Page 22 of 59 Minutes
CARRIE
As Carrie and Grace approach the exit sign, the noise of the next station along starts to reach them through the tunnel.
A burble of announcements, indecipherable but in the same detached tone as all the others.
Carrie has an overwhelming urge to grab Grace’s hand but resists.
No need to make this insane situation any more weird.
A new sound hits them from underneath the recorded voice. A kind of moaning, vibrating hum. Carrie concentrates, trying to parse it into sense and detail.
People. Lots of people.
Weeping and moaning, sniffing, wailing and talking. The tinkle of children’s voices. Their young sentences rising to question marks at the end. How on earth are parents finding any answers to give them?
‘Do you hear that?’ she asks.
‘’Course,’ Grace says.
A small voice breaks through the hum. ‘Mummy!’
Clementine!
Carrie stumbles, knowing even as she does that it can’t be her child, but it’s too late …
She is falling, hard and chaotic.
Her phone spins away from her, lighting up snatches of black dirt.
Her feet scrabble.
Her arms flail.
She is falling onto the live line.
Pain.
Carrie has landed face down, her mouth filled with the taste of dirt, metal and the blood around banged teeth. Her hands and face are smeared in whatever. But she’s not been electrocuted. I am still alive. How?
Carrie realises, as the sounds stretching and flexing around her and start to make sense, that one noise is now missing.
The sizzling sound of the live rails has stopped.
They must have turned them off. Did other people fall on them, is that why?
Maybe people were throwing themselves … She shakes that thought away. No, no, nope.
‘Carrie, oh my god, are you okay?’
She feels Grace’s hands on her arm, tugging her up.
She’s in pain. She caught her right knee on one of the lines, her other knee landed in the middle dip – the so-called suicide pit.
Her head throbs from smacking against something on the way down, her teeth feel loose.
But she is alive. The pain proves that. She feels around for her phone, finds it face down not far away.
The screen is smashed, little pieces of glass falling out as she lifts it.
‘Oh, man.’
Grace helps her to her feet. They look at each other but say nothing. And then, ignoring the pain from her legs and face, Carrie and Grace start to run as fast as they can for the illuminated door. No longer careful. No longer afraid of frying.
As they get closer to the door and the station beyond, the rumbles separate out into individual voices.
‘This is hell, man!’
‘Nah, mate, hell is coming.’
These are the sounds of things about to turn. Grace looks warily at Carrie but if she’s asking a question, Carrie doesn’t know the answer. The calm drone of the announcer becomes crisper through the grate in the wall, offering yet more appeals for calm and promises of water.
‘Where the fuck is the water?’ a woman shouts.
Carrie grabs Grace’s arm and they reach the door together, their bodies slamming into it. With filthy shirtsleeves and smeared hands, Grace reaches for the handle and turns it hard.
The door swings slowly inward and away from the tracks, a grinding sound blocking out all the people noise. They look at each other with relief. Grace looks younger now, as her eyes widen.
The light pouring out from this doorway is overwhelming, a white flood that springs tears. When Grace sees Carrie’s illuminated face she blanches.
‘That bad?’ Carrie says, reaching up and touching her tender face.
Grace shrugs, but then nods. They blink as they step inside and Grace closes the door behind them.
Carrie can see her own hands properly for the first time, the dirt so thick it looks like she’s wearing dark gloves.
Her own blue jeans are black now, her shoes unrecognisable.
Grace’s school jumper has fallen off, her bag is gone, her white shirt is lousy with sooty slime but she’s smiling now.
For the first time since Carrie met her, she’s smiling.
They’re inside a small antechamber, like an airlock.
Another door ahead of them reads, ‘Fire door – keep closed’.
The walls are dull grey but smattered in jargoned signs, maintenance guidelines snapped into clipboards, suspended from nails.
She fumbles to pick one of them up, streaking it immediately with black dirt.
‘Where are we then?’ she says to herself but Grace starts rifling through bits of paper too. ‘Look,’ she says, pointing to a word at the top of one of them.
‘Bakerloo,’ Carrie reads. ‘We just need to know which side of Waterloo.’
‘It doesn’t really matter, Carrie, we have to get out of here anyway or we’ll be stuck.’
For the briefest moment Carrie is affronted. You’re thirteen , she wants to say, I should be in charge here . But Grace is right.
Carrie wipes her hands on the concrete wall, Grace does the same, and then Carrie reaches for the next door handle.