was in all night.
Just as she’d been instructed.
Lily kills the image on her laptop and climbs out of bed. Without the noise of the news report filling the room, the rain can be heard plainly, tip-tapping at the window, behind the curtains. Lily is dressed in her favourite M&S brushed-cotton blue PJs. She has to roll the top of the pyjama bottoms over a few times to stop them falling off her. Lily has lost weight fast, and now weighs just under five and a half stone. Her bones hold up her skin in the same way a hanger does a hand-me-down dress. They look like they’ve borrowed a smaller girl’s body. Putting on her dressing-gown, she goes slowly to her bedroom door and presses her head against the wood, listening for sounds that shouldn’t be there. All she can hear is the noise of the radio in the kitchen, and her mother systematically beating breakfast into submission.
No sounds of doors being smashed. And people stumbling in.
No reek of drugs, and booze, and hate.
No jackal laughter. No violence and ripping and body greed.
Well, there wouldn’t be, would there?
Lily pulls back the bolt on the lock that she had fitted three weeks ago and walks through the flat into the kitchen. She doesn’t walk much these days, and she is slightly unsteady on her painfully thin legs. Her mother is standing over the cooker, a look of complete incomprehension on her face. Lily smiles. It feels good. Lily doesn’t smile much anymore.
Before it all, her mother rarely cooked for her; too busy working three jobs just to make sure there was food in the fridge and credit on her phone. Lily had repaid her by working hard at school and trying not to get in too much trouble. On Lily’s estate that wasn’t easy, but she had tried really hard. Now her mother doesn’t leave Lily alone in the flat. Lily no longer goes to school and rarely leaves her room. There is no longer any need for the cooker.
You don’t eat when you want your body to die.
Lily’s mum looks up from the cooker and stares at her daughter. Lily sees her own eyes in her mother’s face. Bruised from too much crying. Dry from too little tears.
‘Have you heard?’
Lily nods and stares back at her. Outside, the rain speaks a language all of its own as it lashes at the window. Lily’s mum looks at the radio; the quiet, measured radio-voice is talking about the attack on the six boys on the tube train. Lily’s mum nods her head sharply. Just once.
‘Bastards deserved everything they got.’
Lily smiles again. Hearing her mother swear, however mildly, makes her feel grounded. Not like she is walking through a cotton-wool dream world in her head where nothing matters and everything’s all right.
Lily goes over and gives her mum a hug, but only gently so that she doesn’t feel how sharply her bones are pushing at her thin skin. Lily knows her mum blames herself for what happened to her. When she was at work.
‘I tell you what, Mum. You mix me a Complan while I check my messages, and then we’ll swear at the radio together.’
It isn’t much, but it’s the best she can do. Interaction is a skill that has become lost to her. Weaving words to make a shield used to be part of her structure. Now words are a maze that confounds her. Lily leaves her mum crying in the kitchen, staring after her as she walks back to her bedroom. The last time she saw her daughter eating was two days ago, and that was a carrot sliced so thinly it looked as if it had been shaved.
There are over forty abandoned tube stations in London, some of them only a short distance from the ones that are still used, but only a few of them fit my needs.
They need to have more than one way in or out, for a start. It’s no use making a crib with no escape tunnel. When I first started living underground I holed up in an old tunnel just off Green Park: near enough to the platform to feel safe, but far enough away so as not to attract attention. There are hundreds of these tunnels in the system. Some of them are for storage, or work stations. Some connect to lines that are now redundant. Some, well some I haven’t got a scooby what they’re for. I thought the one I was bundled up in was perfect. The walls and ceiling were made up of all these little white porcelain bricks as if someone had used toy bricks to make a full-size thing. Like I felt all the time. It had an old camp bed in there and a lamp and stuff.
Compared to where I’d been living before I thought it was the Ritz.
Never occurred to me that it might still be used. I thought it was a remainder from the War or something.
Third night in and I get woken up by a workman, skimming a few hours off a ghost-shift. I don’t know who was more freaked: him or me. Anyhow, there was no back door to the tunnel, so I ended up having to bite him just to get past. Living as I was then, he must have thought I was an animal.
That was then, this is now.
After I leave the boys on the train, I walk through a service tunnel to Charing Cross, taking off my wig and stuffing it in my satchel, and putting on a baseball cap. I reverse my army shirt so it shows green rather than black, then wait until a train pulls into the station. I have a skeleton key for the emergency tail-door, which is always still in the tunnel when the train stops, so all I have to do is slip out of my alcove, climb on board, and bump it one stop to Leicester Square. Change to the Piccadilly line and ride it up to Holborn.
Little-known fact about Holborn Station is that it’s a replacement station. There’s another station almost opposite it, on the other side of Oxford Street, that closed in 1933; the British Museum Station.
You can probably guess, can’t you?
I get off the train with the other passengers, keeping my hat low and my satchel slung round my back like a haversack, its leather straps over my head but under my arms. I follow the crowd so far, then ghost through a maintenance door and slip along the running tunnel that takes me to the abandoned station. I light the way with the halogen torch I take from my satchel, and then shade through the winding chambers and connecting corridors that bring me to the air-raid shelter that was used in the Second World War.
Home sweet home.
Lily turns on her computer, directs the arrow to the Google icon, and clicks. As she waits for the machine to connect to the Internet she goes to her window and snitches back the curtain, looking through snakes of rain crawling down the pane at the estate outside.
Lily lives on the first floor of a three-floor block. On each of the floors there are ten flats, all identical to hers. Across the battle-ground below her that passes as a play area is a block of flats that exactly mirrors hers. To her left and right are precisely the same again: four blocks of identi-flats; lives wrapped in concrete.
Everybody knows each other to look at, but not to confide in: living in a war zone. There are at least a dozen languages spoken on Lily’s estate, but only two that are understood by everybody: fear and power. Below her Lily can see teenagers on children’s bikes. Peddling from block to block with drugs, phones, iPads, whatever. Above the blocks, in the distance, she can make out the neon lights and shiny bank-towers of Canary Wharf: an untouchable future from another world.
Behind her the computer makes a quiet, muted noise, indicating it’s connected to the Interweb, and Lily turns away from the window, and sits down gingerly. One month on and the bruising has gone, but the stitches still hurt. She opens up the Facebook page specially created for her, and is unsurprised to find it completely empty. There is no photo tag, no likes or dislikes, no friends.
Of course, no friends.
Lily