THE LONDON SILENCE
Stephen Moran
from the book The London Silence
Murphy got on the Jubilee underground line at Green Park after attending a literary launch at a club in St James. He’d taken a little too much free chardonnay, much too quickly, one of the occupational hazards of being a critic. He was racked with self-consciousness when he boarded, as he always was on public transport, but he was just starting to relax in the afterglow of the wine as the train reached Baker Street.
The scrolling display opposite said ‘The next station is St John’s Wood.’ He remembered hearing something about the tunnel having to be diverted to avoid a plague burial pit on the long haul between Baker Street and St John’s Wood. Such a long interval, it felt as if the train had got lost in the night, and it crossed his mind that they had crashed and were really all dead, that the next station would be in the afterlife.
The train’s initial noise like wind howling, turned to a rhythmic hammering. After that it started to sound like a slowed down recording of somebody saying something. Murphy looked rightwards to the far end, through the windows of the connecting doors, where the yellow-lit following carriage switched angles, following the inclines and bends of the track.
Everyone was sitting quietly. For a change there were no builders swearing, no Balkan beggars with babies under shawls, going from carriage to carriage, no cackling teenage girls. A young man in dusty clothes had fallen asleep and slumped sideways. A homely old couple were talking but Murphy couldn’t hear what they were saying above the racket of the train pouring in through the vents on top of the dirty windows.
It was comforting to think that he had just been to a fancy party in St. James. That was something to give one confidence, an answer to any ill-concealed contemptuous glance. The other passengers had all been working late in rat-holes of offices, he presumed, while he had been consorting with middle-ranking celebrities and pocket geniuses. Not to mention the odd gazelle.
A young woman with a short skirt was sitting a few seats away. It was summer above them. Beside him was somebody in jeans, with their legs apart. He assumed it was a young man. The less self-aware a young man is, he thought, the wider apart he spreads his legs when he sits. It is a territorial claim, an aggression, like spitting in the street. But when he looked around he saw that it was not a man but a woman. She had brown hair and wore a small denim jacket over a camisole.
Her right arm and shoulder had been touching Murphy’s left, and her foot tapped against his, making him move his leg slightly. This was not good. You had to sit perfectly still, he had learned that much by observing how people sat who were calm. It was very difficult to keep still while nervous, worse than allowing Saint Vitus’s dance to take over, but one had to try and keep up appearances.
Still the train trundled and the fluorescent tubes glared. Murphy was sitting bent to his right by now to avoid the person next to him. The rocking of the train made their shoulders touch again. He longed for the time before he looked around and saw that she was what he would call a girl, a young woman really. Murphy had been thinking of himself as a sort of wise guru, distant from the distractions around him. Now he had changed and started reminding himself that he was sure to be the first one to panic if anything went wrong, and that disasters were always happening.
He squirmed heavily in his seat. The doors of the carriage flapped and rattled as the train clanked on. The blurred candy and dirt coloured wires along the sides of the tunnel traced a wavy line behind the scratchy glass between the tube train and the tight black tunnel. Still the electronic display scrolled, ‘The next station is St. John’s Wood.’
The lights went off and the electric motors whirred quickly down to silence. There was absolute dark for a few seconds then a couple of dim single bulbs came on near the doors in the middle of the carriage. The fluorescent tubes stayed off. ‘Great,’ he said, aloud. That word must have told everyone in the carriage that yes, Murphy would be the first to panic.
There was a London silence, the only thing that enabled most people to get to and from work in peace, which could last for an age. Londoners could sit there forever, ignoring other people. They assumed the train would move soon and the white noise walls would spring up again between everyone. Eventually though, ignoring other people would become untenable and they would have to talk.
Murphy’s unguarded word was the first crack. Coming so soon, it marked him as an outsider, a foreigner, someone who didn’t know how things were done. They would have detected his vestigial Irish accent. He didn’t care, he hated people who wouldn’t say anything, people who wouldn’t tell you what you needed to know, the kind of people who wouldn’t give you the steam off their piss. He wished his accent had not been bastardised after twenty-five years away from home, or else that it had completely vanished.
The old couple were silent now, holding hands, down the other end of the carriage. The old man had a white moustache and was nearly bald. The corner of his mouth indicated that he was displeased but not surprised by the breakdown. The woman with him was wearing a red woollen coat. She looked confused.
Two lanky young men in suits, sprawling on seats near the doors, started to talk. It was so quiet that it was as if they were talking to everyone. ‘I said that Nigel was going to...’
‘Damn! You know then, pretty well...’ ‘Yah, look, I said you’ve gotta trim.’ ‘Right.’
‘Exactly, what else could you say?’ ‘Yah.’
Murphy noticed how one of a pair on public transport always talks and talks, while the other ‘mmms,’ ‘yeses’ and ‘nos.’ You wonder what the quiet one is thinking. It would be more interesting to hear about that. Mostly they’re just embarrassed to be with Big Mouth.
Surely the train would move soon. The emergency bulbs were flickering. The destination display scroller was dead. The driver could at least have made an announcement. The girl beside Murphy had shifted and leaned away from him. ‘Bloody marvellous, isn’t it?’ he said. After a moment, she got up to change places. So timid. That’s another thing he hated. Just as she moved, the fluorescent lights came back on, the electric motors started revving up, and the electronic display started scrolling again.
The train started to move forward and the girl sat down directly opposite him. Shit. Now he had nowhere to look. The scrolling display offered another phrase, ‘Change here for the Metropolitan Line.’ How little of interest there was, what a waste of time. He directed his gaze to the printed advert slotted in its frame above her, the nuisance. It said, ‘Are you sitting opposite the new man in your life? Call Datelink.’
Murphy’s reflection was spread over the curve of the half-lit glass behind her. In it he saw himself as a fatheaded monster. The other people seen through his his peripheral vision were revealed as zombies. They had faces like cabbage patch dolls with coaly black smudges instead of eyes and mouths. Often one of them would have her mouth wide open, permanently yawning, as if she had a toothpick stuck between her lips, gaping helplessly like beached fish.
When Murphy looked around, the old man with the white moustache was smiling an ‘I knew it’ smile. There was still no announcement from the driver, and the train continued to move much more slowly than usual. The electronic display was now scrolling the message ‘This train terminates here. Please take your belongings with you.’
The train stopped with a jolt and blacked out completely. The girl in the short skirt, it must have been, let out a small scream. ‘Oh here we go again,’ one of the young men in suits was heard saying.
‘Fucking hell,’ the other one said.
It was dizzyingly dark, there was nothing by which to orient oneself. The emergency lights didn’t come on this time. Murphy felt more than nervous; he felt fear, thinking about another train crashing into theirs, leaving them pinned in the dark to die slowly, painfully from their crush injuries, and suffocating in smoke.
Somewhere above them, people were doing all the things that people do on top of the thin concrete shell. The plague dead marbled the earth in between. Far below, molten magma was looking for a pressure valve, somewhere to blast out. Trains were speeding in all directions and one of them might be on a collision course.
Somebody touched his knee. ‘Huh,’ he blurted. The person felt along to find the seat beside Murphy and sat down there, clutching his arm. It must’ve been the girl in the jeans who’d been sitting opposite, but in the absolute darkness he just couldn’t tell. Why didn’t she say something. She must be mute. Was it even her? It could be anyone. ‘Hello,’ he said. He felt stupid when there was no answer.
One of the young men down near the doors flicked a cigarette lighter on for a few seconds. His face materialised like a Rembrandt portrait in the dense blackness, simpering, then disappeared again.
From Murphy’s left came a metallic clanking sound of the doors to the next carriage forward being opened. A man’s voice said, ‘Are you all okay in here?’
The girl in the mini-skirt started whimpering. The old lady shouted, ‘No we’re bloody not okay!’ and the old man chimed in with, ‘What’s happening!’
Murphy asked the unseen one, ‘Are you the driver?’
Just then the train started to move, trundling. The lights were still off and there was no sound from the electric motors. In the darkness, it was impossible to tell whether they were moving backwards or forwards.
‘It’s rolling downhill,’ said the voice. ‘Shit!’
By the sound of the inter-carriage doors clanking and slamming again, whoever it was had gone as near to running as he could manage in the pitch blackness, back towards the front of the train.
The swaying and bouncing of the carriage increased. Murphy still couldn’t tell if they were going forwards or backwards. Backwards would be worse. Whoever it was beside him clutched tighter to his left arm. The girl in the mini-skirt started to scream repeatedly, short screams. The youths were uttering swear words as if they were prayers.
He hadn’t been the first to panic after all.
