We are going to a party at Siobhan’s friend’s apartment on the south side of the Embankment and are taking the train. So we get on at the Angel and take the lift, an old wooden box, down into the Underground.
The platforms we walk through are dark and grimy, brown muddied walls and hidden tunnels, and the service is running slow.
We wait on Platform 2 of the Central line, it seems like for an age, before a train finally arrives, but when it comes to a stop it is already full, people crushed together, all the way up to the ceiling.
The bodies are pressed flat against the glass and there is no way we are getting on. We will wait for the next one.
The next train is a flat bed, cargo only, with a thick plain white rectangular box which covers the deck. It speeds through the tunnel, and we continue to wait.
And the next train will be a passenger train but it will be a long time coming. We wait in anticipation but by the time it arrives the train is ill-lit from the inside and it speeds through the tunnel and disappears the other side without stopping.
It seems we’ll never get there.
“We’ll take the Circle or the District line,” I suggest. Only you have to exit the station and cross the road to the other side of the roundabout to get to the platform.
So we leave, ascending once more with the lift and cross over to the entrance of the Circle and District.
“We can take either line,” I say as we enter down into a dark corridor, intersecting rail line tracks to our left, cavernous walls dark and dripping with sweat. We have to hurry as the District line carriages clank across the lines and past us, towards their stop.
But when we arrive at the platform the problem is the same; though at the start, there were only a few passengers waiting, the crowd begins to pile up. People in dark clothing, faces barely discernible.
“We are meeting at The Kestrel,” says Siobhan. She means Reed’s place.
“But that is nowhere near the Embankment,” I say. “That is in Hammersmith.” I pull out a piece of paper to work out the directions, but it is too small to write on.
“I need something bigger,” and I turn back to her. “Have you got something?”
But Siobhan is distracted, she doesn’t reply and I have to repeat it. And only then does she pull out a larger piece of paper, the size of my hand, that I can use.
“We should go back to the Central line,” I continue. I am getting frustrated that we wasted all this time waiting for the wrong train.
We are exiting the station, onto the road that leads away from both stations, when I suggest we can take an Uber. The greying light of dusk is in the distance.
“Why didn’t you suggest that in the first place?” she says, spitting the words at me, but it was her who got us lost in the first place.
“I’m not going,” I respond, “I’ve had it!”
And I walk away, to the right of me a chain link fence, a construction site behind the fence, both stations further behind me.
“I’m not going,” I reiterate. I walk slowly.
And she follows me, she too is going the wrong way.
But this is it. Where we will really part.
I circle even slower back round the roundabout, time and fear crawls, me slightly ahead of her, until we are back on the Angel side.
I am practically at a stop when Siobhan comes up alongside, to my left. She has thick pale blonde hair and a slightly pudgy face, thick lips like Becky Farmer, unvarnished, and she is attractive at that very moment; it is eating me up.
“I want to fly around naked,” she says and she smiles.
We cannot do it. Part. I don’t want to.
“Will you do that for me?” I ask her. And then I kiss her full on the lips.
Photo via Wallpaper Flare
