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

14 - A Meeting is Called

 “Lads!”

  The rowdy rabble of men jostling around upon the lower floor of the Common Room  – really just an open cavern between the escalator banks and the westbound Piccadilly Line platform that was, during the evenings, at least, full of raucous, drunken man-children whom acted as if they were a set of brain-damaged gorillas. –  did not stand to order as Victor opened his mouth. Voices of dozens of visibly weary and aggravated operatives filled the dry air as a blur of warped sound; nobody seemed to be able to distinguish anybody else’s voice at all. It took a full two minutes – two of the dullest minutes of my life and two of the most tedious of Victor’s – for the crowd to realise that their attempts to talk and make each other heard were futile. The sound of the various voices began to fade, due not to Victor’s insistence but due to the pointlessness of its circulation, leaving the all too familiar buzz of the generators and the overhead lights as the only sound which could be heard within Holborn Station.

    “Thank you,” he groaned after a fashion. “Thank you for the silence.” Victor attempted to remain as quiet as possible despite the fact that his voice had to project itself all the way back to the platform behind the rear pillar of the Common Room, deciding it was best to try and maintain the relatively calm, informal tone whilst addressing the crowd. “I hope that, in the few hours since you were notified about the time change of this morning’s meeting, you have all been able to memorise most of the briefing that was sent to all of you in the early hours.”

    I gave an affirmative nod before Victor had even finished speaking. Following my lead, the other operatives lining the front row of the bundled mass standing on the floor of the Common Room gave an uncertain nod towards Victor and muttered aggravated grumbles of ‘Yes’ and ‘Course I have’ under their breaths. Though I had spent most of the few hours since our tiff with Will going through the ins and outs of the subject of the briefing – Operation Acre – it became painfully obvious that most of the other operatives had done no such thing.

    “Yes, well,” continued Victor disapprovingly. “I decided to call the meeting at an earlier time in order to run through the plan. I thought – and my thought has been, judging by the obvious nervous silence in here, proved correct – that most of you would be too lazy or too hammered to follow orders.” Victor, it seemed, was attempting to talk a much bigger game than his voice would allow. There was no conviction or projection in his voice at all; he was like a scrawny schoolboy trying to stand up to a particularly nasty and notorious group of bullies. “Has anyone in this room,” he huffed wearily, “even looked at the briefing I sent to all of you, let alone memorised it?”

 The room turned a deaf ear to Victor’s inquiry, this time not even bothering to dignify it with even a snarky response. Small groups began to form once more, all holding conversations about subjects which were pointless to discuss considering the circumstances the people holding them found themselves in; I heard utterances about football, about film and about – and I quote – who they would rather fuck.  Victor himself had taken to resting himself nonchalantly on the railing of the staircase he was stood on, a metal structure secured with randomly placed cross-braces, as if he were a regular on the dole who had given up on resurrecting any hope he had of finding work.

   After a good minute and a half, Victor finally found the ability to haul his heavy head upright again, and made another attempt to address the crowd – which had now formed into groups resembling the cliques we had passed whilst walking up to the surface last night – but it was hardly any better than his previous attempts. In fact, it was a damned sight worse than all of his previous attempts put together. “There really is no bloody point in us being here, is there?” he moaned, attempting to yank his entire body off of the handrail. “There’s no point whatsoever. If this is your attitude towards the war we have found ourselves chucked into the middle of, then we may as well just hand ourselves over as prisoners right now, without a fight.”