Milne shrugged. After two days in the tank he couldn’t smell himself any more. “I fell in some shite,” he said, trying not to twitch, or shiver, or sound like he was out of his face on stolen drugs.
“You OK, sir?” she asked, shining a torch into the car, spotlighting him in all his manky glory. “You look ill.”
Milne nodded, she had him there, he could see himself in the rear-view mirror: pale-grey, sweaty, dark purple bags under his eyes, threads of fiery red spreading through his skin. “I fell in some shite.”
She turned and shouted back at the traffic car, “Norm, get an ambulance up here sharpish!” then knelt down, breathing through her mouth, like she didn’t want to smell him any more. “You’re going to be OK, we’re going to get you to the hospital.”
He opened his mouth to tell her he just wanted to go home, but couldn’t. All that came out was, “I fell in some shite...”
Sitting there, watching the policewoman fading away until there was nothing left but darkness and—
Headache. Killer, bastard headache. Like a chisel driven between the ears. Milne cracked open an eye to see a pretty nurse hovering over him with a syringe.
“Where am I?” was what he tried to say, but all that came out was a dry croaking sound. The nurse didn’t smile at him, just held a squeezy bottle to his lips and let him take a small sip. “Thank you...” — weak, but almost sounding human again.
The nurse nodded, then said, “There’s someone here to see you.” Brisk, matter of fact, beckoning over a uniformed constable and a big, fat bald bloke with a tight suit and a constipated expression.
“Mr Milne,” said the fat one, looming over the bed, “we’d like to talk to you about the car you were driving when you were brought here.”
Milne frowned. “I...” Shite — they’d found the drugs. All of McRitchie’s lovely drugs and he’d barely had a chance to sample any of them.
“Specifically, we’d like to talk to you about the car’s original owner. And how his dead body wound up in the boot covered in your fingerprints.”
And that was it: Duncan “Manky” Milne was up to his neck in shite again.
The Circle
David Hewson
The tube line ran unseen beneath the bleak unfeeling city, round and round, day and night, year after year. Under the wealthy mansions of Kensington the snaking track rattled, through cuttings and tunnels, to the bustling mainline stations of Paddington, Euston and King’s Cross where millions came and left London daily, invisible to those below the earth. Then the trains travelled on to the poorer parts in the east, Aldgate, with its tenements and teeming immigrant populations, until the rails turned abruptly, as if they could take the poverty no more, and longed to return to the prosperous west, to civilization and safety, before the perpetual loop began again. The Circle. Melanie Darma had travelled this way so often she sometimes imagined she was a part of it herself.
Today she felt tired. Her head hurt as she slumped on the worn, grubby seat in the noisy, rattling carriage, watching the station lights flash by, the faces of the travellers come and go. Tower Hill, Monument, Cannon Street, Mansion House... Somewhere to the south ran the thick, murky waters of the Thames. She remembered sitting next to her father as a child, bewildered in a shaking train from Charing Cross to Waterloo, a stretch that ran deep beneath the old, grey river. Joking, he’d persuaded her to press her nose to the grimy windows to look for passing fish, swimming in the blackness flashing by. On another occasion, when he was still as new to the city as she was, in thrall to its excitement and possibilities, they’d both got out at the station called Temple, hoping to see something magical and holy, finding nothing but surly commuters and tangles of angry traffic belching smoke.
This was the city, a thronging, anonymous world of broken promises. People, millions of them, whatever the time of day. Lately, with her new condition, they would watch on the train as she moved heavily, clutching the swelling bundle in her belly. Most would stand aside and give her a seat. A few would smile, mothers mostly, she thought. Some, men in business suits, people from the City, stared away as if the obvious extent of her state, and the apparent nearness of her release from it, amounted to some kind of embarrassment to be avoided. She could almost hear them praying... if it’s to happen please God let it not be this instant, when I’ve a meeting scheduled, a drink planned, an assignation with a lover. Any time but now.
She sat the way she had learned over the previous months: both hands curved protectively around the bump in her fawn summer coat, which was a little heavy for the weather, bought cheaply at a street market to encompass her temporary bulk. Her fingers felt comfortable there nevertheless. It was as if this was what they were made for.
So much of her life seemed to have been passed in these tunnels, going to and fro. She felt she could fix her position on the Circle’s endless loop by the smell of the passengers as they entered the carriage: sweet, cloying perfume in the affluent west, the sweat of workmen around King’s Cross, the fragrant, sometimes acrid odour of the Indians and Pakistanis from the sprawling, struggling ethnic communities of the east. Once she’d visited the museum in Covent Garden to try to understand this hidden jugular which kept the city alive, uncertainly at times, as its age and frailty began to show. Melanie Darma had gazed at the pictures of imperious Victorian men in top hats and women in crinoline dresses, all waiting patiently in neat lines for miniature trains with squat smoke stacks and smiling crew. It was the first underground railway ever built, part of a lost and entirely dissimilar age.
When the London bombers struck in 2005 they chose the Circle Line as one of their principal targets, through accident, she thought, not from any conscious attempt to strike at history. The first bomb exploded on an eastbound train between Liverpool Street and Aldgate. The second in a westbound train that had just left Edgeware Road. Fifty-two unsuspecting men and women died in all that day, thirteen of them on the Circle. The entire system was closed for almost a month, forcing her to take buses, watching those around her nervously, glancing at anyone with a dark skin and a backpack, wondering.
She might have been on one of those two carriages had it not been for her father’s terminal sickness, a cruel cancerous death eked out on a hard, cheap bed in some cold public ward, one more body to be rudely nursed towards its end by a society that no longer seemed to care. Birth, death, illness, accident... Sudden, fleeting joy, insidious, lasting tragedy... All these things lay in wait on the journey that was life, ambushes, large and small, hidden in the wings.
Sometimes, as she sat on the train rattling through the black snaking hole in the dank London earth, she imagined herself falling forwards in some precipitous, headlong descent towards an unknown, endless abyss. Did the women in billowing crinoline dresses ever imagine themselves the same way? She doubted it. This was a modern affliction. It had a modern cure too. Work, necessity, the daily need to earn sufficient money to pay the rent for another month, praying the agency would find her some other temporary berth once the present ran out.
There were two more stops before Westminster, the station she had come to know so well, set in the shadow of Big Ben and the grandiose, imposing silhouette of the Houses of Parliament. The train crashed into the darkness of the tunnel ahead. The carriage shook so wildly the lights flickered and then disappeared altogether. The movement and the sudden black gloom conspired to make the weight of her stomach seem so noticeable, such a part of her, she believed she felt a slow, sluggish movement inside, as if something were waking. The fear that idea prompted despatched a swift, guilty shock of apprehension through her mind. The thought: this is real and will happen, however much you may wish to avoid it.