She trod in gum this morning. It stuck to the pavement as she walked, slowing her down, but she was in too much of a hurry to stop and remove it.
Fast feet slapped on the pavement, dampened with the early morning rain, and everyone seemed to be wearing black, with grey faces to suit the sky.
They moved as one great sluggish mass, making the reluctant migration to cramped offices and high rise blocks of concrete and steel.
Her journey was to one of these offices, set high in the corner of some large corporate building. Though she was only a secretary. Like one of those grey-faced beings that moved alongside her, it was not where she wanted to be. But still they moved fast, with purpose, not daring to be late.
The sun had barely touched the clouds when she descended the stairs to the underground. Once, when she had been more aware of things, she had counted the number of steps. Forty nine. Trod by her foot so many times now she knew subconsciously how many seconds it would take her to get to the bottom. She need not be awake for this part of the journey, and really, she wasn’t. She took no notice of what passed around her, just as she ignored the chewing gum stuck to the sole of her shoe.
Ticket in hand she stood on the platform, toes just pressing at the yellow line as she waited for the train. She stared, unseeing, at the tunnel wall that curved over in front of her. Splattered with streaks of silver, red, blue, black, all swirling into an image or a word she was too dumb with monotony to understand.
Down the platform the other grey-faced commuters had lined up like the dead, not hearing, not seeing, not thinking; as if all were under a spell that held them to the dreariness of life. It would take more than the ordinary to free them now.
Perhaps that is why the mind plays tricks, a hint to those caught in that spell, something to awaken them to thoughts beyond the menial.
What she was staring at was the graffitied walls of the underground, but what the meaningless swirl of images and words were about to become would break the spell that bound her to the tedium of her current life.
She stared at the unconventional art, at the sprayed symbols, the hieroglyphics of some other existence. They drifted through her mind as subtly annoying as the gum stuck to the sole of her shoe: a sign of a restless society. She saw no more beyond the vandalism.
And then she blinked.
A child stood on the tracks. Dressed in a red coat and patent black shoes. Wisps of dark hair escaped from under her red hat and the child’s hazel eyes stared deep into her own.
As she watched, the girl’s mouth began to open and close, speaking words that never sounded, but one shape she recognised, and that was her name.
Sally.
The girl in red formed the name again.
Sally tried to step forward and call back to the child, but her words were taken by the echoing rumble of the train as it tore onto the platform. It thrust itself between Sally and the girl in red. If she had been real, she would have been dead, and Sally would have been screaming. Instead, she stayed glued to the platform, her toes still pressing at the yellow line.
When she blinked again the train had gone, but there was no sign of the little girl. She had missed her train but as she looked back to the spot where the girl had been stood she realised something she had missed before.
In amongst the splattered colours a symbol leapt out at her.
A number seven. A circle. The number seven circled, defined in thick black spray, as if to make a point. To any eye it was perhaps the signature of the group responsible for the contemporary vandalism.
But Sally shut her eyes: the image of the encircled seven was burnt into her mind. Something within her grasped at hidden memories and she fought against it, but the image was too powerful.
There was something about the number seven, a mystical number, laced with magic, linked with luck. Seven days in a week, seven deadly sins, seven seas, seven years bad luck. Seven times seven is forty nine: the number of stairs Sally was climbing now as she ran from the station.
She was meant to be heading for work but now she found herself trying to get away, possessed by the fear of what she had just experienced and what she had just experienced provoked her sudden urge to run.
She had no idea where she was heading, or why she was still running. She thought about the girl in red, about what she was trying to say, and then she saw the symbol again, circled, defined, enclosed.
One person’s act of spontaneity on the wall of the underground had freed her, but it had trapped itself in her mind, circling about her. She ran faster. The circle, she thought, the symbol of eternity. Never ending, never changing, monotonous. And it was then that she stopped running.
***
When she was seven Sally wore a coat. It was a dark burgundy red and she had to get her mother to do up the black buttons on the front because they were too big to fit through the buttonholes without the help of an adult. She liked to wear her patent black shoes, but she only got to on special occasions. Her socks reached up to her knees but they always fell down because her legs were too skinny and she always insisted on adjusting the little red hat after her mother had secured it over her dark hair.
Sally was always proud of her father because he had his own office and he caught the train to work every morning; her mother was very proud of him too. He worked so hard that he never took a day off sick, and when Sally turned seven, he said he would take her to see his office. That was why Sally got to wear her patent black shoes that day. But she never saw her father’s office; she never wore her shoes again, except to the funeral, where people told her how much she looked like her father. She was only seven.
