Communion Town (3 page)

That didn’t put him off, though. Whatever he saw, he took it personally. I couldn’t quite make him out; he would scowl at the skinny youths who hauled their rickshaws past the front of the station to pick up rich couples. He’d give filthy looks to such harmless types as the five middle-aged monks who strolled through the Hall in their saffron robes, all with close-shaved heads, rimless spectacles and digital cameras, or the undergraduates complaining languidly to one another about the length of the cashpoint queue: ‘This is
abzurd
.’ On the other hand, he always had a friendly word for the two smartly dressed women who ran the cosmetics kiosk, and for the leather-tanned, tattooed guy who could usually be found patrolling the Hall with a can of cider in one hand and the other thrust down the back of his tracksuit trousers. I can admire it, the instinctive conviction with which Nicolas responded to all that jostling life, but I’m sorry to say that it served him badly in the end. It’s all part of the story of how you lost him to the city.

I wish his judgement had been better, we both do, but there was something wilful in his conduct. It was as if he wanted to put himself at risk. He had taken to buying breakfast every day for one of the other patrons of the Rose Tree Café, a person who it pains me even to describe to you. I knew his sort well, and I could not have imagined a less desirable companion. It’s strange. I like to think I’m pretty tolerant, but with some people you just can’t help how you feel.

He was often to be seen around the streets of Communion Town, this one: he was no older than Nicolas himself, but his face was ruined, a mask of putty on a skull, and he made a show of walking with a limp, cautiously, as if he were favouring a hidden injury. Nicolas, I think, had mistaken him for a genuine casualty of the city, taking pity on his sickly look, his unwashed clothes and scrawny frame, and perhaps on his attempts at dandyism: he actually affected a carnation in the buttonhole of his jacket, and his long hair had been clumsily bleached. As he sat down opposite Nicolas, he combed his fingers through the oily locks as if folornly hoping to be mistaken for a member of the opposite sex.

I could understand why Nicolas felt sorry for him, but he failed to see the arrogance behind the frailty. The fellow wolfed down his plateful each morning without a word of thanks. Then, after another mug of coffee, he would launch into a tirade, staring at Nicolas greedily and plucking at his cuff as he spoke, like someone imparting urgent secrets. He was a fraud, of course: in spite of his appearance I would not have been surprised to learn that he had a trust fund to support his loafing, his radical posturing. Now and then you saw him plaguing the shoppers around Vere Street, going from person to person like a beggar and delivering his spiel with an unnerving show of anguish. He held the sleeves of his targets as if his life depended on getting them to believe whatever line he was spinning.

A fraud, but a dangerous fraud for someone in Nicolas’s situation to associate with. I fumed to see him deceived, and wanted to tell him that this personage was laughing up his sleeve at the fine joke of it. Nicolas could be so unworldly. I watched them through the grease-fouled window, hazy figures leaning seriously towards one another. I could only guess what lies were being told in there, but, if what happened later was anything to go by, I fear very much that he believed them.

You saw the nature of the situation better than he did. I’m only sorry you couldn’t help him understand. I’m thinking of the afternoon you took him picking blackberries down by the canal. The brambles beside the cycle path were dense with shiny black flesh, so you and Nicolas took plastic supermarket bags and struggled in among those alien castles full of cobwebs and dead matter and tiny sharp barbs, threaded through with nettles and loaded with decayed, insect-ridden fruit, some of it soft enough to turn to pulp at a touch and much of the rest pinkish and shrivelled. You walked home scratched and stung but your bags were heavy and wet with purple juice. I often think of you like that, the two of you, blackberrying in a revealing light that lay longways across everything, stirring up the colours of the hedges and the banks and resonating off the water. Sludd’s Liberty had retreated from you. The evening moon was up, and behind the city and the trees the sun was setting in a sky like a sheet of cold copper marked with the single dent of a hammer. One of those sunsets that looks to be changing the world and no one is noticing.

I wish Nicolas had been able to learn that kind of lesson. But looking back, it seems now as though it was only a matter of time until he was mixed up in an incident like the one that followed.

One morning, as he crossed the Upper Hall of Communion Town metro station on the way to his shift, he noticed a figure sprawled on the tiles, full-length, with its body twisted, the side of its face flattened into the floor and its arms thrown loosely over its head. The sparse hairs of its beard stuck to the tiles, and its parted lips were within kissing distance of somebody’s footprint. There was no sign of life. The prostrated form looked for all the world as though it had fallen from the rafters. Probably it had just dragged itself out of the shadows in the night – suffering, perhaps, with one of the diseases to which its kind is prone.

Where it had come from didn’t matter. There was no doubting what it was. The commuters stepped around it without registering its presence, and those breakfasting a few feet away at the aluminium tables of the Transit Café never gave it a glance.

Nicolas, though, not only looked openly at the comatose thing, but stopped and squatted beside it. I felt my innards reorganise as I watched. Even at a distance I could smell the foetor of the overalls and army-surplus jacket it wore. He felt for its pulse and leant in horribly close to its face. His movements were competent, and an idle part of my mind speculated on whether he’d had some medical training back where you came from. He brushed his fingertips lightly against the creature’s eyelashes, and it stirred.

This was lunacy. Cursing my sluggishness, I broke in on the scene, hauled Nicolas bodily to his feet with more strength than I usually possess, and steered him away through the Hall. My heart was lunging and I had a sudden headache. He stared as I explained to him, as if to a child, that you couldn’t
do
that – never, and certainly not in a public metro station. Through good luck no decisive line had been crossed, but I was genuinely angry at the position he had put me in. I hadn’t intended for us to meet face to face like this. Fortunately, he didn’t seem inclined to wonder who I was; but I couldn’t conceal my indignation at his conduct. What, I asked him, had he been thinking?

Nicolas didn’t answer. The creature had woken now, and he watched with what might easily have been taken for solicitude as it scrambled out of sight. He twitched his shoulder free of my hand and glanced in my direction before he walked away, but he didn’t really notice me at all.

I want to be generous, and perhaps we can allow that in those early days he simply did not appreciate the implications of his actions. No doubt he was misled by the company he kept. In a sense he was guilty of nothing more than a failure of imagination: but if so, then the events that came soon afterwards surely granted him all the insight he could have desired.

What the Cynics did at Communion Town was simple in conception, intricate in execution, a nightmare in its outcome. At five-fifteen p.m. on the first Friday of the summer, the conspirators – a cell of only ten men and women, as we now know – took control of the mechanical and electrical systems of the metro station, and crippled the lift shafts. At the same time, down in the station’s innards, they caused a series of ancient fire doors, six-inch slabs of iron which had been out of use for a century, to grind shut. Twenty-seven members of the public were imprisoned, unable either to return to the surface or to escape on to the platforms. They had been sealed without food or water into a buried tangle of tunnels lit by stuttering bulbs. The city above could watch them through the security cameras that the saboteurs had left operational, but all other lines of communication had been cut. The emergency services were baffled by the obsolescent structures that had been layered down through the generations of Communion Town’s growth beneath the city. The wiring had fused and melted, the doors were impenetrable, and any incautious attempt to dig out the trapped citizens was liable to cave in the entire catacombs.

These developments should have been enough to show Nicolas that the city contained more dangers than he had supposed, and stranger motives. But it was only as Saturday passed with minimal progress towards a rescue, and a second midnight approached, that the true nature of the Cynic design became clear. The citizens waiting down there in the tunnels, who by now must have been exhausted and dehydrated and their psychological condition increasingly frail, would have heard the first mutterings, rattles and scrapes, and would have seen the first flutters of movement at the edges of their confined world as, in greater numbers than anyone can have witnessed outside their ugliest fancies, from the ventilation ducts and drainage grates and disused access hatches and all the other dark corners and cracks in the surfaces of things, the monsters arrived.

The barbarism of it is hard to credit. The imagination baulks. We’ll never begin to guess what it was like for the victims, but what choice do we have except to go over the details, transfixed by the fate that was engineered for them, trying and failing to grasp its reality?

When I last spoke to Nicolas, I asked him what he thought about the conspirators and the way the city dealt with them after their arrests. As for myself, and I’m not very proud of this, my first instinct was that they were being treated far too kindly – but then, of course, I know that’s not good enough. I know it’s by extending to the Cynics the respect and decency they deny to others that we show our difference from them. We offer them the chance their victims can never have. We don’t cast them out, however abhorrent their point of view may be to the values that underpin our way of life. Instead, we take them in. We engage with their ideas and challenge them through vigorous rational debate. We let them know that, in spite of what they’ve done, we’re with them, and we won’t give up on them until we have helped them find a way out of the error in which they are mired. Patiently we show them that we’ll never let them go until they understand, and until they have been understood.

We tell their stories.

I said as much to Nicolas, when I faced him across the table in a room not unlike this one. I said to him what I’m saying again now: I can help you, but I need your help. I want to believe that you’re on our side, that you’re serious about embracing the welcome this city has offered, but I need you to make me sure. All you have to do is convince me, I said, and this is your opportunity.

But what was the response? None. He had nothing to tell me. He lowered those dark brows as if he were embarrassed on my behalf.

The sad thing is I wasn’t entirely surprised. I hate to say it, but I’ve spent a long time watching over you and Nicolas, doing all I can to help you make the adjustment to your new life – and what have you given back? I ask myself that, Ulya, and to be honest I don’t have an answer.

I’ll tell you something. You’ll find that there comes a point when you can give up on the regret, at long last – on the hurt of not having kept what you had. But then you hesitate, because letting go means giving up the last piece of ground, and if you did that you’d be surrendering, you’d be allowing yourself to turn into a different person. I can’t help you make that choice. Each of us has to decide for ourselves.

Think of Communion Town. Can we say how we would have behaved, if it had been us in the place of the citizens as they were surrounded by those things? Things that, in spite of what they were, gave the uncanny impression of having a coordinated and even a compassionate purpose. They were carrying plastic canisters of clean water and packets of all-but-fresh food pilfered from the refuse bins of supermarkets. They offered these gifts with nods of encouragement and gestures of hospitality.

I don’t think any of us are in a position to moralise on what ensued. All we can do is state the facts as we know them: that after a night and a day trapped underground, every one of those people accepted food and drink from the monsters without hesitation. It’s clear in the security footage. You can watch, if you have a strong stomach, as an overweight man still wearing his jacket and tie crams his mouth with a hunk of bread that has been torn for him by one of the
homines
, and as a young woman cups her hands, the most natural thing in the world, to catch the water that one of them is pouring for her.

They must have known the consequences of what they did. By the time the would-be rescuers succeeded in bringing the lifts back to life and prising open the fire doors, there were no human beings left in the tunnels for them to save. Nothing was left down there except the pests, the meaningless creatures that slink with the stray cats and cockroaches in the underparts of the city, and those were fit only to be driven off into the dark with oaths and stones. There are twenty-seven more of the wretched things now than there were before.

I’m not going to hide my disappointment with Nicolas. He had the chance to improve matters for himself and he turned it down, in the petulant, deliberate way that he has. For reasons that frankly elude me, he prefers to leave everything up to you. But I’m not too sorry, because, it occurs to me now, you were always the one who fascinated the most. Nicolas had his pleasing qualities, certainly, but you, Ulya, you’ve always been the mystery. You know, I believe that since you came to this city you’ve not shown anyone a glimmer of what goes on inside. Did you give yourself away, perhaps just once? I don’t believe you did.