Down Station Read Free

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