***
11
The director stood before the underground map with the red pins stuck in major stations. His back was turned to his assistant. She was at her desk, crouched over a file, turning over paper after paper, as though hunting for something. Not a word had been exchanged between them since Silberman left five minutes before. They hadn’t even commented on what they’d seen in the flat. There’d just been the director’s two questions in the taxi on secondary matters and her prompt replies.
There was another minor mystery to occupy his mind. Why hadn’t the two hospital “representatives” come across Theo in Crossroads? Still staring at the map the director saw the black dot of the May 23 station on Line 9, one of the spokes radiating out of Crossroads, and remembered the boy locally scratching away at the poster with a knife before he was whisked away and replaced by the blackness of the tunnel. He thought he understood now. Not for the first time, Theo had left his Crossroads base to foray in satellite stations and with great luck must have returned to the giant station after the “representatives” had given up their hunt.
But Theo wouldn’t be systematically returning to Crossroads anymore. The director felt certain that the boy was now taking on the total challenge of the underground network. He was operating haphazardly, unpredictably. At any given moment he could be in any one of the capital’s sixty-three stations. Which made it almost impossible to locate him.
And he had to be located. Every minute of his obsessive activity censoring the posters held the menace of arrest. Arrest, routine investigation, transfer to the hospital for the briefest of time and then transfer to nowhere. Theo had to be found.
Where? How?
Lorz imagined hunting for him in the stations. The tangle of the thirteen lines before his eyes was like a fishing net, the dots of the stations floaters. He, the (compassionate) hunter, would be entangled in that net. It would be worse, far worse, than that long-ago search for him in the endless corridors of the hospital-complex when the boy was still his candidate. He saw himself getting out at every stop, scrutinizing the posters, trudging up Himalayas of stairways, trying to breast the peak hour flood of passengers, standing perplexed before bifurcations of corridors, choosing a line at random, and then shooting off in the wrong direction while at the other end of the net, somewhere, the boy obliterated and obliterated.
A whole lifetime wouldn’t be long enough. And if by miracle Lorz found Theo, what words could convince him to flee?
Flee where?
The solution to this last problem (but not to the first two) came to him suddenly. The refuge existed, of course. It offered more than security. The boy’s psychic needs could be satisfied. Not of course by letting him do to the director’s flat what he’d done to his own with the jarring poster patchwork but by diverting obsession into safe channels, getting him to do what he’d done to the Ideal office months ago. The rest of the apartment was almost as dingy as the locked room with the broken furniture, now the boy’s shining refuge, had been.
Theo would paint the whole vast flat white (acrylic white), three coats. The job would take weeks. The expense and inconvenience would be great. But that was nothing compared to what the contact between the director and his employee would bring about. He saw it as a symbiosis, reciprocal benefit. The boy’s alarming symptoms of obsessive censorship would wear off. His own burning punishment would stop with this disinterested turn, at long last, to another human being.
His assistant asked where he was going as he reached the door. He couldn’t disclose the totality of his project to her, of course.
Crossroads first of all, he said. If he was there, give him his pills and try to reason with him. That wouldn’t work, of course. But tell him to keep clear of Crossroads. And tell him not to come back to his flat or the office.
“You said he wouldn’t be coming back here before a year and a half.”
“His reactions aren’t always predictable. He might be coming back to see you, for instance.”
“Finish off the job he started on my desk, you mean?”
“I wasn’t thinking of anything like that.”
“That’s what you practically said a few hours ago.”
“I doubt that he’ll be coming back here.”
“They’re sure to pick him up then. He can’t stay down there destroying posters. Where else can he go, though?”
“No idea,” he said although he had the clearest idea about that. How could he tell her that? He opened the door on the corridor.
“I have an idea,” she said, staring down at the file as though it were written there. The director waited, holding the knob of the open door.
“Couldn’t you keep him in your flat for a while? Mine’s too small and where I live it’s awfully public, people spying at the windows all the time. I don’t care personally if they see me taking a man to my flat. Nobody takes me for a saint there any more after what happened. It’s just that they might talk about it to the wrong people. He stands out. You have all those rooms in your place and practically no neighbors. Couldn’t you clear one out, fix something up for him, a cot? It would be just for a while until we decide what to do.”
Lorz didn’t answer immediately. Finally he said that he would have to think it over. It was a difficult decision to make. He stifled a yawn. She did too.
He closed the door and returned.
“Would you like another cup of coffee?” he asked. “You haven’t been getting much sleep either. Don’t move.”
He took the three saucers and cups off his desk and rinsed them in the storeroom washbasin. He plugged the electric kettle in. While waiting for the water to heat up he moved the sugar and coffee onto her desk and asked her how he was going to find the boy. It was the necessary first step. He explained that Theo could be anywhere in the underground. It would take a lifetime locating him, getting on and off at all the stations. Had she any ideas about that? She often had excellent ideas, he said.
The kettle started whistling. He got it and poured the water into their cups. They sipped in silence. Finally she said that it might take a day or two to locate him, not a lifetime. They wouldn’t have to get off at every station and investigate every corridor. Just take a train at a terminal station and do the whole line. Chances were there would be at least one of the … new-style posters on the platform wall. The rectangles showed up a kilometer away. He might not be in that particular station but at least they’d be able to localize him roughly. “As soon as one of us spots him he phones the other. There’d have to be the two of us to convince him to leave.”
Like the hospital representatives, he thought. Except they had stronger arguments.
She made him agree that after he had searched that morning she’d spell him in the afternoon. If it was necessary, she added, optimistically.
But at noon he rang up from an underground booth and said they’d waste less time if he kept on looking. At six-thirty he rang up again and told her to go home.
He returned home himself at 1:00am, the pain in his bowels growing. He was unable to swallow a bite of food even though he’d had no more than a sandwich all day long. He went to bed and stared up at the ceiling.
The search had been even worse than he’d imagined. He saw the underground as a chessboard with endless squares and he and his employee pieces light years removed, never destined to meet. The illogical chessboard image (chessmen met only in a relation of hostility) was probably inspired by the multitude of white squares that had lured him out of the train at station after station, line after line that long day. They were everywhere, Theo nowhere. And he’d soon made a disturbing discovery. In Richfield an angular man of indeterminate age was distributing white rectangles on the pornographic posters. Half an hour later in West Gate he saw an exalted-looking adolescent girl of great ugliness with a bulging pimpled forehead doing the same thing. How many others were there?
Theo’s censorship had become a model. His intensely personal action had taken o
n social dimensions. But the satisfaction the director derived from the discovery that he and Theo weren’t spiritually isolated was counterbalanced by the tremendous complications it created in finding the boy. To be sure, he could ignore the great number of the obliterations that were accompanied by slogans such as “No to pornography!!” Also he learned to distinguish between the perfect squares of Theo and the imperfect imitations. Still the multiplication of censors made the task of locating the boy hopeless.
Where was Theo sleeping at this moment with the underground shut down? On some park-bench? In prison? Hypodermically tranquilized in a hospital room? Lorz finally fell asleep.
The next day, a Saturday, the bowel burning peaked so sharply that three times he had to break off the quest, leave the train and sit bent double on a station bench waiting for it to let up. It was during that third attack that the idea came to him.
Lorz returned to Ideal and prepared everything with the greatest care like a speleologist readying himself for some unimaginably deep and perilous descent. He opened three of the operators’ lockers and transferred four liter jars of Basic White to his knapsack. He added a liter each of black and red paint, three sets of crayons, two boxes of florescent chalks, the full range of brushes and a fistful of ballpoint pens and pencils. It would be a great burden at first but would gradually lighten, he comforted himself.
There was still the need for protection. He transferred his father’s ceremonial dagger from his briefcase to the knapsack. He reflected a moment and took a wheeled step-ladder. It was cumbersome but unavoidable for what he had to do. He made sure he had sufficient money in his wallet and carefully checked his vial of blue pills. Assuming Theo had taken them regularly, his vial would be empty by this evening.
Lorz was tempted to leave a word for his assistant, saying that he’d gone down again Saturday afternoon. But to write this was to accept the possibility that he wouldn’t be back by Monday morning.
It was 5:04pm. Saturday, September 3 when he left the office. He didn’t even notice that the burning was gone.
He’d intended to begin with Central Station but soon realized that it was impossible. Saturday was the worst of all possible days for what he had in mind. The hub stations swarmed at all hours. There wasn’t a single stretch of empty corridor. The beggars were out in full force, the musicians too and of course the pickpockets to work the hordes of suburban shoppers loaded down with purchases. There were the groups of loud young drifters from the industrial outskirts, solitary women-hunters, prostitutes, the dangerous ethnic gangs with their studded jackets and savage hairdos swaggering down the center of the corridors, lording it over the native born, forcing them, eyes fearfully downcast, against the filthy tiles of the curved walls. The corridors echoed with their raucous voices. They lacerated and graffitied the posters in public sight.
How did they dare do that? Lorz posed the question to himself in its literal sense, not out of indignation now but envy. What he intended doing, for the first time in his life, was, technically, no different from what they were doing. But how could he do it before all those witnesses?
So the mobbed corridors and platforms of Central Station forced him into the least frequented of the stations. He set up the ladder in the first empty corridor and prepared the tools and chemicals. Shooting glances right and left, he climbed up to the green landscape of Soft-Joy Sweaters. In the blue sky above the hundreds of white sheep he daubed the first of the hundreds of messages planned for that night. He did it in contrasting red.
THEO! MEET ME AT MIDNIGHT CENTRAL STATION PANEL 96.
He repeated it over and over in other corridors.
He couldn’t help recalling similar personal messages that defaced posters, like that of the madman who for a whole year had plagued Ideal with his tireless declaration (how many thousands of them?): “Valeria I Love You!” with a heart that resembled nude buttocks viewed from a certain angle.
But how many of those personal but public messages were motivated by the desire to save a human life? How many of the passengers who, despite the director’s choice of little-frequented corridors, surprised him on his wheeled step-ladder could guess that the real purpose of the message he was scrawling was disinterested protection of a vulnerable human-being through the gift of a roof, affection and – urgently – medicine.
Already he’d pictured the consequences of the absence of the pills: the boy seized by a fit of epilepsy at the edge of a platform, pitching forward and down onto the path of an oncoming train, his body involved with the wheels.
Voices and footsteps again. He switched to the alternate brush and the jar of Basic White and started censoring what he’d had just scrawled. Pathetic subterfuge.
Did they believe it? Weren’t they laughing?
This will be a night of humiliation. My gift to you: humiliation, foreseen, accepted, endured.
Well before midnight he stood to one side of panel 96 in Central Station in the uproar of voices, brawls, shuffling soles, discordant beggar music, all periodically covered by the trains. He tried to get down a sandwich for nourishment without breathing in the reek of burned axle grease, vomit, hemp smoke and unwashed bodies. He endured the solicitations of drug dealers and prostitutes of both sexes, thinking again: my gift to you.
At 12:45 he acknowledged defeat. He moved away from panel 96 and collapsed onto the nearest bench. What he’d done was useless. What chance was there that Theo would stop at those six minor stations lost in the immensity of the net? And if he did, and assuming he took one of the prepared corridors, what chance that he’d notice the message in competition with other graffiti?
It was the walls of the great hub stations – beginning with Central Station – that had, absolutely, to bear the message. There was no guarantee of success even then. To be sure that the message would be received it would have to be repeated everywhere, on all the posters of all the sixty-three stations.
The director ventured into the maze of this idea. How long would it take to daub and scribble the message on the 12,843 posters of the capital’s underground network? The mathematics of the thing made him dizzy. Even scribbling away at top speed twenty-four hours a day, not a moment off for sleep or food, he wouldn’t be even halfway through before the first messaged posters would start coming down. They stayed up on average only three weeks. To say nothing of the gigantic problem of operating in full view of witnesses. Thousands of witnesses. Tens of thousands. Not just the voyagers but underground employees and policemen empowered to arrest poster vandals.
Arrest and the judge’s insinuating question: “For what purpose did you want to meet the individual you call Theo at that late hour?” Who would believe his story of pills? Then prison and his name, his father’s name, in the tabloids. I wouldn’t survive the humiliation, he thought.
But wasn’t there a way of communicating his message without the presence of witnesses? Did he dare do that, at the risk of his life? He let the dangerous idea mature in his mind while he turned to other aspects of that evening’s fiasco.
He had to recognize that the message he’d scrawled was ineffective. It had to be radically modified.
First, the meeting-place had to be changed. A poster-panel number was too abstract. Theo might confuse this number with another. He thought immediately of the Great Clock of Central Station with its octagonal faces giving the hour in eight world capitals. It was universally known.
Next there was the absence of incentive. In the past, therapeutic contact had always required the enticement of a gift: those thin raw slices of beef in the spiced blood sauce, chocolates, Chinese puzzles, a watch, etc. Why should Theo respond to the invitation now? For the pleasure of his company? he thought with sad irony. What could he promise him?
He thought he knew. In his mind he amended the message. He even printed it in his address book:
THEO! THEO!! THEO!!! MEET ME UNDER THE GREAT CLOCK CENTRAL STATION MIDNIGHT FOR BASIC WHITE
A few jars of Basic W
hite might seem a poor lure for a man already in possession of half a ton of the stuff, yet Lorz felt sure that it would have the same effect on Theo as a single gold coin on the wealthiest of misers.
Assuming he read the message. Something essential was lacking. Only a tiny fraction of the 12,843 posters would be inscribed with the message. How could they be given maximum impact? He had to go further. There had to be an image. An image to be effaced.
He watched the idea germ, spread, take possession of his mind. He tried to banish the insistent image. I couldn’t, he said to himself, half aloud. Knowing, however, that he could, had to, would.
A few minutes before closing time Lorz went to the end of the empty East Gate platform next to the tunnel-mouth. He let his knapsack and ladder and then himself down on the ballast. He advanced between the tracks in the gloom of the blue-painted bulbs. He was careful to avoid the mortal third rail.
The loudspeakers behind him blared the order to vacate the underground. The message was repeated at thirty-second intervals.
He reached the first of the niches set at 200-meter intervals for the safety of the track crews. A red bulb glowed feebly above it. Another red light opposite turned green. He started forward again and had covered a dozen meters when he heard the train ahead. He stumbled back to the niche, unslung the knapsack and ladder and pressed his back against the rough concave wall. As the rumble loudened he grasped obscure pipes overhead. The red and green lights down the track floated into sight, grew with the roar. He squeezed his eyes shut.
It blasted past in seconds, compressing the air out of his lungs, pulling at him.
A mercifully short maintenance crew train. The rumble died away.
He stood motionless in the niche for quarter of an hour. Except for the chirp of crickets about him there was absolute silence. By now the corridors and platforms were empty. The folding brass gates of the entrances to Central Station had been deployed and locked.
He trotted back to the tunnel entrance, hoisted himself back onto the empty silent platform and started in.
He printed the first message to Teddy in Basic White on a green lawn.
Now the image.
He dipped the second brush in the red paint and summoned up the image as he’d seen it on a hundred thousand posters, that image he’d effaced and caused to be effaced for over a decade. He kept it before him as though what his hand was now perpetrating above the message had originated in other minds, he doing no more than a mechanical job of transcription.
He operated with fantastic rapidity, platform after platform, corridor after corridor with no idea of the passage of time. He printed his message on one out of every twenty posters. With what crowned the words to Theo it eclipsed all the neighboring graffitied posters.
Red and gigantic, it couldn’t fail to attract Theo’s censorious attention.
It was only at 4:13am that he became aware of his inexplicable blunder. A huge proportion of the posters he’d chosen to bear the message and that image were Ideal posters. How could he have done that? First one of his operators and now the director and founder of Ideal Poster himself engaged in self-sabotage.
That was minor. He thought of the two operators permanently assigned to Central Station. In an hour and a half they would be there and efface most of the messages. He would have to wait and head them off. But how could he openly ask them to spare the most shameless of the graffiti?
Then with a certain relief he remembered that tomorrow – today, actually – was Sunday. The Ideal operators wouldn’t come until Monday morning.
He was placing the last of the jars in the knapsack and had already reduced the ladder when a challenging shout startled him. Tiny at the far end of the corridor two underground employees in dark-blue uniforms were trotting toward him. “What are you doing here?” one shouted. “Stop!” the other shouted. They were echoing the question and command he’d been directing to himself for hours.
He grabbed the ladder and the knapsack and started running awkwardly. The ladder wagged between his legs, almost tripping him up. The jars in the knapsack chinked dangerously. He finally reached the escalators rolling on in the emptiness. He glanced over his shoulder. He could hear the fast echoing slap of their shoes and their multiplied shouts but they were still in the corridor. He lay face down on the descending escalator, hidden, he hoped, by the waist-high ramps. The machine dumped him on the pavement of the lower level.
He picked himself up, raced down a short corridor and took the left fork. Their shouts echoed everywhere. Now he burst out onto a platform near the black mouth of the tunnel. With no hesitation he let himself down onto the tracks for the second time that night and went on running in that deep gloom punctuated by red now green caged lamps. A different tunnel but identical to the first. He slid down to a squatting position in a niche. Maybe he was still being pursued. But he couldn’t go any further. He tried to stifle his hoarse gasps.
There was a low grease-smeared iron door set in the dark base of the tunnel opposite. He got up, stepped very high over the third rail and reached the door. He pushed it open. He had to stoop to enter. A caged bulb inside burst into weak but blinding light. It spilled out on the gleaming rails. He quickly shut the door behind him. A ventilator started up.
He found himself in a tiny storeroom with unpainted roughly daubed cement walls. It looked disaffected. Greasy garments were dumped in one corner, in another corner lay a heap of obscure rusty tools. Great bolts and spikes were heaped on old newspapers.
The light went out. The ventilator collapsed into stillness. He pulled the door open. Light again. The ventilator started up. He saw an old fashioned toggle switch and turned it on. After a while he opened the iron door on the tracks and dared look up-track from where he’d fled. He could see a pinhead of light: the end of the tunnel. Was he being pursued?
Too exhausted to resist, he pulled the greasy work-clothes into the semblance of a pallet and stretched out. He meant to rest for a few minutes before resuming his flight to the next station. The underground would be reopening in half an hour.
When the roar and rattle awoke him he opened his eyes on blackness. He was totally confused. His flat? The office? The hospital? The roar died away. Memory came back. He looked at the luminous dial of his watch.
3:07.
Had time regressed? Then he realized with a shock: 3:07pm, of course. Ten hours had gone by. He also realized that he’d be imprisoned in the tiny dank space until ten more hours went by and the underground shut down at 1:30am and the trains stopped running. At a cadence of a train every three or four minutes he’d be crushed trying to make it to the tunnel mouth and the platform. Suppose midway between two niches he sprained his ankle?
At the sudden thought that he’d miss the midnight appointment, he struggled into his knapsack and slung the ladder over his shoulder. He pulled the iron door open.
The noise of another train built up. In a few seconds the twelve carriages thundered past. The concussion made him stagger back. Sparks, squares of lighted windows stretched out to a continuous line with quick blurs of seated passengers then darkness again.
He started running, with high steps because of the ties, and dangerously fast as though sucked forward by the partial vacuum in the train’s wake. Three times he had to seek refuge in niches. There was no getting used to it. Each time he was certain that he would be pulled under the wheels.
It seemed hours before he managed to emerge from the black tunnel mouth, heave knapsack and ladder onto the Crossroad platform and hoist himself frantically after them before the astonished eyes of three passengers. He hadn’t worked this part of the station. Wasn’t it possible that Theo had made some sign of assent beneath one of the messages?
He took the escalator up to the next level and at the sight of a blue-neoned food stand was seized by ravenous hunger. His mouth was blotter-dry. He washed down two sandwiches with two bottles of beer. There was a surprising number of passengers for a Sunday. He reac
hed a corridor he’d worked early that morning.
The message and scandalous red icon had vanished from the posters.
He turned left into another corridor.
They’d vanished there too.
Looking closely he saw the clumsy brush-strokes of his operators. The posters had been corrected.
Something was wrong. Yesterday had been Saturday and today was Sunday. There were no poster corrections during the weekend. Now he thought of the unusual number of passengers and his ravenous hunger.
He rose on an escalator to the nearest newsstand and saw that the day marked on the newspapers was Tuesday. He passed his hands over his bristly face. How could he have slept two and a half days?
Like a blow came the realization that he’d missed the appointment with Theo. He imagined the boy waiting for him under the Great Clock. He heard in his mind the dead doctor’s nagging voice about a brief window of opportunity. And he, the director, had spoiled everything. Hadn’t come. Had not come! Teddy had shown signs of upset.
He thought of his assistant. He hadn’t the energy or the courage to phone her. He’d phone her when he found Theo. Profoundly discouraged, he abandoned his idea of messages. He reverted to the original search for posters with telltale white squares. He did a stretch of Line 6 then switched to Line 12. He was as certain of failure in his present quest as he’d been confident of success when scrawling the messages.
But at 11:05pm, after no more than two hours of search, the director located Theo with strange ease at the least likely of small stations. The train slowed before a platform with posters covered with squares of authentic perfection. Lorz’s practiced gaze and fingertips judged the age of the corrections: a half-hour. Theo could have gone on to another station and then another line. But in the corridor there were more squares and rectangles: done a bare quarter of an hour before.
Something was the matter with them. They’d lost their perfection. Near the tunnel mouth, the last posters bore lop-sided squares, revealing some of the flesh that was meant to be covered. The squares were still wet. Basic White dribbled from them to the edge of the platform. There were splashes of white on the ballast below. Theo had taken the train tunnel to reach the next station. Why? Why hadn’t he taken the train?
Everything was repeated as in a dream. It was as though his ordeal in the other tunnels had been a rehearsal for what lay before him now. He felt for the vial of pills in his pocket and realized that he himself hadn’t taken them now for three days. He let himself down, as once before, on the ballast. As before, there were the initial blue bulbs in the gloom, the rails feebly gleaming red from the caged lights further on, the ties and crunch of the ballast underfoot, the niches and the trains thundering past into silence, the chirping of the strange cannibal crickets of the underground tunnels.
And finally an iron door like the other iron door. He pushed it open. Again the weak but blinding light of a caged bulb. Again a ventilator started up. This storeroom was slightly larger than the other. Dust was everywhere. It looked disused for decades. Again tools lay in a corner. They were rusted and covered with thick spider-webs. On a cheap filthy table there was an antique upright phone. Next to it was a heap of yellowed newspapers dating back to the monarchy. Against the rear wall, on either side of another iron door, were carefully stacked drums of paint and chemicals, piles of brushes, erasers, spatulas, sponges, cutters, scissors, paste-pots. Soiled faded blue work-clothes were gathered into a pallet. There was the imprint of a body on it. The iron door between the drums of paint was much smaller than the one that gave on the tracks. He pulled it open. “Theo,” he whispered into the square of pitch darkness. “Theo,” he said in a louder voice. It echoed cavernously.
On a shelf there was an old broken briar pipe and a box of kitchen matches wrapped in wax paper against the damp. He struck one against the crudely daubed cement wall and it sullenly burst into flame. It gave off a sulphurous stench. He remembered the matches of his childhood, 3b on the scale of punishment for playing with them. How long ago had they ceased manufacturing such matches? He took the yellowed newspapers and twisted them to torches with difficulty. The brittle paper fragmented. He lit the first torch, stooped and advanced in the low passageway almost in a squatting position. The atmosphere was choking. The flame gutted and went out. He retreated back to the storeroom, filled his lungs with air and returned, nursing the flame. The flickering yellow light was absorbed by the dark massive masonry. He transferred the guttering flame with care to the next twisted paper.
At the end of the low passageway he came up against another iron door. He pushed at it. It was locked. He pushed harder and heard a rattle on the other side. He pictured the padlock, devoured by rust. With dread he imagined it yielding to his push, the door squealing open and he pitching forward into the cleft that ran at a right angle to the big silent empty passageway with the bare bulbs dangling from the vaulted ceiling of the subterranean maze of Old Hospital where he’d once been, seeking Theo as now.
The flame went out. He backed precipitously away from the locked door into the storeroom again. He closed the first iron door between the drums of paint and sat with his back against it. He mastered the urge to flee the storeroom and what was behind his back. Theo would be returning any minute.
He clasped his knees and let his head fall on his chest. The posters he’d worked over arose in confusion in his mind: smiling faces, chateaux, geometric gardens, warmly lit interiors, herds of cows, glazed green pottery, greetings at open doors. They were all situated and circumscribed by the dirty white tiles. Now he saw the farmhouse she’d sketched in her diary, free of tiles and startlingly real: the kitchen garden, the orchard, the forest with three peaks behind it.
Once the iron door that gave on the tracks rattled fiercely above the deafening roar of a passing train. Once the old fashioned phone on the table rang on and on urgently. He didn’t move.
The pain woke him up. It was 2:46. A train roared by, situating the hour in the afternoon. He wasn’t sure of the day. He looked at the pallet with no more than the imprint of a body. He held his abdomen tightly. Finally he got up. He didn’t bother with his knapsack and ladder. He switched off the light and pushed open the door on the tracks.
He walked between the rails, back turned to the station with the white squares, the last ones lopsided. He had to flatten himself four times in niches before he emerged from the tunnel. Someone was shouting in the station.
He levered himself up onto the platform, went past a telephone booth with smashed glass and graffiti inside.
The opposite platform stretched out like an immensely elongated stage. At his end two young teenagers were shouting. They pushed each other, then started shaking vending machines for coins.
At the further end Theo was on his ladder censoring a poster. It bore no resemblance to a square now. It was a dripping blotch. He got down slowly and advanced the ladder to the next poster. His body seemed wasted, his face skull-like and white as the paint. Now he was doing a correction job on graffiti. It was the wrong shade of green. Part of the graffiti was still visible.
The director moved to the telephone booth as fast as the pain allowed him to.
When she heard him say her name she started making a great fuss, possibly crying even, and he had to answer her question and say that yes, he was all right, but then he couldn’t place another word. It was like a burst dam. She’d thought he was dead, gone a whole week without a word or a simple phone call, had thought he’d been killed in the underground, had phoned his flat a hundred times, even gone there, had thought he was sick inside and had almost gone to the police to ask them to force the door, the business was going to pieces, their best client gone, she’d moved into the office, slept there, ate there, he had no right to do that to her.
When she stopped for breath a second, a harsh intake of air, he told her he’d found Theo in the underground, she should come quickly to … He looked through the smashed glass of the booth at the blue-a
nd-white station plaque. She should come to Trinity station, he said.