He could have pounced on Lydia's syntax again, except that there were more important issues. "I take it you've just spoken to her."
"I haven't and I've no wish to. She's welcome to you and all the joy you bring, but she won't hear me sympathizing. I didn't need to speak to her to know where you'd be."
"Then you were wrong, weren't you? And as long as we're discussing Valerie, maybe you and your solicitor friend ought to be aware she makes a lot less than he does now he's a partner in his firm."
"Watch it, big boy."
That was the broader-buttocked of the women. He'd almost trodden on her heels, his aggressiveness having communicated itself to his stride. "Sorry," he said, and without enough thought, "Not you, Lyd."
"Don't you dare start calling me that again. Who've you been talking to about his firm? So that's why I haven't had my check this month, is it? Let me tell you this from him. Unless that check is postmarked today, you'll find yourself in prison for nonpayment, and that's a promise from both of us."
"Well, that's the first—" Her rising fury had already borne her off, leaving him with a drone in his ear and hot plastic stuck to his cheek. He cleared the line as he tramped around more of the prolonged curve, which showed him thousands of heads and shoulders bobbing down a slope to the point almost a mile away from which, packed closer and closer together, they streamed sluggishly upward. On some days that midpoint was hazy with exhaust fumes, but the squashed crowd there looked distinct except for a slight wavering which must be an effect of the heat; he wasn't really smelling a faint trace of gas through the wake of perfume. He bent a fingernail against the keys on the receiver, and backhanded his forehead as drops of sweat full of a fluorescent glare swelled the numbers on the keypad. His home phone had just rung when a man's voice said loudly, "They're all the same, these buggers with their gadgets. Can't be doing with them, me."
There was surely no reason for Blythe to feel referred to. "Pick it up, Val," he muttered. "I said I'd ring you back. It's been nearly fifteen minutes. You can't still be doing whatever you were doing. Come out, there's a love." But his voice greeted him again and unspooled its message, followed by Valerie's giggle, which under the circumstances he couldn't help feeling he'd heard once too often. "Are you really not there? I've just had Lydia on, ranting about her maintenance. Says if it isn't posted today her boyfriend the solicitor, who gives new meaning to the wordsolicit, will have me locked up. I suppose technically he might be able to, so if you can make absolutely certain you, I know I should have, I know you said, but if you can do that for me, for both of us, nip round the corner and get that bloody envelope in the shit."
The last word came out loudest, and three ranks in front of him glanced back. Of them, only the woman whose T-shirt ended halfway up her midriff retained any concern once she saw him. "Are you all right, old feller?"
"Yes, I'm… No, I'm… Yes, yes." He shook his free hand so extravagantly he saw sweat flying off it, his intention being to wave away his confusion more than her solicitude, but she advanced her lips in a fierce grimace before presenting her substantial rear view to him. He hadn't time to care if she was offended, though she was using the set of her buttocks to convey that she was, exactly as Lydia used to. The ticket seller had been right after all. The tunnel had cut Blythe off, emptying the receiver except for a faint distant moan.
It could be a temporary interruption. He pressed the recall button so hard it felt embedded in his thumb and was attempting to waft people past him when a not unfamiliar voice protested, "Don't go standing. There's folk back here who aren't as spry as some."
"When you're my dad's age, maybe you won't be so fond of stopping and starting."
Either might be the disliker of gadgets, though both appeared to have devoted a good deal of time and presumably machinery to the production of muscles, not only beneath shoulder level. Blythe tilted his head vigorously, almost losing the bell, which was repeating its enfeebled note at his ear. "Don't mind me, just go round me. Just go, will you?"
"Put that bloody thing away and get on with what we're here for," the senior bruiser advised him. "We don't want to be having to carry you. We had his mother conk out on us once through not keeping the pace up."
"Don't mind me. Don't bother about me."
"We're bothered about all the folks you're holding up and putting the strain on."
"We'll be your trainers till we all finish," the expanded youth said.
"Then I ought to stick my feet in you," Blythe mumbled as those very feet gave in to the compulsion to walk. The phone was still ringing, and now it produced his voice. "Valerie Mason and Steve Blythe," it said, and at once had had enough of him.
All the heat of the tunnel rushed into him. He felt his head waver before steadying in a dangerously fragile version of itself, raw with a smell which surely wasn't of exhaust fumes, despite the haze into which the distant walkers were descending. He had to go back beyond the point at which his previous call had lost its hold. He peeled the soggy receiver away from his face and swung around, to be confronted by a mass of flesh as wide and as long as the protracted curve of the tunnel. He could hear more of it being tamped into the unseen mouth by the jabbing of the megaphones. Of the countless heads it was wagging at him, every one that he managed to focus on looked prepared to see him trampled underfoot if he didn't keep moving. He could no more force his way back through it than through the concrete wall, but there was no need. He would use a walkway as soon as he found some steps up.
Another wave of heat, which felt like the threat of being overwhelmed by the tide of flesh, found him, sending him after the rhythmically quivering women. As far ahead as he could see there were no steps onto the walkways, but his never having noticed them while driving needn't mean steps didn't exist; surely a trick of perspective was hiding them from him. He narrowed his eyes until he felt the lids twitch against the eyeballs and his head ache more than his feet were aching. He poked the recall button and lifted the receiver above his head in case that might allow him to hook a call, but the phone at home hadn't even doubled its first ring when his handful of technology went dead as though suffocated by the heat or drowned in the sweat of his fist. As he let it sink past his face, a phone shrilled farther down the tunnel.
"They're bloody breeding," the old man growled behind him, but Blythe didn't care what he said. About three hundred yards ahead he saw an aerial extend itself above a woman's scalp as blond as Lydia's. Whatever had been interfering with his calls, it apparently wasn't present in that stretch of the tunnel. He saw the aerial wag a little with her conversation as she walked at least a hundred yards. As he tramped toward the point where she'd started talking, he counted the slabs of light overhead, some of which appeared to be growing unstable with the heat. He had only half as far to go now, however much the saturated heat might weigh him down. It must be his eyes which were flickering: not as many of the lights as seemed to be. He needn't wait until he arrived at the exact point in the tunnel. He only wanted reassurance that Valerie had picked up his message. He thumbed the button and flattened his ear with the receiver. The tone had barely invited him to dial when it was cut off.
He mustn't panic. He hadn't reached where phones worked, that was all. On, trying to ignore the sluggishly retreating haze of body heat which smelled increasingly like exhaust fumes, reminding himself to match the pace of the crowd, though the pair of walkers on each side of him made him feel plagued by double vision. Now he was where the woman's phone had rung, beneath two dead fluorescents separated by one which looked as though it had stolen its glare from both. All three were bumped backward by their fellows as he jabbed the button, bruised his ear with the earpiece, snatched the receiver away and cleared it, supported it with his other hand before it could slide out of his sweaty grip, split a fingernail against the button, bruised his ear again… Nothing he did raised the dialing tone for longer than it took to mock him.