UNDER ground, Agnes felt the world was stripped down to its bare essentials. Her lover, in a rare and uncomfortable moment of loquacity, confessed that he rarely took the underground and only then to see how the other half lived. Later it became plain to Agnes that he drove his car to keep that distinction alive, but at the time she was strangely relieved to hear him express an opinion so different from her own. He seemed so indistinct to her sometimes, flimsy as a ghost on the treadmill of his deepest moments. They came back to her in the full moon of her loneliness, the odd things he said, little islands of identity marooned in an inscrutable ocean. The memory of them sustained her on the long journey until the next sighting of land.
Agnes boarded the train and headed for an empty seat in the middle of the carriage, but was beaten to it by a woman laden down with plastic bags, who elbowed her out of the way with the expertise of one who has had to fight to get what she wanted in life. Agnes, who didn’t even know what she wanted, conceded the territory with an awkward twist of her body, as if she had never intended to sit there in the first place. People stared. She edged her way back into the space by the doors and hung on to one of the straps dangling from the ceiling.
‘Sorry,’ she said, half-inclining her head to the person behind her. She had leaned into him with the pull of the train as it left the station, although she did feel it wasn’t entirely her fault. He was standing rather closer than was necessary.
He did not acknowledge her apology and she turned away, her gaze loosely focused on her concave reflection in the door. She looked dwarfish and squat. Walking down the street sometimes, she would catch sight of herself in a shop window and her heart would plummet and rise with mingled horror and love. Beneath the tumultuous act of self-recognition, however, she never stopped experiencing a sense of relief that she was there at all. Merlin had once told her that if she looked in a mirror whilst travelling at a high enough speed her reflection would disappear; but at present the events in her life had not achieved the velocity required even to resemble progress.
Agnes shifted nervously. The motion of the train had again pressed her against the man behind. The hard edge of his briefcase was knocking against the back of her thighs. She shifted again, this time more ostentatiously to show her irritation. The briefcase lodged itself more firmly, right underneath her buttocks. She glanced nervously at the other passengers and then turned round in an attempt to catch his eye, but in the vice of bodies clamped around them she could not do so without further aggravating her plight. A sudden shift in pressure, however, allowed her room to look down at the offending briefcase. She went rigid with horror. No! It couldn’t be! She averted her eyes and stared fixedly ahead. Blood burned in her cheeks. It couldn’t be! Looking around again, this time with stiff deliberation, she saw that it was true. There was no briefcase: just a monstrous bulge of blue pinstripe, an accusatory cloth-covered protuberance proclaiming her most secret and shameful places.
With as violent a thrust of her body as their confinement would allow, Agnes attempted to escape her tormentor without alerting those in the carriage to the nature of his affront. Her heart was pounding. She had heard of such things before; of girls emerging from crowded trains, the backs of their legs splattered with semen. She felt quite faint with nausea. In the carriage, it was impossible to move. The rocking train seemed lewdly to be exacerbating the situation. She wondered if she should broadcast her violation to those around her; but although she knew her only alternative was to suffer in silence, the compromise which such a declaration to a carriage full of strangers would force upon her seemed at that moment worse than that which she was currently enduring. She thought of what Nina would say if ever she discovered that Agnes had aided the enemy, had become the very handmaiden of Satan himself, by passing over an opportunity to fell a Goliath by exposing him in flagrant indelicacy. This proved a more effective spur, and, impelled by fear of such an accusation, she managed to twist her body round so that she was looking him in the face.
Surprisingly, his features were exhibiting a terror which uncannily resembled her own. He was sweating profusely and began to shake. Really, it was hard to tell who was threatening whom. She looked down at his trousers and saw they had regained their proper shape. His eyes followed hers shamefully. She opened her mouth, about to speak. There, she wanted to say. You have put down your weapon. Like this, we have no quarrel with each other. The train drew into a station and in the sudden bustle she was swept away from him. He put his hands in his pockets and disembarked without looking back at her.
The carriage filled up again with people. Looking around, Agnes felt suddenly angered by their slavish submission to silence: strangers passing one another by, while in their minds a thousand babbling mouths spoke of sadness, of worry, of loneliness. Why couldn’t they all just sit down and talk about it? Why couldn’t she lean over, touch the arm of a stranger, ask them what they thought of love? If they could not do it here, deep beneath the city, circulating like plasma around this strange subterrane – if they could not talk of the heart here in the heart – then where?
Run to ground by the trains, Agnes took shelter on the buses. The overground journey to Finchley Central was far more laborious, entailing at least three changes of vehicle, but it seemed a fair exchange for the less pressurised form of human commerce it afforded.
Like most children Agnes had once thought transport the central focus of any outing, regarding A and B as two unrelated points of departure and arrival between which, however, was to be found the real fun. In those days cars had seemed an inferior means of conveyance; like Christmas, they cordoned off the family into a compression chamber of solitude, which isolation seemed to render its members fractious and ill-behaved. Moreover, they emphasised the tiresome power structures which already characterised the hierarchy of their home.
‘Don’t distract your father!’ their mother would call from the realm of adult responsibility in the front seat, with its flashing control panel and ominous wheel.
‘Mum, he’s hurting me!’ Agnes would yell from the hotbed of insurrection behind, as they were carried off against their will.
Trains had seemed then to afford a greater degree of equality and, as they proffered their tickets to the inspector with unwarranted nervousness, to bind them together in the face of uniformed authority as if they were attempting an illegal border crossing or smuggling contraband. The presence of strangers, too, ensured their enjoyment of one another’s company in a manner somewhat foreign to their own hearth.
‘Really, darling?’ said their mother as Agnes entertained her with a thoughtful monologue on why Jessica-at-school’s birthday party had been so superior to her own, while their father guffawed benevolently at a story of Tom’s involving a dead rat he had put in another boy’s desk.
‘Kids,’ they would say, shrugging hilariously at their companions in the carriage.
Now Agnes disdained the trains, and found she enjoyed the bustle of the roadside, despite their congested and tortuous progress along it. ‘Hold on tight!’ warned the conductor as the open-ended 19 careered around a corner and Agnes did so, warmed by the thought that this man, who didn’t even know her, nevertheless did not want to see her flung through the cavity in the vehicle’s side and mauled between tyre and tarmac.
She examined her fellow passengers in this spirit of benevolence and felt cheered by their differences. Women in saris and monkish robes, through which their long chattering hands protruded with the jangle of bracelets and the flash of rings, sat beside truculent boys with indolent eyes and fluffy nether lips, thighs splayed and arms folded like adolescent pashas in garish track-suits. In front of her, two vast West Indian women were packed into one narrow seat, merging and spreading into the aisle beyond like a mountain range. Agnes looked at the palm trees and orange groves depicted in the fabric of their ebullient head-dresses and wondered, guiltily, at their wilful disenfranchisement from such splendour. Picking out from the crowd a few of her fellow-natives, the women with tired faces and straggling perms, the men with ill-fitting suits and threadbare heads, shoes the grey of shopping malls, pigeon-chested and pot-bellied, her wonder doubled. Could they not go at least? she thought. Could they not sample for a while the lapping oceans and languorous palms, the chirping forests and somnambulant lakes and sweetly choiring minarets? Whatever deprivation they found there could be no worse than that of this concrete island with its poisonous drizzle, its sewer-lakes, its banshee road-drills and filthy streets. Could they not get together and solve each other’s problems?
Agnes seemed to hear, as if from around her, dissenting voices which appeared to take exception to her vast cultural exchange programme. Condescending! they cried. Racist! Her thoughts short-circuited with self-doubt. It was so hard sometimes, having to think for oneself. A loud blare of horns from the surrounding traffic seemed to chorus their disapproval. A stream of cars backed up and ground to a halt on the road ahead. She got off the bus and walked.