Take Back The City - Part One of the 'Life in London Town' series

9 - A Look Back at a Nightmarish Night

 Victor stared at me, a sympathetic yet nonplussed look dominating his face. He was sitting at a tiny desk he had managed to shift through the door of this room in the depths of Holborn Station, with an Underground map covered with a confusing, eclectic network of multi-coloured lines and arrows lying in front of him. Ignoring the blinking lamp hanging ominously from a single exposed wire above his head, he kept his gaze fixed upon me for a full thirty seconds with an eerie aura of confusion. Throughout this strange encounter I found myself rooted to the spot, unable to make a dart for the door that would lead me towards the escalators to the surface or retreat calmly back into the unoccupied hammock behind me and, of course, could not remove the harrowing image of the silhouette in the smoke of the destroyed coat shop upon the junction of Newburgh Street and Fouberts Place from my broken head.

    “You’re crying, Nox,” he interjected, shoving aside the airs of the awkward silence. “You should wipe your eyes. It’s like I’m looking at a relief map of the River Lea here.”

    I didn’t realise it at first, but he was right. Tears were streaming down my face at a rate of knots and beginning to slowly cake my face in a crusty layer of forlorn emotion. “Thank you, Victor.” I stared at the map for a little while, staring intently at the strange lines he had weaved across its surface like little rivers of ink. It gave me a perfect opportunity to turn conversation away from the flow of tears I was trying to prevent gliding down my cheeks.  “What’re you planning now,” I sniffed.

   “Oh, this,” responded Victor calmly. “It-It’s not important – well, it is important, very important, but what’s more important is finding out exactly why you’re in the state you are in.”

No luck. His attention was, unwaveringly, focussed upon the crystalline drips of water adorning my face which, though they were no longer rushing down my face in grand, melancholy waterfalls, were still dripping down onto the cold, jagged floor. “Why are you upset, then?” he asked calmly, concerned not to make my emotional condition any worse than it once was. “You seemed fine in my office earlier despite the story about the ambush at Seven Dials.”

      I said nothing. I tried to look at the lamp hanging above the map, and despite the surprising level of mesmerisation it gave me, it couldn’t drag my attention away from Victor’s eyes for long, nor did it let me forget the image of the silhouette in the smoke – to be honest, I could have sworn that I had seen the silhouette quite a few times since leaving my hammock; in the lamp, for example, and in the dust on the curved, tiled wall on one side of the room, the only clue still left that we were sitting on what used to be a station platform. “You’re still crying,” he noted, and once again, he was right. I wiped the few little drips that had managed to flow down my face onto my slowly disintegrating shirt and tried not to open my mouth. The light, hanging over Victor’s head by the thin strand of a single exposed metal wire, was flickering still. “Has anything happened tonight to leave you in this state?”

    “No,” I replied.

    The light was still flickering.

     “Tell me, Nox.”

     The smell of looted booze kept sweeping across the quarters. Between one of the Piccadilly Line platforms that ran through Holborn and the escalators that led from them to the surface was a small intermediate concourse split by a flight of stairs and decorated with chequered tiles; this was the Holborn Common Room, used as a recreational room – read ‘dodgy local pub’ – by some of the operatives of Holborn. Quite often, some of the men who resided with us at Holborn would rush off on early morning rounds to some of the now-deserted bars at Covent Garden to steal cheap beer to gulp down in this makeshift Common Room; some of these beers must have been cracked open to relieve memories of the battle.