Tunnel Walls

Chapter One

Everyone knows that feeling you get in the back of your throat, dry, coated in dust, trapped. There’s a cough stuck in the back of my throat; I want to make the sound, to get it out. The feeling I’m talking about, that everyone knows, like when you spend too much time in a tunnel, I hate it.

Obviously it’s an understandable feeling, most of the city’s population live underground, and therefore in tunnels, long snakes of passages which house our entire lives. The ceiling is the sky for us of average intelligence, the ceiling only about 40 feet high and constantly spewing out a sickly medicine orange light. Every now and again there’s a white light from Upper, I used to see a glimpse from my school window, but then was transferred to a higher tier class. You see, you have to be intelligent to live on the surface. They say it’s a meritocratic society. They say I could be leading part of it.

I say that’s crap. 

Instead I’m delving even further below our urban streets and into the tubes, the only transport there is around London. I’ve learnt that these are beautiful places, sometimes the tiles make patterns in forgotten corners of the system, but sometimes they’re ugly and redbrick and crumbling. Seldom, in a secluded spot, on a rare wall there’s paint. 

Artwork, graffiti, messages left all over the city. Cropping up every now and again would be a symbol, an A inside a circle or a broken gear. Then there would be words following: ‘Lies’, ‘Truth’, ‘Power’. The phrases are what truly intrigue me. ‘Don’t believe the books’. 

Ridiculous, what else is there to believe? The books, the collections of precious knowledge, what else could they be insinuating?  These books are all we have, well, all we are technically allowed to have but the collection, small, of battered books under my bed are fists of knowledge, knowledge that I have always craved.

I’m two months into my search, and staring at yet another hastily scribbled word: ‘why’.

I cross reference the paint with my position on my map, holding a dim torch in my mouth and propping the crumpled piece of paper against my leg. This dot goes on a tunnel I’ve had to draw in, one of many, the tube system is far more labyrinthine than I even imagined. This map is the only reason I haven’t managed to lose myself within the older tunnels where I can become hemmed in by crumbling brick and trapped by dim lights.

Once that’s done I shove the pencil and paper back in my too small jean pocket and stride back down the way I came, into the yellow light of the underground tube system. Found it. Finally. Where all this is coming from: the epicentre.

I’m on a train to “Old Victoria Station”, it’s hardly ever used and mostly deserted. However, it’s where the answers are, it’s where the pattern of symbols and confusing words lead me. As I step off onto the platform I smell the intensified damp that indicates it’s started to rain above, and I look up to try and find where the smell from upper comes from. My greyish eyes, matching my uniform which has become a sort of camouflage here, – no one looks closely at a school-kid in the grey mist of similarly dressed – search through the orange glow for any sign of dropping water from above. I find nothing.

Still walking with my head up I trip into the main entrance of the station. In the off white hall there are blocked up tunnels to either side of the dusty concrete floor and a bank of ticket doors in front of me. Just behind them is the stairs leading to the pavement, but something’s different. I sniff the air, and notice that these stairs don’t go to the urban level, but straight to upper.