Above His Station (6 page)

‘Did you not hear what I just said?’ I enquired, losing my rag a bit. ‘There’s been an accident!’

‘Hold up, Gramps, my spider-sense is tingling,’ said the rat. ‘Lift me up, will you?’

I dutifully obliged, cussing impatiently under my breath. ‘This man’s a buffoon.’

‘Lovely day,’ said the rat into the speaker.

“
Lovely day, lovely day
,” replied the voice back through it.

‘Tits,’ said the rat, and at that point I quickly snatched it away.

‘Have you gone mad? That’s a security guard for Buckingham Palace you’re speaking to, you nincompoop! That’s not going to help us get this thing open, is it?’

‘Just lift me back up there,’ said the rat. ‘I want to try something.’

Against my better judgement, I did so.

‘Tits,’ said the rat again.

“
Tits,
” said the mechanized voice.

‘Great big jugs,’ added the rat.

‘
Great big jugs! Great big jugs!
’ repeated the voice.

‘With nipples like fucking champagne corks,’ the rat concluded.

I was absolutely appalled, and not for the first time that day felt like giving the rat a fat lip - if such a thing were possible. I placed the creature back down on the ground before it could do any more damage. I had a serious situation on my hands, and all it could think of was shouting obscenities! Now we wouldn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of ever getting through that-

“
Nipples like fucking champagne corks!
” I heard the rat say – except I didn’t, as its lips didn’t move. I was about to conclude that not only could this rat talk, but it was also a fairly impressive ventriloquist, when I realised that the voice had come from the speaker behind me…

‘Don’t you get it?’ said the rat. ‘It’s not a person. It’s a fucking parrot!’

I felt all the air whoosh from my lungs. Surely that couldn’t be right. But then again, I wasn’t exactly an expert on what ‘right’ was supposed to be anymore and I was rapidly losing my grip on things that had formerly been so assured. None of this made any sense whatsoever, so lord knows why I was still so intent on looking for it.

‘No, wait….it’s not a parrot,’ said the rat.

I felt my body compact out of sheer relief.

‘It sounds more like a mynah bird,’ added the rat, and then I found myself getting all puffed up again.

‘
A mynah bird?
’ I yelled. ‘What’s a bloody mynah bird doing in charge of a security checkpoint for Buckingham Palace?’

It looks a bit odd when a rat shrugs. It’s impossible to tell whether they’re actually shrugging or if they’re just having some sort of epileptic fit, which is probably why you don’t see them do it very often.

‘I give up!’ I said, throwing my hands in the air. ‘This day is turning out to be one nightmare after another! What else could possibly go wrong?’

‘Don’t tempt fate, Gramps,’ said the rat. ‘You haven’t seen street level yet.’

‘No, and there’s precious little hope of me getting the chance at this rate!’ I said. ‘Not unless we can get past this bloody barrier, anyway.’

‘There’s always the way the tiger came in,’ suggested the rat. ‘From one of the other stations somewhere along the line maybe? Why don’t we backtrack and check it out?’

‘Because the rails are live, that’s why!’ I snapped. ‘One slip and we’d be barbecued on the spot. It’s a miracle the tiger made it through without getting shocked.’

‘It looked a bit shocked when the train hit it.’

‘That’s not funny,’ I told the rat, firmly. ‘Have you got any other bright ideas?’

‘We could always ask the bird to open the door for us.’

‘Are you being serious?’ I gasped.

‘Hey, if it’s a choice between getting hit with a few thousand volts and seeing if we can sweet-talk a fucking bird, don’t you think it’s worth a shot?’

I declined to agree. I’d seen what a man looks like when he’s been electrocuted, and it’s not a pretty sight. A commuter was on route to Waterloo this one time and he accidently dropped his mobile telephone onto the tracks. I was in my ticket office at the time with a big queue of people, so I didn’t see the fool climbing down to retrieve it. One of the passengers alerted me. She’d said that people on both platforms had been yelling at him to get off the tracks, but he made some crack about not being able to see any trains coming. He’d forgotten about the live rail and by the time I’d got to him, all that was left was a smoking lump of charred flesh. Ironically, the phone that he had paid his life to collect was undamaged. So, with that image playing in my head, wandering about in the dark with a live rail inches from my feet wasn’t exactly an enticing prospect. But then I slapped my forehead and exclaimed:

‘I’m an idiot!’

To which the rat said, ‘Well, I wasn’t going to mention it.’

‘No, I meant I’m an idiot for not thinking of it sooner!’ I said, turning away from the glass partition and rushing back down the stairs as quickly as my bones would carry me, filling the rat in on my brilliant idea as we went. ‘We’ve been going about this the wrong way. We need to get out of this station, so why on earth did we pick the route that was always going to be the hardest? We don’t want to chance walking down the tunnels because of the live tracks, but we don’t have to walk at all.’

‘We don’t?’ asked the rat.

‘Of
course
we don’t!’ I said, winningly. I’d unlocked the iron-barred gate and we were through it and back out onto the platform before I explained. ‘We’ll use that!’

The rat followed the direction of my finger. ‘The train?’

‘No, the bloody mess of a tiger. Of course the bloody train!’

‘You know how to drive it?’ asked the rat, which was a pertinent question.

‘In theory,’ I replied, modestly. ‘As long as there’s a live current of electricity – and I’m inclined to think there is, seeing as the train slammed back into the station only a few minutes ago - then I think we’ve got a good chance of making it to the nearest station!’

‘I thought you said this place wasn’t connected to the Underground?’

‘It’s connected
to
it, just not accessible
from
it,’ I said, confident about a subject that I had only briefly skimmed in my mammoth Welcome Pack. ‘This train had to have come from somewhere, which means that with any luck we can get there too. All right, it might not be a major station, but at least we’ll be able to get up to ground level.’

‘Sounds like a plan, Gramps,’ said the rat, giving me a thumbs-up.

I couldn’t have been more excited as I boarded the passenger car of the train once more, making my way forwards to the driver’s car. Once inside, my ratty companion hopped up onto the control desk alongside me.

‘Okay,’ it said, grinning from ear to ear, ‘let’s see what this bucket of bolts can do.’

‘All in good time,’ I said, thumbing my lips, consulting memories that I had no intention of ever revisiting again. If I’d known that I might be relying on them to save my life one day, I might have paid more attention. I glanced around the control board in front of me. There were plenty of dials and gauges and things, as well as two handles – one black and one red. I presumed that one was to start the electric current to get the train going and the other was obviously the brake. It didn’t look all that hard to fathom. The only question was whether HQ had cut off the electricity supply to the rails. I closed my eyes and pulled the black handle. The train lurched forwards at a jolt and I quickly let it go. The train stopped instantly.

‘It’s a ‘
dead man’s switch
’,’ I said to the rat, as it all came back to me. ‘In case the driver kicks the bucket whilst he’s driving. It cuts out the electrical current and stops the train.’

‘Yeah, but we want to go backwards, don’t we?’ asked the rat.

We did indeed – if only I could get the blessed train to obey my mental commands. I took hold of the black handle once more and twisted it in the other direction. To my great relief (make that ‘surprise’) the train began to reverse. I held the handle steady, careful not to move too quickly. As we began to leave Regal Street I felt another great sense of relief, yet it was one tainted by regret. That station was supposed to signal the beginning of a new chapter in my life, yet so far it had only given me more bad memories to deal with. That thought was emphasised by seeing the mess of the tiger as we pulled away.

Consulting my memory of the Underground network, as well as information that I could recall from the Welcome Pack, the line from Regal Street led all the way to Charing Cross, and from there Her Majesty could hop on her Royal locomotive and be out of London in a flash. How I wished that I could do the same – but then a thought struck me. The Queen couldn’t do that, could she? Not now that I’d just commandeered her bloody train for myself! I felt rather guilty about that, and once again I hoped that I wasn’t going to get into hot water for this. But the big difference between Her Majesty and me (besides the blatantly obvious) was that I didn’t need to get as far as Charing Cross; any old station would do me. And so I decided to stop at whichever one came first, and in this case that happened to be High Wharton Street.

‘This is more like it!’ I said, striding along the platform towards the exit.

We moved through the tunnels, a stark contrast indeed to the ones at Regal Street; discarded
Metro
newspapers, empty drinks cans and polystyrene coffee cups blanketed the floor. It was partly our fault, and by ‘our’ I mean the transport company. We’d done away with rubbish bins throughout all the stations a couple of years back to mitigate the risk of bombs, so really the passengers had nowhere to deposit their rubbish. Consequently, it was all over the place. I stepped over a pair of trainers, barely affording them a second glance, and it was only when I came across a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, as well as many more piles of clothes scattered about, that it registered.

I spoke my thoughts aloud.

‘It’s just like with the driver of the train…as if people just stripped off all their kit and went running about in the bloody nude!’

‘I don’t see anyone running about,’ said the rat. ‘In fact…I don’t see anyone at all.’

And the rodent was quite correct. The absence of human beings at Regal Street I could understand considering its secrecy, but here at High Wharton Street the place should have been teeming with people right about now. It was almost lunchtime, what on earth was going on? I couldn’t see anyone official ushering passengers to safety so it wasn’t an evacuation, and there was no recorded message on the public address system to suggest some sort of emergency. No alarms sounded of any kind, and I doubted that they would run a drill so close to lunch. According to the computerised timetables suspended from the ceiling, all the trains were running to schedule – which I prayed was not correct, for any train arriving now would collide with my own on the Eastbound platform.

Silently, we moved deeper into the station. My mouth went drier the further that we progressed. The rat sensed my unease, and furthermore, appeared to share it.

‘This is bigger than I thought,’ it said. ‘It’s affected so many people.’

‘What has?’ I asked. ‘And affected them how?’

‘Clothes everywhere…left where they fell,’ muttered the rat, and I had a job to hear it, if I’m honest. Such sadness from a rodent, a creature recognised as a pest at any other time. I shook my head, freeing the thoughts that weighed so heavily upon me. I needed to remain alert; my wits as sharp as a lemon.

‘It’s as if they all just…
ran away
,’ I said. ‘But why did they take off all their clothes?’

‘We’ve got more pressing business to attend to,’ said the rat. ‘Trouble’s ahead.’

‘How can you tell?’ I enquired. ‘Is it some sort of special sense of forewarning that only rodent’s have?’

‘Not really,’ said the rat. ‘It’s just that there’s a pack of fucking wolves over there.’

‘A pack of fucking
what?
’ I said, weighing my use of expletive against the possibility that I was about to get attacked by a wild animal (for the second time that day, might I add). Sure enough, just as the rat had declared, by the row of cash machines along the far wall of the main concourse were a pack of wolves. I suppose it’s fair to call them a ‘pack’, although I’m not exactly sure what qualifies as a ‘pack’ in the truest sense of the word. In my book more than one of them is ample – especially when I’m frozen to the spot and unable to move a muscle.

‘What do we do?’ I asked the rat.

‘How the fuck should I know?’ was its vulgar response.

‘Should we run?’ I asked.

‘More to the point, Gramps –
could
you run?’

‘I could give it a go once I stop my knees from knocking together,’ I said.

‘There’s your answer then. No, we shouldn’t run.’

‘Shall we go back?’ I asked. ‘Retreat and think of a plan?’

‘A
plan?
A plan to do what, exactly?’

‘Well, I don’t know!’ I snapped. ‘Find a way around them or something!’

‘Have you ever been to this station before?’

I nodded. ‘I worked here on a year’s secondment back in 1997.’

‘And
are
there any other ways around them?’

I shook my head. ‘Not to my knowledge, no.’

‘So you know where that leaves us?’ said the rat. ‘Right back at fucking square one.’

‘Must you swear
quite
so much?’ I hissed.

‘I only swear when the situation calls for it,’ said the rat.

‘And does it?’ I asked.

‘What do you think, shit-for-brains?’

‘I’ll take that as a Yes,’ I said. ‘All right…let’s take stock. A pack of wolves, I count five of them, stand between us and the way out. We can’t go around them, so we’ll just have to brave it and go right through them.’

‘That’s your fucking plan? That’s fucking suicide!’

‘Well, I don’t hear you coming up with any better suggestions!’ I shouted. ‘I don’t know why you’re so worried about it anyway. It’s me they’re going to want to eat, not a scrawny little thing like you!’

‘So let me get this straight,’ said the rat. ‘Now we’re arguing over which one of us is more likely to get
eaten?
’