Plume

‘Do you want a hand with those bags?’ I asked.

‘Nah,’ Alan said, redistributing the load around his body with a practised sequence of heaves and shrugs. ‘Used to it. Like to keep everything with me.’

‘Very sensible.’

‘You drinking that? We’ve got to get a shift on.’

‘Uh, I’ll take it on the train,’ I said, changing hands.

The eastbound Central Line platform was quiet, but I would have been happiest turning right and walking along it to find its quietest part. Alan had different ideas and turned left, where there was only a short stretch before the platform ended. Again, he said this was habit – it was where the rear of the train would be, and there would be more room, in theory, for his bags. I doubted his reasoning. I doubted his Tube sense. And we were left standing in an awkward corner between two staff-only doors, right by the tunnel mouth. One of those doors was a concertina-like affair, which I found gravely unnerving. Warning signs. Cabinets closed with inspection tape, like a crime scene. My discomfort was ticking upwards at regular, frequent intervals. The coffee could only be tolerated for ten seconds or so in one hand before it had to be passed to the other, and was still too hot to be sipped. I tried, once, and scalded the roof of my mouth and the middle knuckles of the fingers of my right hand. While the pain of that had subsided, stickiness had spread between all my fingers, across my palm, and down to my wrist. I wanted to wash my hands in icy water, and to splash that water against my face. I wanted to be holding a cool can, fresh from the fridge. How had Alan drunk his so quickly? His innards must be Le Creuset.

‘Do you got it with you?’ Alan said, without intro.

‘Got?’ I said. ‘It?’

‘The mag,’ Alan said. ‘The one with the F.A.B. piece in it. Want to see how it came out.’

Had he asked for one? I couldn’t remember. I had considered bringing along a copy of the magazine to give to Pierce, but I hadn’t written anything in the most recent issue, and I knew he had already seen the one with the Quin interview – besides, I wasn’t too proud of that one. If I went through the back issues until I found a feature I was proud of, I’d be taking him a copy from three years ago, and that just seemed plain odd.

‘You weren’t sent one? You should have been sent one.’

‘Nah.’

‘Typical.’

‘Muppets,’ Alan said, shaking his head. Wanting to align myself with Alan, against the muppets, I tried to think of an equivalent term of cockney abuse.

‘Ragamuffins,’ I said. Then winced.

Alan frowned. ‘You need to have a word. You guys used to be the best, a right treat to work with – good as Monocle, good as Condé fucking Nast. Taxis, expenses, assistants …’

‘Times are tough.’ I couldn’t remember the last time Eddie had sprung for a taxi. The no taxis rule was so strict and long-established it might be in the Old Testament.

‘How’d it turn out?’

‘It turned out fine.’ It had been, perhaps, half a step from becoming an unstoppable meltdown that rendered my career an uninhabitable fallout zone. But the photography was not at fault.

I really didn’t care to have that piece – and the multiplying failures in the magazine’s treatment of its freelancers – brought up again. And I had a fearful premonition as to how this morning was going to go. Alan, I suspected, was going to get on with Pierce a lot better than me. I would be left on one side, stammering, watching them form an easy, down-to-earth rapport. I had too much at stake, I was just too impressed by Pierce, almost star-struck. Alan would not be so hindered, and would chat freely, drop impressive names, and they’d find they had friends in common; I’d be left going oh-please-sign-my-books-Mr-Pierce and where-do-you-get-your-ideas-from. I wasn’t too worried about appearing drunk – I am an expert at concealing it. If anything the problem was that I was not drunk enough, that I would freeze up, that my hands would shake, that I’d be visibly, palpably ill-at-ease. Not even that: visibly ill, lacking, empty. Perhaps Pierce would be cool, offer me a glass of wine, a bottle of something from the fridge? Those bottles were always tiny compared to a good, solid, weighty can, but it would be something. But it was futile to hope, we’d be there at 11 a.m., no one offers their guests booze at 11 a.m.

Fuck Alan and his relaxed, class-transcending bonhomie. He would ruin the whole morning.

A recorded announcement played.

‘Did you hear that?’ I said. ‘Inspector Sands.’

‘I wasn’t listening,’ Alan said. ‘What did they say?’

‘“Inspector Sands to the operations room”,’ I said. ‘It’s code. It means there’s a fire alarm that needs to be checked out.’

‘And this Sands guy’ll do it?’

‘No. There is no Sands. It’s just a code. When there might be a fire somewhere but they don’t know and they don’t want to cause any panic.’

‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘That’s the point, it’s a very bland, boring, routine message, people tune it out, don’t know what it means.’

‘You know what it means,’ Alan said. ‘Can’t be that secret.’

‘Seriously, though, can you smell burning?’

I asked because I could smell burning – the acrid smell of an electrical fire, melting copper, blistering insulation. We must be surrounded by equipment handling the Underground’s canalised lighting, all of it out of warranty, overdue for replacement, caked in dust. I had seen it in documentaries. The men who went into the tunnels at night. The Tube acts as a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking human detritus from the light into the darkness. I could see those documentaries again, now, in my mind’s eye: a gloved hand bringing up a smoking grey fistful from the ballast around the tracks, like a robot submersible on the ocean bed. This accreted dust and hair burned very well.

‘I can’t smell anything,’ Alan said.

He was wrong, surely. Though it did not seem to be stronger, I felt that the smell had become inescapable; perhaps because I was more focused on it, it had begun to block out all other sensations, almost as if it were welling up within me, a toxic spasm in the lungs rather than a scorched and poisoned breath from the tunnel.

I looked about to see if anyone else had smelled fire, expecting others on the platform to raise their heads, frown, sniff the air – the herd detecting danger, abandoning their quiet little worlds of phone and newspaper to confront an environment that had become unsafe. But no one raised their eyes, no one even stirred. Couldn’t they sense it too? How could they all be so oblivious?

The breeze from the tunnel grew stronger, and I could see it now, see the smoke, a steadily thickening haze carried on the back of the column of air pushed out by the approaching train. And I could feel it on my skin, in my eyes, hot and stinging. I raised my hand to my face and did not lower it. I was hot to the touch. I coughed, and fell into a fit of coughing, unable to stop. Hair and skin, on fire in the darkness, one of those coal seam fires that burn for decades, inextinguishable, slow death to the communities above. I felt ready to vomit.

‘You OK, mate?’

Alan was scowling at me, but not without kindness. I barely registered his expression, though; behind him, the sealed panels looked about ready to start jetting smoke, opaque and heavy yellow-stained smoke, any second it would begin.

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ I said, barely able to speak, each word displacing more poison into my lungs.

‘What? Train’ll be here in a second.’

A second was too late. The air was going, it was gone, no way to get at it. Suck it in and the poison would come too, into the blood, into the brain. Then the light. It was almost too late. I needed cold air, cold water on my face, coldness in my throat.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And I ran.

THREE (#u12ebdc24-7568-5f1f-957f-b8f9476145db)

Self-control came easier back in the cold street air, but I still felt that my inside was coated with grime and soot. Coughing would not shift whatever had been exhaled from the tunnel. My efforts instead brought up a belch that made me rush to the nearest bin, ready to puke. But I did not, disappointing the couple of passers-by who had turned their heads and scowled. I sat on a stone step with a view of the top of the station escalators, waiting for the alarms, the stern announcements, the fire engines.

Wishing for them, in fact. A real emergency, an event that I could live through. I knew the shape of it: an exodus up those escalators and a crowd forming around me. Long minutes of confusion and shared fear and excitement, people thrown together, enjoying the interruption to their routine even as they cursed it. Then the adrenalin would turn to cold and boredom and mere annoyance and we would all call our offices or appointments and tell them we were late.

Or more serious than that, and my imagination was disgustingly eager to spill the details into my reverie: a fire in the tunnel, fumes spreading fast, national news, fatalities, this stretch of line closed for days, an inquiry, a slow trickle of consequences over months and years: fund-raising, one or two of the survivors being held up as inspirational figures for saving others or overcoming horrible injuries, marathons completed, popular books written, mayoral bids considered. A plaque at this station, perhaps only feet from this cold stone step, and if I came by this way with someone, I’d go a little quiet and break my pace, and I’d say, ‘I was here that day, when it happened,’ in a voice that really stressed how I didn’t talk about it often but it had stayed with me, picturing a great dignified weight, the memory of those x souls, my gratitude at having escaped in time, tempered with noble guilt at being a survivor, my respect for the emergency services. Perhaps poor oblivious Alan would be among the x, intimately involving me, bringing the whole sad story closer, making it far more authentic.

Or nothing. The same steady procession out of the station. No sirens, no evacuation, no space-suited firefighters, no strengthening fountain of smoke from the depths. I wanted there to be an emergency not for ghoulish reasons, but because the alternative was an internal emergency. The smoke, the suffocating need to escape – for me that was real, but it never happened to anyone else.

There was real smoke out here, though: the darkness in the east, over the roofs of Bishopsgate, behind the spires of finance, where I was supposed to be. Perhaps that was the source of my fascination with the Barking fire – that, at least, was real, really happening; other people around me could see it too, it was in the papers. For the first time in months, the city was in sync with me.

Eleven a.m. – the time Alan and I were supposed to arrive at Pierce’s house. I was cold and my joints were stiff from sitting on the step. Adjacent to the station entrance was a pub.

I had been caught up in station evacuations before, as I suppose every regular Tube user has – or any regular passenger on any subway network anywhere in the world. A couple of times I had seen fire engines arrive. But I had never smelled smoke, not so much as a match’s worth, let alone the thick clouds that had almost suffocated me on the platform with Alan.