TWO

The beginning and the end were housed in a corrugated shed in a leafy suburb of London. Nestled in a valley of woods and parks and family homes, the building was grey and nondescript. Only the traintracks leading up to the shed gave a clue of its purpose. Inside the shed, on a morning with winter’s early bite in the air, was a man called Pat and a train called Betty. 

Betty was condemned. She was old; part of the 1976 rolling stock. Serviced the Jubilee line for 36 hard years. A refurbishment in the 80s was meant to add another forty years to her, but the unprecedented numbers of passengers and journeys had taken their toll. Part of the 80s refurb had been to remove the need for a driver; now she’s handled by a computer housed in Greenwich, with only minor adjustments made by human operators to account for events the computer can’t predict with any accuracy; the weather, human error on other lines, suicides.

Other engineers didn’t like Betty. It wasn’t her age, or the way her sump valve constantly leaked. In fact, there was no tangible, measurable cause for their unease. At least, none that they had been made aware of. But they’d all noticed the way she’d sit quiet in the drafty sheds, anonymous and brooding. People make faces out of almost everything, and Betty’s features of grills, lamps and windows were, on paper, exactly like her sisters. But as the slanted light speared down from the high, grimed windows of the shed, it seemed to find a unique meanness in her. Betty was an old pull-horse, and a dark one.

So no-one but Pat Fields was there to wipe her down, to whisper a small thank you as she embarked on her last journey before being shuttled to the depot to be torn apart. Her hull itself had already been bought by a syndicate, to house a pop-up restaurant in Shoreditch that would serve artichoke jelly and calf’s liver tartare and people would come and say what an amazing idea it was, how retro-cool, and they wouldn’t think at all of what had happened inside those carriages; the minor tragedies, the little victories, the hopes and fears and long tired hours, the rushed mornings, the intoxicated nights, the sweat and tears and blood and vomit, the time-worn ghosts of a million journeys. 

Some of the engines had names, other’s didn’t. Pat was the one that had named Betty, after his daughter’s grey rabbit, who had a tendency to nip and bite. He had tried to like the little rabbit, offering it a variety of vegetables and attempting to find a sweet-spot where she might actually like to be stroked; the belly, under the chin, behind the ears. But the rabbit was stubborn and it bit him and it often drew blood. And the next morning he would be out there in his dressing-gown, pushing thin batons of carrot through the cage, making the small “tch, tch” sounds that we use to calm small creatures. His daughter was somehow never bitten and she would hold the rabbit in her arms and put silly doll-hats on it and demand that he take pictures of them. The rabbit died, and his daughter didn’t cry, and things had changed and moved on and she had grown up and grown distant, and Pat guessed that she never thought of her rabbit at all anymore. There was a thin, white line of raised tissue on his finger that was a reminder of the rabbit’s sharp teeth, just above the thin, white band that marked the absence of his wedding ring. Both were sometimes tender, especially on cold winter mornings, feeling like the unprotected skin when you cut your nails too short. They were both scars.

Now, in the non-descript shed, with his breath clouding out in front of him, Pat went through the safety checklist, testing and probing Betty’s inner workings. He felt a shiver as he touched her, a frosty shudder as he tightened screws and replaced blown fuses, and he marked it down to his own advancing years. Just like the crick in his neck and the way it took his hands an hour longer than the rest of him to wake up in the morning, these strange feelings were nothing to worry about.

Had Pat been privy to Betty’s stats, he might not have volunteered to oversee Betty’s last journey and he may have thought twice about the feeling of empty dread in the pit of his stomach. The Department for Transport does not publish journey statistics for individual engines, for fear the drivers (or worse, the public) would read them and find superstition in them. Had he been given clearance, Pat would have noticed something strange as soon as he opened the filing cabinets, because whilst most of the files were a uniform size and shape, the paperwork for 69-AC spilled over to two folders, each two inches thick. Taking the papers to the desk, he’d skip past the maintenance entries and find the “Significant Incidents” section, which made up the bulk of the files. There’d be a list. A long list. Had Pat McGree seen this list, he might well have set his mouth into a smile of cold recognition; Betty had a tendency to bite, and she often drew blood. She had been the instrument of over ninety suicides. Pat would have been sure that was well above average. Reading more, he’d see she had also been the venue for six hundred petty crimes, four knife-attacks and twelve heart-attacks. On one evening in 1986, she had held a nineteen year-old girl captive while a gang of four males attacked and raped her. In 1993, a bag was found in her rear carriage; it contained the skulls and thighbones of four children. Experts estimated that children were between three and five years old and no one ever found out who they were.

Pat attached a nozzle into Betty’s inlet and flicked on the pump. Twenty gallons of engine oil were sucked and slurped down every second. Pat thought how guttural, how like an animal, the sound was.

Pat went to the sink next to the rows of workbenches and used the industrial soap to remove most of the grease, but no matter how hard he scrubbed, there was always a line of dirt around his fingernails. He dried his hands, relishing the warmth that he was rubbing in. He glanced over his shoulder, and saw an image of himself, caught in Betty’s window. Reflected in her lens, he became ancient, a husk of a man. Betty showed him the thin parchment of his skin, the sallow folds of his neck, the low stoop of his shoulders and Pat turned away from the sight.

So Pat was old, and on his way out, and Betty was old and she was condemned. But they had one last journey to make. He pressed the button to open the shed doors and morning light spilled in over them both and Betty’s dark interior was not illuminated at all.