Simon’s laptop was in a satchel slung across Stevie’s body. The weight of it pulled at her shoulder blade. The carriage shuddered to a halt and an elderly man’s hand grazed her right breast. He gave her a half smile that might have been an apology or an invitation. Stevie’s foot tensed with the urge to stamp on his toes but she merely shifted her bag to her other side, making a barrier between them.
Stevie thought she could scent the lingering smell of her illness beneath the blend of body odours and rubber that permeated the carriage. A droplet of sweat slid down her spine and she hoped her shirt wouldn’t cling to it. She noticed an ex-member of the Cabinet further down the train. Cartoonists had made a feature of his hair, which was usually gelled in a blond quiff, but it had lost its bounce and was slumped greasily against his forehead. Stevie wondered how he dared to use public transport in the wake of failing wars, austerity and job cuts, and then she spotted the trio shadowing him, men whose sharp suits needed no padding to broaden their shoulders. They looked tired, as if a life of being on the alert had taken its toll.
The Underground train dashed to a halt and the robot voice announced: Westminster. Stevie squeezed from the carriage, joining the stream of bodies making their way along the platform and into the corridors that led to the escalators. The station was a hundred or so years old, but the original interior had vanished beneath a monumental steel-and-concrete façade designed to remind travellers that this was a feat of engineering, a miracle to rival flesh and blood.
Stevie stepped on to one of the upward-bound escalators, aware of other bodies being ferried upwards and downwards in the vast hallway. The whoosh and rattle of the trains was still audible beyond the hum of the escalators, but otherwise the station was surprisingly quiet, as if this was a place where machines held sway and men and women held their tongues.
She imagined the noise that would fill the station if all of their thoughts became words, the racket of it. The idea felt like a hangover from her fever. Stevie gripped the moving bannister and looked up towards the exit. The angle of the stairwell was dizzying.
Then, suddenly, the hum of the machine world was fractured by shouting. Stevie looked across the rows of escalators and saw a man tumbling down the metal steps, limp-limbed and flailing. Somewhere, someone must have hit the emergency button because the staircase stalled. People reached towards him, trying to stop his progress, but the man’s body had gathered momentum. He crashed into a woman on the stairs below; she fell too, and then it seemed that a shoal of people were falling.
A couple of youths managed to leap on to the bannisters, but gravity was faster than even gym-fit commuters and other people were caught in the descent. Stevie had watched countless movie villains tumble to their deaths, but cinema hadn’t prepared her for the chaos of it, or the sound of bone on metal that seemed to rise above the shouting. Her escalator juddered to a halt and she stood, frozen, unsure of what to do. The screaming died into sobs and agitated chatter, and she heard a train rush into the station. Down below, people were gathering. Someone was crying. Someone else shouted for a doctor. And then slowly, unbelievably, the queue of people on the stairway ahead of Stevie started to move, and she moved with them, climbing out of the Underground towards the light.
She overheard a passing teenager, who might have been Italian, say, ‘He was swaying and then he fell. I saw him. It was too quick to do anything. What could I do? I was on the other staircase.’
A cockney voice answered, ‘Nah, mate, he was pushed. I saw it with my own eyes. A white man pushed him down the steps.’
‘He’s got the sickness,’ said an elderly lady. ‘That’s how it hits you. One moment you’re okay, the next you’re dead.’
‘It was gravity got him,’ the cockney youth said. ‘It never lets up for a moment.’
Then they were outside, embraced by the ever-present rumble of traffic and the stale city air that not even the river could freshen. For an instant the commuters, newly released from the world below, were distinct from the pedestrians aboveground, as if their mortality had risen to the surface with them and left its mark. Then they dispersed, and were absorbed into London’s careless anonymity, taking the memory of the falling man with them.
Stevie wove her way between the tourists who crammed the streets around Westminster, viewing the sites through the lenses of their cameras. The satchel containing the laptop banged against her thigh. An ambulance was trying to force its way through the traffic towards the Underground station, its sirens screaming. It was agonising, the sound of the sirens, its thwarted progress. She looked away, at the Thames and the looming Houses of Parliament. They seemed unreal, like a backdrop rolled out for a budget movie that needed a quick establishing shot. This was what tourists imagined when they thought of the city: Big Ben and red buses, the London Eye and bobbies with silly helmets. And it was all there waiting for them.
But did they see the rest? Stevie wondered. The rough sleepers and kettled demos, the cheap chicken fryers whose sleeping bags lay bundled in the back of the shop, the men and women hanging around King’s Cross with a kind word and the offer of a bed for the night to runaways they would soon put to work?
Maybe the tourists did see, and felt as helpless as she did. It was a globalised world after all, and there was no reason to imagine that their capital cities were any different. The screams of the people falling were still in her mind. Stevie felt a sudden urge to go back, but didn’t break her stride as she crossed Westminster Bridge. Simon had trusted her to deliver the laptop. It was the only service she could do for him now.
Ten
St Thomas’s Hospital was grey and dirty against the blue sky. The filth of the city clung to its once white façade as if drawn there by the sickness within. Stevie felt a familiar sense of dread, but she walked through the automatic doors and into the foyer.
Inside, St Thomas’s looked more like a small mall than a hospital. A queue ran all the way from the tills in the Marks & Spencer’s concession to the bunches of two-for-five-pounds roses and serviceable carnations stationed in buckets at its door. The entrance hall was busy with workers on their lunch breaks but Stevie caught glimpses of the building’s real purpose amongst the crowd.
A thin man with a stethoscope draped around his neck stood by the lifts, talking on his mobile phone. Two women in green scrubs chatted as they walked towards the exit. A policeman shook his head and laughed at something an ambulance driver had just told him. Stevie thought she could spot some relatives of patients too. Tired-looking low-wattage ghosts of themselves, hoarding their energy for those moments when they needed to dredge up a healing smile or their heart’s blood.
Stevie went to the reception desk and explained that she was looking for Mr Reah. ‘I think he’ll be in one of the children’s wards.’
The receptionist consulted her computer. Stevie stared at a poster on the wall behind the desk.
COUGHING
VOMITING
DIARRHOEA
RASH
SWOLLEN GLANDS
If you experience a combination of three
or more of these symptoms, avoid sharing
them with your friends and family.
OBSERVE GOOD HYGIENE
CATCH COUGHS IN A DISPOSABLE TISSUE
DO NOT PREPARE FOOD FOR OTHERS
WASH YOUR HANDS FREQUENTLY
STAY AT HOME