It is not difficult to flee. He stuffs some clothes into his rucksack, silences his phone. He deletes his father’s texts unread. His parents each assume he’s with the other. Sod them both, he thinks.
Most nights he stays at Bigsby’s. They hang around playing World of Warcraft, smoking weed, and watching their favorite DVDs: 28 Days Later, The Zone, Mad Max. The best bits are the settings: blighted wastelands, derelict buildings, radioactive skies. His hard drive is full of photographs of places just like these, only his photographs are real.
They argue over where to explore next. Bigsby wants to have a poke around Millennium Mills down in the Docklands, but for weeks now, Mole has been drawing up a hit list of “ghost stations” in the Tube. He’s been collecting maps and diagrams and photographs of disused tunnels, platforms, branch lines, tracks. He sprawls on Bigsby’s sofa, munching on crisps, his laptop propped on his skinny thighs. “Right then,” he says. “Down Street. Aldwych. Belsize Park. Mark Lane. King’s Cross. Have your pick.”
“Has anyone got into any of them yet?” Amir asks.
“You can hire the Aldwych booking hall for fancy parties, for fuck’s sake,” Mole says.
“Martin,” Amir says. “People like us.”
Stoned, Bigsby gets all philosophical. “The raight question,” he says, cracking a Foster’s, “is not has anyone got in, but why more haven’t even tried?”
Mole shrugs. “There’s rumors.”
“I’ll tell ye why,” Bigsby continues. “Because it’s not possible. It’s a panopticon out there.”
Mole rolls his eyes. “A what? Speak bloody English.”
“Bentham,” Bigsby says. “The power of surveillance.” He mimes pressing the shutter of a camera. “Smile, yer on CCTV!”
“That’s why you got to be a ninja, Biggs,” Mole says.
“And never mind the live rails, the zero-clearance tunnels, station workers, locked doors, cleaners, mice, transport police. They won’t just rap yer knuckles and send ye packing, either. Ye’ll go raight to jail.”
“You shouldn’t smoke, Biggs, it makes you paranoid,” Amir says, and even Bigsby laughs, but they know that what he says is true.
The fuse has been lit all the same. He can feel it crackling in the air. It’s all right there, waiting for them, right beneath their feet.
Come study with me, Miranda texts.
Since the night of that last revision party back in May, that has been their little joke. That night, Ian showed up with a fifth of vodka and Miranda’s flatmate handed round a batch of chocolate biscuits laced with weed, and the study session soon degenerated into a loud and inebriated argument over 9/11 and the Mossad conspiracy, with Miranda uselessly attempting to shift the conversation back to the Muslim umma and their exam. And then, somehow, it was two in the morning and Amir and Miranda were lying on her bed, her shirt pushed up, her breasts cupped in his hands.
“I like studying with you,” she said, smiling, coming up for air.
She was always smiling.
He likes her smile. He’s never had a proper girlfriend before, and he’s not certain if Miranda counts exactly as a girlfriend now, seeing as they haven’t done much, really, other than have sex. He likes the secrecy of it, the dark kernel of it lodged behind his breastbone, the silent understanding of two bodies that words can never match.
Some days he stops at the Costa’s on the Seven Sisters Road where Miranda works now that term is out. He sits outside and reads the paper or just watches the people coming in and out of Finsbury Park Station over the road. When he goes inside to order, sometimes he’ll pretend he doesn’t know her. He’ll put on a fake posh accent and say, “A flat white and a toastie, please, Miss.” The other barista just rolls her eyes and says, “Yo, Miranda. Your toy boy’s here.” But Miranda just smiles and shakes the frothed milk back and forth as she pours it over the espresso to form a swirly heart.
Other days, he wanders through the park, watching the lawn bowlers and the duffers on the tennis courts, or lies out on the grass beneath a tree, looking up at the leaves, his earphones in, his iPod cranked up high. He’s lived in London his whole life, but this is a whole other world: gritty, dirty, real. It’s like that storm drain or manhole you’ve walked over a thousand times but never noticed until you knew where to look. Everything is multiple. It is strange. Even his own face, reflected in the bathroom mirror, seems a doppelganger of his former self.
The Finsbury Park mosque is not far from Miranda’s flat, just a few blocks from the Tube. It’s a newish redbrick building with bright green window trim—an odd primary-school touch. The concrete minaret along the side could be mistaken for a lift shaft, but sometimes you can hear the call to prayer from the street: Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. Even though it has been ages since the police raided the mosque and arrested the former imam and his jihadi radicals, the street out front is still cordoned off with traffic cones and caution tape. A CCTV camera keeps watch beneath the streetlamp across. Most days there’s a policeman stationed there as well, pacing up and down along the spiked brick wall.
A couple of weeks ago, for the first time, he went in. He slipped off his shoes and stood among the other men and tried to follow as they raised their hands in reverence, crossed them in supplication, and bowed their heads and knelt, prostrate, touching their foreheads to the ground.
Their voices rose as one: Subhaana rabbiyal-a’laa. Glory is to my Lord, the Most High.
Something twisted inside him then, a kind of longing for something for which he had no name.
They decide to start with King’s Cross on the theory that it will be easier to get into a cut-and-cover station than the deep Underground. Even so, it takes a while to find a way in. Bigsby is tempted by the Gothic clock tower of the old Midland Grand, cordoned off for renovations, but Mole urges them on. They scout the concourse of the main King’s Cross Station, mugging alongside the tourists for an obligatory PLATFORM 9 ¾ photo op. They suss out the Thameslink platforms, the Underground ticket halls, the warren of tunnels running underneath.
The disused Metropolitan line platform they’re searching for is one of the oldest bits of the Underground, Mole says, built way back in 1863. Two high-explosive bombs dropped here and killed a man during the Blitz. The old Met line station house, closed since then, is easy enough to locate. It’s around the back of the main station, a blank white building wedged between a Royal Pizza parlor and a dodgy payday lender’s shop. The metal fire door—handle-less, locked—is signposted KEEP CLEAR–EXIT FROM EMERGENCY ESCAPE ROUTE–THESE DOORS ARE ALARMED. There’s no way in from there.
But down a narrow, brick-paved side street, looking down from a narrow bridge onto an exposed stretch of track, they spot the disused platform. They lean over the railing, gazing down. It’s nothing but a weedy patch of concrete in the shadow of a high retaining wall. Trains run past it all day long, as they have done since 1941—for more than sixty years. It is right there, for anyone to see. It’s just a different kind of seeing, like walking into a dark room on a bright, sunny day and letting your eyes adjust to the lack of light.
Bigsby is all for abseiling straight onto the platform from the bridge, but the drop looks dangerous and there are windows and CCTV cameras everywhere they look. They note the locations of the cameras, the security systems, the fire exit stairs. Somewhere, there’s got to be a crack.
It’s Amir’s idea to follow the graffiti tags, and sure enough, good old Tox leads them straight in. Two nights later they are back, dressed in dark hoodies and trainers, armed with cameras, stoked on adrenaline. Warnings rumble through their heads like freights: Lights mean workers. Dark tracks are live. Rail trespass carries an automatic fine of one thousand quid.
Breathing hard, dry-mouthed, hearts gunning in their chests, they drop down and wait. The disused platform is lit up bright as day. Above them is the bridge they were standing on the other day. Just street noises overhead. Amir pulls out his camera and fires off a bunch of shots. Everything’s in sharp focus, clear, hard edged. The rails flash in the sodium glare.
Moving out of the light, they climb a flight of stairs to a crossover passage and find themselves in a long corridor that has the musty smell and feeling of a catacomb or tomb. The walls are scabby with rust, the ceiling draped with old wires and cables and rusty pipes. The corridor is bricked up at the end, but a sign posted on the wall still states: KING’S CROSS 200M. NUMBER OF STEPS TO EXIT: 44.
Mole says, “Always so helpful, they are, the T.A.”
An abandoned place remembers, Bigsby always says. They might be the first people to have set foot here since the Blitz.
Amir takes out his camera and documents their finds. Retaining wall. Escape tunnels. Alarmed doors. Tracks. The camera flashes. He works fast. Getting in is the challenge. Sticking around is just asking to get caught.
They are right out in the glare, back on the open platform, when it happens. The vibration comes before the sound, a faint humming along the rails. Deep in the dark recess of the tunnel, a red eye blinks.
“Fuck,” Bigsby says.
Mole dashes for the thin line of shadows behind the platform pillars and they tuck in behind him, pressing their backs against the wall, and wait.
“Don’t move,” Mole hisses.
Amir holds his breath.
A shuddering fills the narrow space, the thrum of diesel, and then with a spray of light out of the tunnel comes a blue train like a slit-eyed monster, a work train, thundering along the tracks.
And then with a gust of stale and gritty breath it’s passed, snaking across the open stretch of track and into the black mouth of the far tunnel, taillights blinking, the engine noise subsiding like an ebbing wave.
They exhale, doubled over, gasping, almost laughing, surrendering to relief.
Bigsby exhales hard. “That was a heart attack.”
“You should see the look on your face!” Amir says. “It’s brilliant.”
“Fuck off,” Bigsby says.
Everything is vibrating, everything is sharp and hard and clear. The lights along the tracks are shining extra bright. They are utterly, intensely alive.
Twenty minutes later they are out, surfacing like divers rising from a wreck, breathing their private prayers of thanks to the patron gods of exploration for bringing them back from the world of the dead. They’ve peeled back the layers of history; they’ve turned back time.
Zombies move along the main concourse of the King’s Cross Station, mobile phones and iPods playing static in their zombie ears. Their zombie eyes are dead. They take no notice of the three boys in black hoodies and jeans. Late-night zombie cleaners follow, obliviously sweeping, dragging rubbish carts behind.
Only the CCTV cameras watch with their all-seeing eyes.