth back over the teeth to shout and, three, I breathe right in. It will be so loud this shout, it will be like the whole trees breaking. Here it comes.

  3

  Roses

  It is a day before he sees her again and then it is twice in the space of hours. As if she is a new word in his life, something he has never known and so never seen. He catches sight of her bent by a platform drinks machine through a crocodile of day-trip schoolchildren, gone when the crowd separates. Then again, that afternoon.

  He recognizes her before he has seen her face. It’s the end of middle turn, three o’clock. Sievwright’s cracked voice echoes through from the office toilets, singing one line of pop music again and again over the hiss of a basin tap. Casimir looks up absently at the monitor screens. Smile lines crease around his eyes. The irises are near black, red-black only in the strongest light. Now they stop, pupils narrowing to focus.

  ‘Flash! Ah-hah. Save every one of us. Flash! Ah-hah –’

  The Underground girl is walking down the platform, quick among the loose mid-afternoon crowd. A train pulls away next to her, black roof curving close to the fish-eye camera. Casimir can’t see her face and she is wearing different clothes – a man’s chinos and a pale cord jacket. It is the way she moves that he recognizes. Faster than the crowd but not pushing. Just faster, as if her blood is circulating at a different rate.

  He sees that her hair has changed, the dreadlocks washed out. She still has her headphones on. Once she turns and he sees her face smiling, lips moving. Then she is taken in by the crowd and he can’t see her face any more.

  ‘Ah-hah. Flash! –’

  The screen blinks with interference, then clears again. Casimir wonders how many times he has seen her before, or looked at her without seeing. How long can it have it taken him to notice her? He tries to place the earlier sense of familiarity, but there are so many people and places on the Underground. The grey thickness of the monitor screens, slow parades of rush-hour crowds. Solitary figures in the halls or wells, shafts or concourses.

  Even so, he is surprised to have seen her twice in a day. She has not been commuting, he thinks. Not in transit, but here in a less temporary way. Again, he wonders where she sleeps.

  ‘Flash! – Hello, Cass. You look like the cat what got the Mogadon.’ Sievwright peers past him at the screens. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing. I saw someone I knew.’

  The pace of the crowd slows as they reach the exit. Casimir narrows his eyes, trying to keep track of the Underground girl, but it’s impossible. She is becoming lost in the crowd. He is losing her for a third time.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew anyone. Who was it, comrade, Mikhail Gorbachov? Your mum, was it? Oy –’

  He is on his feet, the swivel chair clanking back against the control-room wall. Weaver and Aebanyim are by the door, shrugging off orange visibility vests. Casimir pushes past and out into the Underground, Sievwright’s laughter echoing after him.

  The passage is still crowded with people. Casimir stands back, waiting, his eyes going from face to face. He sees a man built like a darts player, the nails of one hand broken down past the quicks. A woman with blue-rinse hair and matching blue jogging shorts. A tall Chinese man, shirt loose over his hollow ribcage. Children kick up against wall posters as they run by.

  He waits until they are almost gone, checking that the girl is not among them. Then he turns up the empty passage towards the southbound platform, quick but not yet breaking into a run. There are two side-passages before the platform entrance and he stops at each, listening. There is no sound except the whirr of ventilation outlets and the sound of a busker’s music from one of the distant tunnels; the engine growl of a didgeridoo, becoming indistinct against the subterranean roar of trains.

  Casimir tries to think what he will say if he catches up with her. The English in his head seems to condense, becoming inexpressively hard. He thinks of what he felt when he saw her on the morning train, the sense of shared experience and the physical desire: simple things. But he knows he’ll say none of this. If he tells her anything it will be to remind her of the train, of her own song. He remembers the words of it. Have you ever been to Electric Ladyland? He wonders if she will remember him at all.

  At the point where the passage opens on to the southbound platform he stops. The crowd has thinned out, filtering up to the surface or through to other platforms. On the nearest bench an old couple are eating white-bread sandwiches, greaseproof paper spread on their knees. They don’t look up at Casimir.

  He turns back. Twenty feet down the corridor a figure is turning into the first side-tunnel. Small steps and a woman’s fine long hair, blown back bright. Moving fast, already out of sight.

  ‘Wait! Miss, I need –’

  He doesn’t know what he needs. He begins to run fast, too fast to speak. Air filling his mouth, the sound of his own feet clattering around him. There is a sign on the side-tunnel wall, NUMBER OF STEPS TO EXIT 1
00, the enamel lettering dull with dirt. Casimir swings into the emergency stairwell and goes up the spiral of steps, taking them three at a time.

  ‘Wait! Please –’

  It is hard to make out the footsteps ahead of him, but they are there. Casimir gauges they are not far ahead, but quickening. He feels a momentary shame, that the girl should be running from him.

  He goes up fast, large but carrying his bulk easily. In his mind the Underground’s levels and rooms are laid out, clear and certain. He feels a trembling in his arms which has nothing to do with exhaustion, which is instead the adrenalin brought on by excitement. He visualizes the emergency stairwell, its spiralled length. There are no exits except those at the top and base. There is time, he thinks. I have time to catch her.

  The metal stairway smells of dry shit and dust around him. He is near to the top before his heart rate starts to quicken. He remembers a church tower in Poland; Pentecost, laughter, the bell-tower floor strewn with blue irises. In the sides of the shaft are painted-over doors, entrances to bricked-off levels and storerooms, wartime tunnels and deep shelters.

  He comes out into the surface concourse and stops, not understanding. The Underground girl is gone. Up ahead he can see one of the trainees on the ticket barriers, bored and inattentive as the passengers mill around him.

  Casimir pushes past, out of the eastern exit into the Kentish Town Road. On the pavement the crowd is thick and slow, spilling into the gutters, where a hot-dog salesman has set up his stall. Steam rises in the warm air. Bike couriers brake and hoot at the market jaywalkers. For some minutes he looks around, knowing it is useless. His breath tastes of iron and he gulps it back, breathing slower now.

  I was wrong, he thinks. With the thought comes the dizziness he felt yesterday, the sensation of the Underground shifting around him. As if he is losing control. He pictures the staircase again, going over his mental blueprint, trying to imagine if any of the old doors could have been unsealed. He tries to remember which lead to storerooms, and the blueprint in his mind fades and falters. Casimir realizes he does not know where all the doorways go. The feeling of dizziness rises in him again and he groans softly, clenching his teeth.