Page 16 of 59 Minutes
CARRIE
The tube trains have apparently been stopped; that’s what they announced when she was still on the concourse, and she can’t hear any coming.
This fake station is empty and dimly lit. It’s still gussied up from whatever was last filmed here, a wartime romance maybe, the kind for which Carrie has a soft spot. All those tea dresses, waistcoats and lovely hats.
Fake posters line the walls, warning Londoners to wear something white and carry a torch, to be careful alighting in the blackout, never to chance a journey without a gas mask. And a real sign, crusted with dirt. It bears only the classic roundel and three capitalised words: LINE IS LIVE.
She stands up and walks to the edge of the platform. She can hear a slight sizzling sound, which must be the electricity. She turns and lowers herself until she is sitting on the edge of the line. Humpty Dumptying with death. Can she really do this?
She thinks of Clementine and Emma and steps down between the tracks.
Carrie has ridden the tube thousands of times in the last thirteen years but she has never paid any attention to what’s underneath the trains, what makes up the metallic veins and arteries. And now she must walk among it all.
When she sweeps the flashlight of her phone around, it’s a confusion of tracks, metal boxes and mechanical-looking oddities. She doesn’t know which bits are electrified, maybe all of them. The sizzling mingles with the pulse in her ears.
There is no colour. Everything around the tracks is the same dark sooty grey. She listens intently. The noises separate and clarify until she can tell which tracks are making the sizzling noise.
She starts to walk carefully along the narrow edge of the track, the platform level with her torso. A shock of cold bites her as soon as she steps into the tunnel, every muscle in her body clenches.
She holds her phone in her left hand and uses her right to guide her along the platform wall, greasy dirt coating her fingertips.
The space she’s in now is completely circular overhead, it’s unbelievable that a whole train can fit in here.
If one were to come along now, there’d be nowhere for her body to go.
No platform, no exits. Ahead, a red light glows on a spike.
Her steps are babied by the dark and the constant reminder that she could be electrocuted if she slips. Running down those stairs from the station, she’d felt like she had ample time to get home. Now she feels time leaking away into the thick dirt floor of this tunnel.
Shit!
What the hell is that?
A tiny tube mouse, brown and tailless. Part of an innumerable colony, wriggling wildly through the network, multiplying like a virus. She knows they’re harmless. She knows that rationally.
Her narrow shaft of light picks out more movement. She keeps on stepping rhythmically, thinking of Clementine and trying not to imagine these little bodies busying themselves up the hem of her jeans and writhing around against her skin.
‘Oh, go away,’ she says to them, her voice bouncing around the tunnel and back to her. ‘Piss off!’ A gasp comes in reply. A pocket of wind.
This is the most constructed place she has ever been. There is not a scrap of anything natural. The only organic things are her and the vermin, just their soft tissue and hers tickling this metal throat.
She reaches the connection to the main line, although it looks exactly the same as this spur.
With time ebbing away fast, it’s essential she goes in the right direction, left or right.
She thinks it must be to the right but if she makes the wrong choice, she will worm her way right back under the station and towards the river, boomeranging along the South Bank towards her office.
If she doesn’t get out soon and run home, or if she’s too far away when she does emerge, she won’t make it in time.
If Clementine survives and Carrie doesn’t, if she’s fried by the train line or blown to pieces by the missile, or poisoned by whatever the hell is loaded into it …
she’s made no will. She and Emma aren’t married because forever was already established.
But Emma doesn’t yet have parental responsibility for Clementine.
The half-filled-out form is still wedged next to the fridge.
Would Emma and Mum fight each other for custody?
Stop fucking spiralling and make a decision.
She steps out to the right, shouting at the mice as she goes.
Her throat fills with something that makes her cough.
Her skin, somehow, is both cold and sweating, clothes coated in filth from brushing against the wall.
Every few metres there’s another small red light.
A glowing signal meant for drivers. She forces herself into a shuffling jog, her footsteps echoing.
When her flashlight catches a slice of her white trainers, they’re filthy with the dried grease that must be inches deep on this floor, pasted there by nearly a century of trains rushing through.
She kicks something and it wriggles away in the dark. But as she starts to hurry on, she hears something new. Something clear. The shuffle of feet. An uncertain cough. Another.
And then, ‘Excuse me, miss?’