Anticlockwise on the Circle Line

Glancing up from the pavement, I note the hands on the old clock face: ten to eight. Still plenty of time. I take one last look at the original station name still etched proudly on the white façade – Farringdon and High Holborn; see the Parcel Office sign on the wall. Strange that I’d never noticed that until now. You and I, we, don’t seem to be walking in step, or of our own accord; carried on the thrust of the rush hour throng, like dried autumn leaves being swept up off the pavement on Cowcross Street and in through the entrance. Under my left arm, the crudely wrapped parcel you’ve given me earlier lies tucked like a jealously guarded secret. I’ll deal with it later, when I’m ready; though already I feel its weight pressing against my rib cage.

‘Goodbye, Cassie,’ you say in the way you always have, ever since I have come to know you: using the diminutive, the affectionate. It makes me feel fleetingly young again, a brief scene from an otherwise tragic play in which a middle-aged woman acts out the main role. And then I’m on my own and it’s all down to me. I’ll have to make decisions.

I descend from street level to the concourse at Level 1, Oyster Card in hand. As well as getting me up, helping me to dress in something for the day ahead, you’ve seen to this for me as well. Always so practical. I could choose to go clockwise, I suppose: it looks about the same distance on the yellow lined map whichever way you travel – about thirty minutes, thirteen stops, if time and distance matter anymore to this woman in transit.

Barbican… Moorgate… Liverpool Street… Aldgate… Tower Hill…

I mouth the names like an incantation; but this particular sequence does not appeal, not this morning. I feel accosted here in this vast space where the whole of London seems to be on the move, closing in: the young, with

their walking shoes and their bags slung across their shoulders, earplugs shutting out the world, sure of where they’re going. I wipe the sweat from the back of my neck, put on my dark glasses, trying to shield my eyes from the sickly glare of the fluorescent strip lights, close my ears to the incessant clank of the trains one level below and the interminable automated safety announcements about unattended luggage. One of those headaches has already started. There’s a taste of metal on my tongue. I clutch the parcel ever-closer to my breast.

Farringdon…King’s Cross… Euston Square…Great Portland Street… Baker Street…

Something from deep within urges me to choose anticlockwise to St. James’s Park. I push on through the crush, descending to Level 2 for the trains, looking for the one that will take me in the direction that has called to me. Via Edgware Road flashes up on the panel. Next train expected in 2 minutes. I feel invisible among all these commuters, detached, even from myself. I am becoming she, a spectator outside my own body, an omniscient spirit floating in a world I no longer seem to inhabit. A woman, hair half-black, half-white, a woman going somewhere on an autumn morning, beneath the streets of London, journeying through the tunnels of a subterranean world where there seems no context. I step through the sliding doors and heave my body onto a vacant seat as we pull out of the station.

Though it’s wedged to capacity, there’s an unearthly silence in the car, though they’re looking in my direction, these tallow-faced passengers: ghostly stares, trying to avoid my eyes. It’s the parcel they’re drawn to; the warnings, I expect. And this woman, they perhaps suspect. Everyone is suspected of something these days. I snuggle the present close to me, fearful of ever losing it.

I am gulped into tunnels of blackness, into the heat and griminess of this subterranean world. It feels timeless, another universe almost. Though there’s the smoothness of electric modernity, there comes from out of nowhere, a whiff of the past, a judder and jolt, a sense of steam, dust and

decay. I recall from somewhere that this line was first built to freight dead meat to the terminus at west Smithfield Street. I wonder whether my stonyfaced travelling companions can smell it too; that distinctive sweet smell of rotting flesh that I’m breathing in. And with it comes memory.

I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the smeared window of the carriage. Is that woman really me? I switch my gaze to the map above: Edgware Road… Paddington. I’m voicing the syllables out loud. I savour the taste of them rolling around the mouth’s chamber. The expressions of the passengers sealed in this space with me suggest that perhaps I am focusing too intently on the yellow line and the twenty-seven stations that are plotted out neatly in diagrammatic form. But I continue what I’m doing, taking note, ticking them off one by one on my tongue. Perhaps I won’t alight at St. James’s Park at all; perhaps I’ll just stay on board for the twenty-seven stations, just for the sheer hell of it. Perhaps I’ll sit in my seat in the midst of this anonymity and simply keep going around and around in a never-ending continuous loop for ever and ever, here in this strange black underground world. A woman with an unusual parcel, not quite knowing where she is travelling to, where the end stop might be.

They can’t stop eyeing my present. Suspicious creatures. From time to time they shift their gaze from their Kindles to my nebulous form, where your gift, my darling, lies resting snug in my spreading lap. I can’t blame them, I suppose; for it’s a peculiar package: the shape, the soft, almost fur-like fabric, the way it’s tied with white string, looped into six neat sections and secured with a reef knot. They’ve probably never seen anything like it in all of their young lives. But I have. I’ve seen a meat-bag like this before, way back in childhood.

There’s Dad in our butcher’s shop, wrapping joints and long-forgotten cuts of slow-cooking flesh, stewing steak, shin, skirt, brisket. Rust-red liver, like a redundant placenta, flops on white greaseproof, the blood trickling through his fingers, before he tucks the folded greaseproof inside yesterday’s newspapers and slips the wrapped meat softly into the plastic wallets inside the furry parcel. The sickly-sweet smell is stronger

now, pervading my nostrils, filling the carriage with its stench; but these commuters don’t seem to notice, they just keep staring and then averting their gaze when their eyes meet mine.

Bayswater…Notting Hill Gate… High Street Kensington…

I will have to make my mind up soon, though decisions are so hard to make at my time of life, amid the rattling clutter of my mind that these fellow travellers cannot hear, these characters with non-speaking parts in my mid-life drama beneath the streets of London. I see them lower their heads and shift back to their iPhones, their tablets, as I caress the velvety parcel with my ageing hands. They will remain blind and deaf to the flood of menstruation as I grieve for my young uterus, fresh and fertile.

It is tenseless and senseless down here in this place where the dark creeps around the carriage like a hot, musty blanket. I feel primeval now as I start to notch the passing of time. I am fifty. If my life had run its natural course, as it perhaps had been mapped out, then I would have bled through three hundred and twenty-four menstrual cycles since that final one; twelve for every one of the twenty-seven stations on this Circle route I’m passing through. I’m aware my thinking is not as it should be; but feel powerless to alter its course. I will go with the flow, like this momentous journey I am making on my own, with just my precious parcel.

Gloucester Road… South Kensington… Sloane Square…

Almost there. Just two more stops. And now inside the carriage it’s nauseous in that overly-hot London way. The carriage lights are stark and yellow-white, and the probing stares and silence from the eyes that surround me pierce me like that surgeon’s scalpel. That scalpel that stole my future before I ever met you, my serious and sensitive soul-searcher who I have left abandoned in the station back at Farringdon. I close my eyes before we pull into Victoria.

I drift in and out of semi-consciousness, lulled by the monotony of the

engine. I feel myself being sucked ever more backwards, rooting into the past. I need to sleep, to shut it all out; but peace does not come easily these days, especially now with the package in tow. Restless whispers and murmurings are melding into a cacophony which is splitting my head, as I try to doze to the accompaniment of the rhythm of the train on the track. But demons are lurking here in these caverns:

I’m sorry, it’s not good news – but at least we’ve got it early and at least you had your children young.

You look so well, can’t believe something so horrible is going on inside… thank God it isn’t your arm!

You’ll be no good to anybody…no-one will ever want you now. You’re doomed to stay with me for ever and ever and ever and ever…

And then I’m back in the ward from the antiseptic theatre with the sharp lights like these on this train and I wake to white wimples and the softdimpled innocence and gentle Irish lilts of the nuns at my bedside as they tong the miles of brown-blooded gauze from the secret tunnels between my parted thighs and pile the bandages to form white mountains in shimmering stainless steel dishes, shaped like kidneys. They daub the raw gash in my belly with iodine as I ramble with the morphine and cry for the womb they have taken away. For I never had chance to say goodbye and I don’t know where they have put it, this sacred part of me. And they have cut me from my past and from my future.

And later, much later, the fortune teller says: Have you lost a baby? There should have been a third baby?

I come to and wonder whether the passengers can hear my sobs. But of course they can’t for my wails are lodged deep inside, silently festering. But you, who I have left to wait and wonder back at Farringdon, must have been looking for my womb all this time, ever since we met. It is so like you

to do something like that for me, without even telling me. And you have found it, for today when you took me as far as you could, and left me at the station, you handed me this present which I’m clinging on to. For it is part of me. It contains my lost hopes, I know it does.

…St. James’s Park… But I decide against it. I’m not ready yet so I carry on anticlockwise. …Westminster…Embankment…Temple…Blackfriars…

I continue to look at my route on the map, absorbed in its never-endingness. I lose track of the stations, time and direction seem to be disappear and find myself already back in Farringdon. I check my watch: it’s only fifty-five minutes since I set out. One complete cycle; but I’m nowhere near ready yet. I’m hungry for oblivion to feed on the dank contextless space for a little while longer, however long a little while is, looping through the dizziness of my personal Hades, on my lonely journey through the underworld, far beneath the madness of twenty-first century London.

And now it surely it must be evening already. An arcane chorus as though from a Greek tragedy sweeps into the carriage soundlessly on a sheet of ice-cold air that cuts through me to the bone and gristle. They are swathed identically in funereal black taffeta or silk, I cannot tell, but with complexions of alabaster. They, like me, find themselves here, in this sunken world of otherness, endlessly circling this infinite track.

But I am spent and I want to go home. I know you will be there already; waiting. Asking no questions, demanding no explanations. You simply know I will return when I am ready. I rise from my seat, shaking slightly, and abandon my precious parcel – my gift from you, alive with possibility. I am done with it now. I exit the carriage without a backward glance. If I had, I might have noticed the seep of fresh blood on the fabric of my seat which would leave an indelible carmine stain.