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Chiswick Park

Chiswick Park tube station with contrails.

Picture by markhillary: Chiswick Park Station

Theodore checks the back of the box, and sets the timer for 25 minutes. He’s done everything right: the eggs are room temperature, the room is room temperature, the milk is cold and full-fat. He even used the stopwatch function on his phone to make sure he mixed the batter for three minutes precisely. The two eight-inch pans are brand new, but he’s washed them, greased and floured them, lined them with baking parchment, and then greased and floured the parchment as well.

He puts them in to start baking. Shortly after, the timer dings; when he opens the oven door, he finds 12 perfectly-iced cupcakes on a tray.

He pulls them out.

“I don’t think that’s supposed to happen,” he says.

Vikram shrugs. “It’s Chiswick,” he says. “I did warn you. What flavour are they?”

Theodore prods one of the cakes; its icing dents beneath his finger. “The box said chocolate, I think it’s her favourite.”

The icing is cream-coloured. The cake beneath is a warm yellow. “White chocolate?” Vikram asks.

“No.” Theodore pulls the box out of the recycling bin, looking for clues. The bowl sitting by the sink is still lined with scrapings of brown batter.

“Never mind,” Vikram says; picks up a cupcake, sniffs at it. He’s lived in Chiswick for three and a half years, and he’s used to this sort of thing.

Theodore, less experienced, lives in Streatham Hill; he’s only here to borrow Vikram’s oven. He squats down and opens it again, pulling out each shelf. “Did you take—”

“When did I have time? No, of course I didn’t.” Vikram turns the cupcake upside-down, then right-side-up, then pokes out the tip of his tongue to lick the icing. “Citrussy,” he says, and peels the paper case off. “It’sh lime,” he adds with his mouth full. “Sh’good.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense.”

Vikram swallows, and shrugs. “Like I said, we’re in Chiswick.”

Things seem to work out okay, in Chiswick; they just don’t work out predictably. The first English wisteria, brought with impeccable care on a hurried ship from China, was planted in Kew’s own experimental Chiswick garden; it died, while down the road a haphazard cutting flourished at the brewery. The Chiswick Soap Company tried out recipe after recipe in an attempt to perfect their product, or at least come up with something that would make people cleaner instead of dirtier; eventually they gave in and became the Chiswick Boot Polish Company instead. Old naval ropes, brought to Chiswick for cleaning, were transformed into books: the tar leeched out and made ink, the hemp shredded and reformed into paper.

It’s relaxing, if you can manage to sit back and enjoy it. Relish the unexpected. Assume that everything happens for the best. Trust Chiswick.

Trust isn’t Theodore’s strong point.

“Maybe she’ll like them,” Vikram says, halfway through his second cake. “They’re really good.”

“Okay, how about this,” Theodore says. “I’ll try to make a lime cake, and it’ll come out chocolate. Won’t it?”

“Nope,” Vikram says. “Doesn’t work like that.”

“Then how does it work?”

“I dunno. For the unexpected best, usually.”

Theodore sits down and picks up one of the cupcakes, rotates it in a couple of different directions. None of the different angles make it any more comprehensible. “So, what, I’ll find out she likes lime more than chocolate after all and she’ll fall in love with me instantly?”

Vikram shrugs. “Could be.”

“Or she’ll have some sort of… medical attack and only lime can cure her? Or maybe it’s telling me not to bother.”

Vikram shrugs again, and reaches for his third cupcake. They’re pretty small, after all.

Theodore bites into his cake, and crumples the paper, which has small green-brown bows printed on it. “Is that it? Chiswick deigns to inform me that I should give up on love, through the medium of inexplicable cupcakes?”

But he and Vikram reach for the next cake at the same time, and their hands touch. Vikram’s eyes grow wider, the same colour as the golden crust on the cupcakes. Theodore has never noticed, before, the tiny green flecks; they remind him of the bows on the paper cases.

“Oh,” he says. “Wait, what?”

“Oh, I see,” Vikram says after a moment, and laughs.

Posted in District Line. Tagged with , , , .

By Holly
July 24, 2009

3 comments

Chigwell

Chigwell.

Picture by Ewan-M: Essex Tracks

Annabeth is fair and young and lovely; she kicks off her sandals to walk through summer puddles, she knows half the lines from your favourite movie by heart, and she’s never had an ice-cream. If you buy her one incredulously, she’ll jump at the first lick and then she’ll let it drip all over her arms as she laughs in in astonished delight. (She always eats as much as you, though she wears a size 6.)

You’ve been sent to Chigwell to speak at a conference or to look over the company accounts; or at any rate, you own a grey suit, which is more or less the same thing. You’re grumpy on the train, presumably (a week in the country! Ridiculous!), and you make cross noises about mobile phone reception, and you pull the heavily-embroidered coathangers from the hotel’s shabby wardrobe with a wrinkled nose.

Annabeth works at the hotel bar, or maybe she cleans your room, or the kitchen at the company with the accounts you’re going over. Maybe she’s a busker. Maybe she was wandering the streets looking bedraggled and you offered her space on your wickerwork hotel sofa for a few nights, because that’s the sort of man you are: kind to passing homeless blondes who wear lipstick and don’t smell. The point is, you’re somewhere unfamiliar, your life is a grey and dreary one, and there she is. You don’t have long together, but somehow she seems to understand you better than anyone else. Better than the girlfriend who broke up with you because you’d forgotten what was truly valuable in life, or the wife at home who wants to have a child if only you weren’t so afraid, or the grown-up son still bitter about the product-placed Transformers toy you didn’t buy him for a distant Christmas.

You’ll have fun with Annabeth, leaning over a wall somewhere picturesque and shouting into the wind, carefully pulling a single hair from where it’s caught between her lips, running into the woods together laughing and then suddenly falling silent. Maybe after a while she’ll get angry at you, in a pretty and tearful sort of way: she’ll ask you what you’re really running from, or how you’re going to come to terms with the absence of your father, or when you’re going to realise that it’s not your fault your sister died.

After a few days, or a few weeks, it’ll be time for you to leave. You’ll want to stay, of course, but you can’t, and she won’t come with you if you ask - she’s probably got one of those terminal diseases that makes you pale, anyway. She might even have to return to a mysterious faerie world that’s never explicitly discussed, for all you know, I mean she’s called Annabeth. Whatever: point is you have known all along that your time together is fleeting. So you’ll hug, maybe kiss, and then she’ll disappear into the crowds, or the rain, or the mountains, or the fog, or she’ll stand waving as your train pulls away. You don’t have to tell her what she means to you. She knows you’ll never forget her. She’s changed something inside you, something you didn’t even know was there.

When, later, you can’t find your wallet or your netbook, you’ll be too embarrassed to phone the police. Watch out: this could cause identity theft problems in the future. Still, at least you were enlightened!

Posted in Central Line.

By Holly
May 20, 2009

3 comments

Chesham

Chesham.

Picture by brapps: racing off to Chesham

Diana goes to Chesham every May.

She catches the first train of the morning, all the way out, as far from the centre of London as you can go on the Underground. Trees rush past the window. In Chesham, she leans on the brick of the station and surveys her kingdom, then she starts to walk: past the bus shelter, down the road, poking at flowers and grass as the sunlight grows warmer. She’s seen it all before, of course, and the aesthetic appeal of late spring has waned over the years, but she has a job to do.

April 1957, and at Townsend Road School, rumours and notes have been flying for weeks; who’s nicest, who’s prettiest, who’s the most popular, who’s making her mother put her hair in curlers every single night, who was sulking at lunch, who are you voting for? The selection of the May Queen is a complicated process, complete with occasional interference by vote-rigging teachers (or so the rumours have it). The outcome is always in doubt. But there are frontrunners all the same, and grumbling contenders with no chance of victory who declare the whole thing absurd by the middle of the month; some of them say they wouldn’t be Queen even if they won, and a few of them probably mean it.

Diana, frontrunner among frontrunners, nods and says that it does seem a bit silly sometimes, then she goes to pinch her cheeks red in the bathroom and deepen her dimples with a pencil.

May 1957, and the pencils pay off: Diana is the Queen of May. She has a throne, and a white dress, and a host of attendants who didn’t get quite so many votes. Four-year-olds dressed as flower fairies bring ritual tribute. Photographs are taken. It’s a rare May Queen who makes it through the day without bursting into petulant tears, and Diana isn’t one of the exceptions, but helpers rush with handkerchiefs and comfort and sweets, soothing her into contentment again. When she assumes the crown, laid on her head by last year’s Queen as she relinquishes her power, Diana is, it’s quite clear, the centre of the world.

March 1958, and the school’s new headmistress calls off the May Queen elections: they are divisive and cause inharmonious behaviour, and distract the girls from their work. This decision causes widespread dismay, but nobody can deny that the objections are, in fact, true, so April comes and goes with no votes, with no rumours, with no more tears and broken friendships and disappointment and sorrow and glee than any other month.

And Diana never lays the crown upon another’s head; and she is still, technically, the Queen of May.

She doesn’t realise until 1968, when she moves out of Chesham in February and comes back to visit in June; when she returns the bluebells and the daffodils are still in flower, in midsummer, and the asparagus has yet to ripen. “That’s Chesham weather for you,” her mother says, but by the time Diana leaves the next day the lilacs are beginning to wilt, the roses are accelerating through buds into bloom. Coincidence, perhaps, but why risk it? So the next year she comes back on the first of May, just to get the process started, and the year after that, and the year after that.

The dress, of course, no longer fits; and at 63 she no longer has any patience with the trappings of her queendom. The crown is in a box in her attic somewhere, but the rest of the paraphernalia went to a charity shop years ago. Her procession is simple: into Chesham in comfortable shoes, make sure May gets started as it ought to, shake a few trees in the orchard if they’re still showing blossom, and then back home in time for afternoon tea.

One day, she supposes, she ought to crown a successor, but for now it’s quite nice to feel special and efficient and to keep the seasons turning, even if the cost of a journey all the way out to Zone 9 is frankly ridiculous.

Posted in Metropolitan Line. Tagged with , .

By Holly
May 18, 2009

6 comments

Charing Cross

Charing Cross.

Picture by Lawrence UP: London Icons III

John Rivet, Brazier, is in his workshop, along with his tools, his wife Elizabeth, three chairs, a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, an empty jug, seventeen pieces of paper, a mouse (unseen), the large table he uses for work, the smaller table they use for meals, two cobwebs, and the legs and body of a very large brass horse. The head of the very large horse, and the body of its brass rider, disappear through the ceiling to emerge in the bedroom above. Elizabeth is not best pleased.

“I thought you were supposed to destroy it,” she says.

“I was, I am,” John says. “But it’s the king!”

“If it was just the king,” Elizabeth says, “I wouldn’t mind so much. We could prop him up in a corner under a blanket. But there’s the horse, John, it’s enormous.”

John reaches up to pat it on the flank. “A Horsse in Brasse bigger then a greate Horsse by a foot,” he says, quoting the commissioning document, “and the figure of his Maj King Charles proportionable full six foot, which the afore saide Hubert le sueur is to performe with all the skill and Workmanship as leith in his powoer. Who am I to destroy the best work of Hubert le Sueur? Who am I to destory the image of the king, for that matter?”

“You’re someone who’s been paid,” Elizabeth says. “And we shouldn’t even call him the king any more. You’ve been given money to destroy a statue of someone who’s been executed, John, which is what’s going to happen to you if anyone finds this here. Look, I’m not going to say anything about the hole in the ceiling, all right? But the statue has to go.”

He frowns.

“John,” Elizabeth says. “Love. It’s beautiful, but you know you can’t keep it. Parliament’s bound to want proof that you destroyed it.”

“I’ll show them the melted-down candlesticks,” he says, “and the old bugle.”

Elizabeth looks at him, and then at the statue.

“And nobody ever comes in here but us,” he adds. His eyes are so wide and hopeful. And the horse does have a certain grace to it.

“I could paint it,” he says. “Yellow, even. You like yellow. It’d be cheerful.”

“I don’t want a statue of a dead king watching us in bed,” she says. “Even a cheerful yellow dead king.”

“Then I’ll blindfold him. He’s not even facing the bed anyway, he’s facing out toward the window.” He’s talking fast.

She tries to imagine it yellow. The tail’s quite handy, at least, she could hang her spare cap there easily enough.

“Elizabeth,” John says.

“You’d have to cover over the, you know,” she says, and nods at the horse’s penis, which is impressively in proportion to the rest of the statue. “I’m not having my dinner under that.”

“Of course,” John says, and smiles.

Posted in Bakerloo Line, Northern Line. Tagged with , , .

By Holly
May 13, 2009

1 comment

Chancery Lane

Chancery Lane.

Picture by James.Stringer: Chancery Lane

“Are you absolutely sure,” Dilly says, “this isn’t personal vengeance?”

Karina pulls on her leggings. She’s dressed in dusky rose because come on, who wears black in summer? “Yes,” she says. “I promise, okay? This isn’t personal vengeance.”

In further deference to the heat, the mask leaves her nose and mouth uncovered. A plait juts from the slit in the back of her skintight hood. “Hey,” she says, “profile pic?” and she tosses her phone across, stands against her turquoise wall and poses.

Dilly photographs dutifully, and passes the phone back. “You’ve got it on silent, right?”

Karina smiles. “Better than that,” she says. “Here, call me.”

Dilly does; birdsong erupts.

“I’m pretty sure,” Dilly says, “that’s a bad idea.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s an awesome idea. Like Robin Hood in the forest.”

“You do know we’re not actually in a forest, right? I think people are going to notice birdsong at one in the morning.”

Karina rolls her eyes. “They’re barristers,” she says. “They’ve got no souls, why would they pay attention to a singing bird?”

“A singing bird inside?”

“Well, obviously I’ll turn it off once I’m in. I’m not stupid.”

She isn’t; she just has this thing about barristers. She was engaged to three of them once—unfortunately simultaneously rather than concurrently, which is part of why the weddings never happened. To be cast over by not one nor even two but three dismayed barristers, all in the course of a single evening: surely a cause for anyone to resort to vengeful acts of small crime?

“It wouldn’t bother me,” Dilly says as they stand against a wall in Chancery Lane, waiting for a cloud to block off the moon, “it we still made money off it! But we had a perfectly lucrative business model, the one where you steal gold and jewels and I sell them, and now we have a less lucrative business model in which you mostly steal wigs. It seems like a poorly-considered change of business tactics, and I can’t think of a reason that isn’t just vengeance and spite.”

“That’s because you have no imagination,” Karina says, drumming against the stonework with her fingertips. “I like… I like the sense of breaking the law in the stronghold of those who enforce it.”

“Then maybe you should break into a police station.”

“They have guns,” Karina says. “And the buildings are all made of, you know, red brick and cement blocks. New Scotland Yard is just windows, there’s nothing to get a grip on.” She looks up at ledges and pillars and ornate windowsills.

“I don’t think they even do criminal law in there, just broken contracts and ginger beer snails,” Dilly says, but the cloud cover’s arrived at last, and Karina’s climbing.

They get home just before dawn, and overturn the loot sack onto the centre of the living room floor. A few pens, none of them worth selling. A watch. A text book, a family photo. Five wigs.

“If it’s not petty vengeance,” Dilly says, “then why did it start when the barristers broke up with you?”

Karina sets the wigs on top of the others in the corner, then sits down gently. “Why would I need to steal wigs when I could just use theirs?” she says, and nestles into the pile, content.

Posted in Central Line. Tagged with , , .

By Holly
May 12, 2009

1 comment

Chalk Farm

Chalk Farm Road.

Picture by tonyhall: Chalk Farm Road Fire

Chalk Farm, perhaps inevitably, isn’t as exciting as it sounds. During the day there’s nothing but fields of scrubby brassica; and at night, when the chalkpullers are working, spectators are banned. The harvest takes place on cloudy nights, undocumented, under cover of a tarp rolled out between the walls. It’s best to be safe. The young chalk bruises so easily that the flash of a torch or a camera could ruin a night’s work.

In the old days they did it all by touch: chalk harvesting was the first resort of blind children who lacked the musical aptitude for piano tuning. Nowadays there are night-vision goggles, but Rashamma is a holdover from the forties, stalking the rows with her fingers outstretched, squatting down to worm them into the ground.

The chalk is soft and malleable. In the bounty years of the 50s it grew to maturity so fast, so lithe, that she could wind it around her waist as she went. Even now she can pull out strands two metres or more before they snap, though she always carries them with arms outstretched, as straight as she can, and lays them on pallets for wheeling into the warehouses.

The processing plants are dark as well, and the women recognise each other by the sound of footsteps: heels or sneakers, quick or slow. Hannah walks in waltz time, heavy on the ground with every third step, and nobody notices in the city, but here they hum “My Favourite Things” as she passes.

She adjusts the colour settings, upping the red and green. A long time ago, pink chalk came from harvesting under a red moon; then, for hundreds of years, it came from sunlight cast through red silk. Nowadays there are numbers and charts and graphs, but the process still relies on instinct. Different harvests take the light in very different ways.

Hannah thinks, sometimes, about trying to distill her intuition into a set of rules, even an automated process, but no company would fund that level of research and development, not now. Blackboards and hopscotch are all but gone, chalk farming is a dying industry; ten percent of Britain’s chalkfields are uprooted every year to make way for whiteboard markers.

Shame, really.

She shifts the filters again, and then, finally satisfied, pulls the cord for a two minute exposure. No need for her to fret: the last fields of the chalk farms will last out her working life. Carpenters and dressmakers and half-hearted revolutionaries will keep them going for a while yet. And there’s part of her that relishes the gradual destruction, just for the glory of it, the bulldozers sent to rake up crops in the foolhardy day, the explosions of dust and colour as new chalk is overturned into sunlight.

Posted in Northern Line. Tagged with , , .

By Holly
May 6, 2009

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