Fugue: Chapter 20

As the train slows, an empty can of Special Brew rolls down the carriage, coming to rest against a man’s foot. He ignores it in the way that only the middle classes can, busying himself with his newspaper, attempting to remain oblivious to the presence of this symbol of disorder. Opposite him, a pair of public schoolboys grown into City boys with shiny shoes are acting like a walking advert for the socialist revolution. Their hooded eyes, ludicrous hair, braying laugh and big teeth are sure signs of their superior breeding. Next to them sits a downtrodden office gimp, hunched into as small a space as possible, struggling with folders of work as he goes home to his wife. Perpetually sniffling, dabbing at his nose with a hankie, he’s chubby yet skeletal, pale yet flushed, while they display a tan that suggests they’ve probably just come back from watching cricket in the West Indies, and an easy drunkenness that suggests they’ve probably been in the pub for the two hours that he’s been stuck in the office catching up on someone else’s work. An announcement comes over the PA system. Somebody apologises for the delay. A tube train stopped in a tunnel is a very different thing from one hurtling along through the darkness at speed. The carriage seems to shrink, forcing us closer together, squeezing the breath out of us, asking us what if? It has a tangible air of something having gone wrong, of the system collapsing, of our own fallibility. We can’t take our safety for granted any more. If the trains don’t work properly, who knows what else could go wrong? Nobody says anything, for fear of looking like an idiot, and they don’t allow themselves to think it, but the thought is there, lurking in some dark corner of their mind, prodding away at their brain. Maybe they’re going to die there, in the dark, starving to death or being crushed or blown up. They scold themselves for thinking it, but they can’t help it. And then the train starts up again, and normal service is resumed. Like an aeroplane, the underground is a realm of unreality. It removes you from the time-line of life on the surface, transports you through the void, and spews you back out into the world somewhere else. What goes on above is an irrelevance. Anything could change up there without you knowing about it, while you hurtle through the darkness. Those tunnels could protect you from the end of the world, just as they did once before. Even the tube map proclaims its disdain for physical geography, compressing and distorting the city into a neat bottle of colour, cramming it into shape like clothes being forced into a suitcase. The gaps between the lines are a nothing, less than a desert, to the eyes of the tube. Even now, I think of London geography in terms of the tube map, because that’s how I learned it – the one-day Travelcard version of the place. Between the Central Line, cutting its bold red swathe through the East End, and the Victoria Line, daintily picking its way along the light blue path to the north, lies a vast expanse of white space, an icy wasteland occasionally penetrated by those brave pioneers of the Silverlink Metro North London Lines. Somehow buses seem much more real. The routes are like veins, running through, across, around people’s lives, getting in the thick of things, complicated enough to deter most of the tourists, except on the routes which go past Bucking-Ham Palace. Like most things in life, we take the tube for granted. It gets us from one place to another, sometimes it breaks down, it usually works moderately well. We see the dirt, we see the torn posters and the crowds. But we don’t look at it. We don’t notice how big it is. There are miles and miles of tunnels, twisting and turning like intestines. It’s a remarkable feat of engineering. One day, somebody came up with the bright idea of digging a tunnel under London, and putting a train in it, and they actually saw it through. They made it happen. They started something that became bigger than any person. We forget that somebody made everything, that everything has been designed, that the system was created by people. But then the people see that it’s easier to sign away your responsibility to the system, to just do what you’re supposed to do. We give our possibility away, because to admit that we have possibility is to admit responsibility. What was that test of God’s omnipotence? Something about building a wall He cannot jump over. I never quite understood that.