no use making a crib with no escape tunnel. When I first started living underground I holed up in an old tunnel just off Green Park: near enough to the platform to feel safe, but far enough away so as not to attract attention. There are hundreds of these tunnels in the system. Some of them are for storage, or work stations. Some connect to lines that are now redundant. Some, well some I haven’t got a scooby what they’re for. I thought the one I was bundled up in was perfect. The walls and ceiling were made up of all these little white porcelain bricks as if someone had used toy bricks to make a full-size thing. Like I felt all the time. It had an old camp bed in there and a lamp and stuff.
Compared to where I’d been living before I thought it was the Ritz.
Never occurred to me that it might still be used. I thought it was a remainder from the War or something.
Third night in and I get woken up by a workman, skimming a few hours off a ghost-shift. I don’t know who was more freaked: him or me. Anyhow, there was no back door to the tunnel, so I ended up having to bite him just to get past. Living as I was then, he must have thought I was an animal.
That was then, this is now.
After I leave the boys on the train, I walk through a service tunnel to Charing Cross, taking off my wig and stuffing it in my satchel, and putting on a baseball cap. I reverse my army shirt so it shows green rather than black, then wait until a train pulls into the station. I have a skeleton key for the emergency tail-door, which is always still in the tunnel when the train stops, so all I have to do is slip out of my alcove, climb on board, and bump it one stop to Leicester Square. Change to the Piccadilly line and ride it up to Holborn.
Little-known fact about Holborn Station is that it’s a replacement station. There’s another station almost opposite it, on the other side of Oxford Street, that closed in 1933; the British Museum Station.
You can probably guess, can’t you?
I get off the train with the other passengers, keeping my hat low and my satchel slung round my back like a haversack, its leather straps over my head but under my arms. I follow the crowd so far, then ghost through a maintenance door and slip along the running tunnel that takes me to the abandoned station. I light the way with the halogen torch I take from my satchel, and then shade through the winding chambers and connecting corridors that bring me to the air-raid shelter that was used in the Second World War.
Home sweet home.
Lily turns on her computer, directs the arrow to the Google icon, and clicks. As she waits for the machine to connect to the Internet she goes to her window and snitches back the curtain, looking through snakes of rain crawling down the pane at the estate outside.
Lily lives on the first floor of a three-floor block. On each of the floors there are ten flats, all identical to hers. Across the battle-ground below her that passes as a play area is a block of flats that exactly mirrors hers. To her left and right are precisely the same again: four blocks of identi-flats; lives wrapped in concrete.
Everybody knows each other to look at, but not to confide in: living in a war zone. There are at least a dozen languages spoken on Lily’s estate, but only two that are understood by everybody: fear and power. Below her Lily can see teenagers on children’s bikes. Peddling from block to block with drugs, phones, iPads, whatever. Above the blocks, in the distance, she can make out the neon lights and shiny bank-towers of Canary Wharf: an untouchable future from another world.
Behind her the computer makes a quiet, muted noise, indicating it’s connected to the Interweb, and Lily turns away from the window, and sits down gingerly. One month on and the bruising has gone, but the stitches still hurt. She opens up the Facebook page specially created for her, and is unsurprised to find it completely empty. There is no photo tag, no likes or dislikes, no friends.
Of course, no friends.
Lily types, ARE YOU THERE?
A computer pause; the cursor flashing like fingers tapping on a desk, then:
YES.
The reply font is electric blue.
Lily is unconsciously biting her lip, causing petals of blood to flower as she stares at the screen. There is so much she wants to ask, but knows she can’t. That isn’t how it works.
She types, HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS?
Pause
YES. WHERE WERE YOU?
Pause
AT HOME WITH MY MUM ALL NIGHT WATCHING TV
Pause
GOOD. ARE WE DONE?
Lily turns to look at the raindrops sliding down her window, then back at the words on the screen. They are so simple. Are we done? So simple, but impossible for her to fathom. Lily sucks at the cut on her lip and uses her sleeve to drag the tears away from her eyes.
ARE WE DONE, LILY-ROSE?
Pause
YES. WE’RE DONE. THANK YOU.
OK. FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS, AND THEN HAVE A NICE LIFE. YOUR BODY IS YOURS. MEND IT.
Lily is given directions for her to manipulate her laptop settings, allowing her computer to be accessed remotely. Once done, she watches the ghost hands systematically remove all traces of their correspondence from her laptop. All references of the Pro-Anna forum where they first made contact. All the conversations they have had in the cyber-basements of the Interworld. Omecle. Whisper. All of them. The Facebook account specially set up for their meetings ceases to exist. Everything. Every connection between Lily-Rose and the person remotely-controlling her keyboard. The last thing written on the screen before the computer shuts itself down is:
GOODBYE, LILY-ROSE
Lily-Rose sits in front of her blank laptop, its dead screen, and the future-girl stickers with which she’d personalized it in another life, and wonders what is going to happen next. She feels as if there is a door between her and the rest of the world, and the handle has been removed. Even though she has never met the person on the other end of her computer there was a connection: a way of understanding the pain and self-loathing inside. Lily-Rose does not know whether she will ever be able to take the advice and stop being frightened. Whether she’ll be able to take control of her life enough to live it. She wraps her arms around herself and stares past the curtain of rain at the grey world outside, seeing nothing. There is a knock on her bedroom door. She turns round to see her mum standing in the doorway to her bedroom, a mug of Complan in her hand, and her face set in an expression Lily-Rose is unable to read.
‘Mum? Are you all right?’
Lily-Rose sees past her to a tired-looking man in a zero-style suit and a weary-looking woman in an even worse one staring back at her.
‘It’s the police,’ her mother says, her voice tight-leashed. ‘They want to ask us some questions.’
