The buzzer sounded, the voice intoned. The red lights at the rear of the train receded into the black tunnel, grew faint, winked out. The flurry of litter stopped wafting on the track bed, and was still.
Mama took a pair of cotton gloves from the cleaning cart, and a black bag. She passed them to Mary, then helped herself.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be telling me what Mr Nicholls was saying?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing worth wasting your time on, or mine, either. Now you stay out of trouble, girl.’
‘Yes, Mama.’ Mary pulled on her gloves and flexed her fingers, watching the woman dole out supplies and advice to the rest of the shift. Most of them were women, none of them British except Nicholls, and he didn’t really count as part of the team. He didn’t do any of the work, just looked occasionally at his watch when he thought they were behind time and cracked the whip a little harder.
The three little tunnel lights winked from white to red. The rails were no longer live, and it was time to get to work.
She wasn’t the first to lower herself down into the suicide pit, the deep gap between the running rails, but there was plenty of debris for her to pick up. Scraps of paper, sweet wrappers, more copies of the bloody Metro than she could count, buttons, coins domestic and foreign, articles of clothing◦– the baby socks and shoes she could understand, but the items belonging to adults? Seriously?◦– empty wallets thrown in by pickpockets, phones dropped by tourists, plastic bags, tin cans, bottles, pairs of glasses, and the thing that had freaked her out at the start but no longer bothered her: hair.
Teased out of passengers’ heads by the whirlwind of passing trains, it formed spidery clumps, not just at the stations, but deep into the tunnels where it had to be picked out from the rocky ballast, by hand, by people like her.
Earrings weren’t uncommon. Mainly paste with plated fittings, but occasionally something of worth turned up. And rings. Mary often wondered about those. Had they been lost from a cold hand, much lamented and impossible to replace. Or had they been torn off in anger and thrown under the train in an evocation of sympathetic magic that would have the ring-giver similarly cast under the wheels of an oncoming train? It wasn’t called a suicide pit because it saved lives; rather, the concrete trough was there because it made it easier to retrieve the broken, scattered bodies afterwards.
They were supposed to turn the expensive stuff◦– notes, wallets and purses, lost travel cards, jewellery◦– over to Nicholls. He was, in turn, supposed to log it all and transfer everything to Lost Property in Baker Street. They were each supposed to watch everyone else and make sure the rules stuck. It was a lot of supposing. Mary knew at least a couple of her shift were in the habit of diverting the most saleable items inside their boiler suits. It was risky, but they thought it a perk of the job.
She didn’t do that. She couldn’t do that. She had to keep her nose clean. She was getting almost nine quid an hour which, when fences were offering somewhere between five and ten pence in the pound, was pretty good money. Some of it was going on paying off her past fines, but it wasn’t like she had many outgoings.
But she didn’t feel like she was going straight. She still had the same urges as before, to take what she wanted and lash out at those who pissed her off. The fear of what would happen if she gave in kept her partly in check, and recently, some little bit of pride flickered in her heart, sparked from God knew where.
She’d cleared her immediate area, and ducked under the middle rail to collect the debris from the far side of the tracks. Though the power was off, she was still reluctant to touch the rail, despite her rubber-soled boots. Her bin bag started to fill.
The tunnel echoed again to a growl of deep, distant violence. As she looked up, so did everyone else. She caught Mama’s eye, and the women stared at each other until Mama shrugged.
‘Rail replacement near Hyde Park,’ said Nicholls from the platform, tapping at his clipboard. ‘Come on, we haven’t got all night. Back to work.’
2
The sparks from the angle grinder were intense and alive, as captivating as a firework. The noise was incredible, though; a singing wail that cut through skin and bone as much as it did the ear defenders that Dalip was wearing. He held on to them, in case they fell off and he became deaf. Outside in the marshalling yards, it was just about bearable. Inside the tunnels, conversation was reduced to simple signs and anticipation.
The bullet-headed man lifted the grinder from the broken rail and inspected his cut with a practised eye. He nodded with satisfaction and put the machine aside, holding it easily in one hand where Dalip struggled to use two.
He pulled his own ear defenders off and shoved them down around his neck. He mimed for Dalip to do the same.
See? The man who’d been introduced as Stanislav gestured to the rail, expecting Dalip to bend down and appreciate the skill involved. Dalip dutifully did so, admiring the thin bright slice taken out of the rail. When he straightened up, Stanislav mimed, Now we lift the failed section and take it away.
He bent down and scooped up two long metal bars, each with a hook at one end. He passed one to Dalip, and started to twist free the metal keys that held the rail to the sleepers. The top half of his boilersuit was tied around his waist, and his bare arms, slick with grease and sweat, bulged with muscle as he leant into each action. He made it look easy when it was anything but.
The track was replaced when it was necessary◦– and the keys had been forced into place by big men with big hammers. Releasing the rail again was a matter of leverage and technique, and Dalip had neither, relying instead on brute force that was too often beyond his meagre strength.
They were supposed to work as a team, each side of the rail, and match the other’s movements. Stanislav watched the young man struggle and clench his teeth, swinging on his iron bar like it was a piece of gym equipment, before shaking his head and resting a gauntleted hand on the lever. He leaned close and shouted over the din.
‘No. Use whole body. Lean out, arms straight, turn from shoulders.’ He demonstrated and the key turned smoothly. ‘You see. We are tool users, yes? Not brutes. Now you try.’
Dalip did his best to emulate Stanislav’s technique, but he jerked at it. The older man frowned, and started to step in.
‘No. No, I’ll try again.’ Dalip could feel the effort, the strain in his forehead where it was tight against his turban. This time, smoothly and cleanly, the bar an extension of his arms.
The key turned, and he felt the rail rise. He grew giddy with delight.
‘Very good. Now the other fifteen.’
His smile slipped. This was what it was always like. An achievement made, a skill acquired, an exam passed: always a stepping stone to the next goal, and never a moment to bask in the joy of simply succeeding. And Stanislav was just another man in the role of teacher, to be respected and learned from.
Dalip nodded, and applied himself to the next key. It came out more easily. Perhaps it was easier, perhaps it was the looser rail. Perhaps he was doing it right, but that didn’t matter, because there would be another thing along soon enough that he couldn’t do, and would have to be taught, there in the dark and the dirt and the noise.
The rail was finally free. Eight men, stripped to the waist, carried it away with pairs of giant pincers, and brought a new one, whole and gleaming under the yellow lights. They lowered it into place with brief, shouted commands and started to knock it in, fixing it back to the sleepers with rhythmic blows of their lump hammers.