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Belsize Park

Warning sign foreground, tunnel background.

Picture by axelrd: Belsize Park

Lara sorts out a broadband connection for her father, claiming she wants to send him pictures of Jess; secretly she hopes he might finally give up hangliding if he has something else to do with his afternoons.

It works, a little. He starts by joining every gardening forum he can find, trying to figure out how to grow an outdoor pitcher plant in Sussex (he settles for a Venus Flytrap in the end). Later, he graduates to ordering out-of-print spy fiction off AbeBooks and writing cross Have Your Say letters under a variety of pseudonyms. A month after that, he finds YouTube.

“Many people have skiied down the escalators of the London Underground…” he says on his next weekend visit.

They’re waiting for a southbound train in Belsize Park, after two hours spent chasing Jess over Hampsted Heath. Lara would very much like a cup of tea. “One person,” she says. “Not many. One. And he was arrested.” She’s not sure about that last bit, but then, she spent half her childhood convinced that she’d go bald if she didn’t stop chewing on her hair. Benevolent lies are in her blood.

“…but nobody has ever waterskiied through the tunnels themselves.”

“There are a lot of really good reasons for that,” Lara says. “And just one of them is the fact that tube tunnels don’t have water in them.”

Alan frowns. “That’s true,” he says. The gardening forums will know about hoses, though.

“What worries me,” Lara says, pulling Jessmyn away from the yellow line, “is that Jess is twenty-five percent your genes.”

Alan scrunches his nose at his granddaughter, and she giggles. “What worries me,” he says, “is the third rail. I suppose the water’s going to be electrified.”

“I don’t know,” Lara says, “why don’t put a couple of sharks in and see how they do? If they live you’ll know it’s safe, and you can just ski-jump over them to add excitement,” but Alan never watched much TV and he hasn’t read that bit of the internet yet, so it sounds like a pretty good idea to him.

Posted in Northern Line. Tagged with , .

By Holly
February 23, 2009

1 comment

Becontree

Rainy shapes around Becontree.

Picture by Nicobobinus: Becontree Heath

Pinkett is tired of the city: harried sighs, suspicious glares, shouting, pushing, crowds. He heads to the suburbs instead, west to Kew on Monday, Richmond on Tuesday. Wednesday he goes east instead, no real destination in mind, but sunlight and warm red paint lure him out of the train at Becontree.

He’s hoping for a leafy hinterland idyll, so he’s disappointed to find a vast council estate; and he’s not very pleased by the slow, persistent drizzle that displaces the sunlight almost immediately. Still, he’s here now. Might as well make the best of it.

He tucks a clipboard under his arm and knocks at the first door.

No answer; nor at the second, or third. A teenager in pyjamas at the fourth.

“Hello,” Pinkett says. “I’m Richard from InQuire, we’re a market research company, and I was wondering if you had a few minutes to answer some questions. You’ll be helping us out, and we might even be able to help you. We put all our respondents into a monthly draw, with prizes ranging from a new toaster to a new home!”

The teenager shuts the door.

Next: small man with a beard and several children. Next: nobody home. Next: tall old woman wearing a raincoat, talking too quickly for Pinkett to understand. He thinks about grabbing the coat and running away; the drizzle’s coming down heavier now. Instead he loops around the block and heads back toward the station; and that’s when he sees the house.

It’s halfway down the street, and it’s painted light purple, surely against estate regulations. The front garden has a tiny green lawn, and a birdbath, and miniature rose bushes lining a mossy path.

The bell ding-dongs when he presses it, which disappoints him a little (he was half-expecting “Greensleeves”), and the door is opened by a dumpy woman in her — forties, maybe? Old enough that she should have grown out of hip-length purple-streaked hair, anyway. And the cheesecloth dress isn’t doing her any favours. Pinkett decides she’s probably named Amber.

“Hello,” he says. “I’m Richard from InQuire, we’re a market research company, and I was wondering if you had a few minutes to answer some questions. You’ll be helping us out, and we might even be able to help you. We put all our respondents into a monthly draw, with prizes ranging from a new toaster to a new home!”

“Ooh,” says Amber. “What sort of questions?”

“Well,” Pinkett says, standing under the overhang of the roof and flipping open his clipboard. “Could you start by telling me what you do?”

“Sure,” Amber says. “I’m an alternative therapist.”

Pinkett writes it down. “Great,” he says. “And can you name three brands that you consider reliable?”

Amber thinks for a moment. “Lindt, the BBC, and Marmite.”

Pinkett ticks a couple of boxes. “Lovely. Now, which would you say,” he asks, “is the most patronising hot drink?”

Amber frowns and leans against the doorframe. “Low-calorie hot chocolate,” she says. “The Cadbury brand. Highlights.”

“And which is the most corruptible?”

“Ooh. Strawberry tea.”

“Which fruit do you buy for its serenity?”

She smiles, conspiratorial. “White-flesh peaches. It’s the fluffy skin that does it.”

White-flesh peaches cost a pound each. Pinkett ticks another box. “I’m now going to read out a list, one item at a time. I want you to give me the first word or phrase that pops into your head. Gun.”

“Bang.”

“Jackie Chan.”

“Um, Rush Hour?”

Housemate prompts sitcom, alarm prompts clock. After pet prompts unicorn and a gust of wind through the open door sets windchimes tinkling inside, Pinkett decides he can afford to skip attack, boyfriend and husband. “Okay,” he says, drawing a knife and pushing into the hallway. “There’s one last thing I’d like you to do for me, and that’s to put all your jewellery and your other valuables in a pillow case.”

Amber sighs; Zapphirea charges out of the kitchen and gores the nice man right through his heart.

Posted in District Line. Tagged with , , .

By Holly
February 20, 2009

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Beckton Park

Leaves outside Beckton Park DLR station

Picture by Kake Pugh: Beckton Park DLR Station

Spring comes all of a sudden, long before it’s due.

Yesterday all the coats were grey or black. This morning there’s pale green, and pink, and right in front of Annika there’s glowing golden yellow, embroidered daffodils with beading on the stamen. It’s the daftest thing she’s seen in six months, and it makes her so happy.

These aren’t new clothes; nature’s seasons have been quicker than the high street’s, this time around. Some of the coats still show folds from where they’ve been stashed in boxes or pushed to the back of a cupboard, crumpled and ignored since May. Some of them must have been bought last-minute in 2008’s spring or summer sales, price tags torn out only this morning. Some of them are ugly by the new year’s standards, orange and pink stripes, blue plaid. It doesn’t matter: this isn’t fashion, it’s celebration, it’s an involuntary startled hodgepodge of colour and growth. It’s a confused squirrel digging up the very first crocus, an early bumblebee warming its fat bottom until it’s buoyant enough to lift into air.

This is the mark of the new season: the casting off of winter’s thick dark wool. Men’s scarves are hanging loose, no longer looped into a tight winter knot.

There are still plenty of the old coats about, of course: Annika is wrapped in charcoal, her scarf dark red. She doesn’t feel left out. There’s no exclusionary sisterhood of colourful outerwear. It’s just spring. She stands in the same place she always does, and for the first time in months, sunlight hits the tip of her shoes before the train arrives.

It’s dark when she gets home that night, but she leaves the lights off anyway to summon in long evenings.

The gloom makes it harder to work out where her own spring coat might be: folded up in the bottom of the blanket box? Pushed to the back of the closet behind the vacuum cleaner? In the end she finds it right at the bottom of the laundry basket, tangled in two towels and a pillowcase. The moths have been kind, and taken only the pillowcase, which has three wide holes in almost the right places for robbing a bank or amusing a small child. Annika pulls it over her head, laughs out of the mouth-hole, then stumbles down the stairs in the dark.

It’s spring, though, and a twisted ankle is nothing much. The next morning she wears her bright coat and limps down the platform to stand in what should be full sunlight. The sky is white, and snows a little, unexpectedly, but she can tell it doesn’t really mean it.

Posted in Docklands Light Railway. Tagged with , .

By Holly
February 18, 2009

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Beckton

Beckton Alps

Picture by otrops: Beckton Alps

It’s never easy to dispose of toxic waste, even if you’re attentive and diligent and never let it build up for more than a week. If you’ve ignored your increasing hills of the stuff for 150 years, hiding them behind factories and smoke, there’s not much you can do other than (a) put them up for rent as a film location, and (b) hope they don’t give anyone superpowers.

Roger Moore hangs from the underside of a helicopter as it zeroes in on a small Pacific island. He can’t help wishing that Beckton Gas Works had been slightly more diligent, or that he’d quit after Moonraker, or at the very least that they’d used a stuntman to film the scene in For Your Eyes Only that left him with superstrength, x-ray vision, ultrasonic hearing, and severe lactose intolerance.

Still, there’s nothing to be done about it now. He nods at John Wayne, counts three, and then the two of them swing and let go, falling straight into the heart of the volcano far below.

Splash. Hiss. Their clothes dissolve.

Roger Moore wipes the lava from his eyes with one invulnerable hand. “Where is it?” he says.

John Wayne is already diving under the surface. “Straight down,” he says, coming back up for breath and flicking open his tertiary eyelids. “Pretty deep.”

Roger Moore nods. “All right,” he says. “Are you ready?”

“I’m always ready,” John Wayne replies, and the two of them dive.

It’s difficult to tell, from above, what’s going on beneath the lava. Still, the volcano doesn’t explode: that’s definitely a good sign.

Peter Cushing takes one hand from the helicopter controls, and uses his cane to push the rope ladder out the door as he flies lower. “A waste of a good tailor’s work if you ask me,” he says, as Roger Moore and John Wayne climb in, “but nicely done all the same. There ought to be spare clothes in the red box behind you.”

Usually they find a nearby restaurant to celebrate, after they’ve saved the world, but the “spare clothes” turn out to consist of a clown suit and a large Edwardian night-dress, so they go for a picnic on a nearby mountain peak instead. The scones are cold, but Peter Cushing reheats them with his microwave hands.

The mountains remind Roger Moore of Beckton Alps, and that confused brightly-coloured week after his superpowers came. “I think,” he says, “that we should do something about Beckton.”

John Wayne rummages through the basket. “Has anyone seen the clotted cream?”

Roger Moore ignores him; he can’t eat cream anyway. “Stanley Kubrick is going to be filming there in a few months,” he says.

Peter Cushing grimaces. John Wayne grins. “Stan’s okay,” he says.

“I’m sure he is,” Roger Moore says. “I just don’t want him to turn into an invulnerable superhero. I think it would be a bad thing for him, and a bad thing for cinema. Also, the world.”

John Wayne’s found the clotted cream and he doesn’t respond immediately, but Roger Moore won’t let up. In the end, they take a vote and it’s 2-1; so that night they fly the helicopter to Beckton, scoop up most of the toxic hills, and bury them in Norfolk.

(John Wayne is worried that Doctor McFrenzy — previously Angela the continuity girl — will drain his superpowers again and he’ll need a top-up, so he insists on leaving the last hill in place. Roger Moore hides it under a dry ski slope, which is almost as foolproof a plan as it seems.)

Posted in Docklands Light Railway. Tagged with , , , , , .

By Holly
February 16, 2009

3 comments

Bayswater

Bayswater station platform, apparently empty.

Picture by jonrawlinson: bayswater train station

The carriage empties at Victoria and Johann stands up again, walks to one end and then back. He takes hold of a pole, spare hand grasping in the air for something to catch onto.

Talbot leans back in his seat and sips from the lid of his thermos. “You know,” he says, “vampirism isn’t the, ha, undeath sentence it used to be. It’s true that there isn’t a cure, but what the popular media doesn’t understand is that ‘no cure’ isn’t the same as ‘no effective treatment’. There’s no cure for diabetes either, but it’s a long time since it was a major killer. These days the most serious symptoms can be suppressed indefinitely, with the proper medication — you won’t lust for human blood, you won’t turn to dust in the sunlight. You won’t even have to give up garlic bread.” He smiles broadly; his teeth are yellow.

“But the reflections,” Johann says. He can’t bear to look at the windows and see the empty space looking back.

Talbot nods acknowledgement. “Yes,” he says, “it’s true that there’s still no treatment for the reflections. Not too bad for an old man like me, but it’s going to be hard for you.”

“And cameras?” Johann feels like he’s gone pale, and paler still with the fear of never seeing himself blanch again.

“Same thing, I’m afraid.”

“But I’m an actor.”

Talbot shrugs. “There are three vampires in the RSC,” he says.

“Theatre,” Johann spits out. “What else are you going to suggest — radio? Dead media for a dead man?”

Talbot pours a little more coffee, rocking gently. “Undead,” he says. “And it’s not the only recourse.”

Johann’s sob is half laughter. He remembers Puppet Pam. You can be the nation’s best-loved soap star, and viewers still won’t stand for it when you turn invisible to the cameras and start to use a marionette instead of a body.

“Things have come on a long way since then,” Talbot says. “Puppet Pam had to drink fresh pigs’ blood, don’t forget; absurd, in this nation of meat-eaters, but it turned people against her. We’re past all that now, and computer generated images are good these days. Better than you probably imagine. Not just motion-tracking: every movement of your face, if you slap on a good enough sensor mask.” He takes another sip. “You’ve heard the rumours about deliberate infection?”

“Criminals who want to be CCTV-safe,” Johann says. “Teenagers in black lace.”

“Not exclusively.” Talbot swallows the last of the coffee in a gulp, then screws the lid back on and stands up without a pole, balancing himself against the motion of the train. “Think about who else wants to stay away from cameras, who can’t go down the shops without paparrazzi spotting chocolate biscuits in the shopping basket and pasting SLOB CELEB headlines over the free papers. Think about whose unblemished face on television screens is almost eerily smooth. Think about who will go to any lengths to keep their acne scars and pock marks out of public view, now that HDTV wants to reveal them to the world.”

Johann’s silent, then: “Someone would know. Someone would have said. The paparazzi…”

“Would what? Wave around a picture of a basket floating in the air and say no really, when we took the picture there was someone famous there, please believe me? They’ve done it, Johann, but the editors say nah, it’s some random vampire shopper being victimised, it’s a basket suspended by fishing line, and even if it isn’t how do you photograph someone’s inability to be photographed?” Talbot steps towards Johann and lowers his voice. “And they don’t want to spread the rumour for its own sake. It might give their other targets ideas. Come on, I’ve got something to show you.”

“I just want to go home,” Johann says.

“Shush.” Talbot takes his arm and pulls hard, and they stumble onto the platform. “Up here.”

BAYSWATER, the sign says. Johann wrenches his arm free.

“Listen,” Talbot says, turning to face him. “There’s two houses up there with no rooms, no roof, just the facade, walls and doors and windows sitting there to make sure nobody can see the trainline behind them.”

Johann’s crying now; someone edges away down the platform.

“It’s all right,” Talbot says quietly. “I know it’s hard, but Johann, it’s all right. They know about appearances, here. They know about gloss and surface and sensor masks and everything you could ever want, and I promise it’s going to be all right. There’s a lot of expensive buildings in Bayswater, but there’s not many of those big plate glass windows that reflect the whole street, are there? There’s a reason for that. I’ll show you.”

He reaches out and takes Johann’s arm again. Johann hesitates for a moment, then lets himself be guided upward, slowly, toward the vampire capital of Europe.

Posted in Circle Line, District Line. Tagged with , , .

By Holly
February 13, 2009

2 comments

Barons Court

A train drives past at Barons Court, slightly too fast to photograph clearly.

Picture by bbcbob: District line arrives

His name was Christian Frederick Charles Alexander. It was quite a long name: longer than his father’s, and his mother’s, and his sister’s. It wasn’t quite so long as his older brother’s, but his older brother was dead.

It was, however, a shorter name than Caroline Friederike von Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld, and since Caroline Friederike von Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld was his wife, he found this troubling. He dealt with the problem by maintaining several mistresses, each with a name significantly shorter than his own, and by starting a bank named the Hochfürstlich-Brandenburg-Anspach-Bayreuthische Hofbanco.

“The… the what?” his wife asked.

“The Hochfürstlich-Brandenburg-Anspach-Bayreuthische Hofbanco,” he said, and nodded firmly. “Caroline.”

When his wife died he married Elizabeth Craven, the mistress with the shortest name, and enjoined her to never again speak of the satirical novel she had written (unfortunately titled Modern Anecdotes of the Ancient Family of the Kinkvervankotsdarsprakengotchderns). Shortly afterwards he moved with her to England, where his long name was even more remarkable — especially as he was a Margrave, a title longer than any widely employed in Britain (women’s titles didn’t count, “viscount” was technically the same length but didn’t take so much space to write, and “baronet”, the next longest, barely counted as a title at all).

So his name was long, and he was happy, and then he died. And then, after a while, Barons Court tube station was built, just down the road from where he used to live, and it all went wrong.

Christian Frederick Charles Alexander is now, some say, the grumpiest ghost in all of London.

“Margrave’s Court,” he says in a Brandenburg accent that has only grown stronger since his death. “What would have been wrong with that? I’m not even asking for Christian Frederick Charles Alexander Court, not that it wouldn’t be nice of course but Margrave would have been perfectly fine. If they had to anglicise I could even have tolerated “Marquess’s Court”; perfectly acceptable English word, leaves me my eight letters.”

“I thought the place wasn’t, strictly speaking,” says Aubrey de Vere, “named after you in the first place.” Aubrey de Vere haunts Earl’s Court — which actually is named after him, more or less — but he takes in the rest of the District Line on weekends.

“Of course it was named after me. I lived right over there! I died here! I died for their tube station, and this is how the people of London repay me?”

Aubrey de Vere sighs. They’ve had this conversation before (it’s the only conversation they ever have), but he persists. “I can’t help but feel,” he says, “that if you could learn to let go of this, you might find yourself freed from the bonds that tie you to earth, no longer condemned to pace this lowly world as an impotent ghost.”

“I am not,” Christian Frederick Charles Alexander says, “an impotent ghost.”

“Oh look,” Aubrey de Vere says, “that’s my train.”

“I am an impotent apparition!” Christian Frederick Charles Alexander shouts after him, and puts his fist through the BARONS COURT sign for the third time that day. The sign doesn’t seem to mind.

Posted in District Line, Piccadilly Line. Tagged with , , .

By Holly
February 11, 2009

14 comments