Neverwhere(17)

Richard sat on his couch, and he brooded. The events of the previous two days became less and less real, increasingly less likely. What was real was the message that Jessica had left on his machine, telling him she did not want to see him again. He played it, and replayed it, that Sunday, hoping each time that she would relent, that he’d hear warmth in her voice. He never did.

He thought about going out and buying a Sunday paper but decided not to. Arnold Stockton, Jessica’s boss, a many-chinned, self-made caricature of a man, owned all the Sunday papers that Rupert Murdoch had failed to buy. His own papers talked about him, and so did the rest. Reading a Sunday paper would, Richard suspected, probably end up reminding him of the dinner he had failed to attend on Friday night. So instead Richard had a long hot bath and a number of sandwiches, and several cups of tea. He watched a little Sunday afternoon television and constructed conversations with Jessica in his head. At the end of each mental dialogue they would fall into each other’s arms, make wild, angry, tear-stained and passionate love; and then everything would be all right.



On Monday morning Richard’s alarm failed to go off. He came out onto the street at a run at ten to nine, briefcase swinging, staring up and down the road like a madman, praying for a taxi. Then he sighed with relief, because a big black car was heading down the road toward him, its yellow “taxi” sign bright. He waved at it and yelled.

The taxi slid gently past him, ignoring him completely; it turned a corner and was gone.

Another taxi. Another yellow light that meant the taxi was available. This time Richard stepped out into the middle of the road to flag it down. It swerved past him and continued on its way. Richard began to swear under his breath. Then he ran for the nearest Tube station.

He pulled out a pocketful of coins, stabbed the button of the ticket machine for a single ticket to Charing Cross, and thumbed his change into the slot. Every coin he put in went straight through the guts of the machine and clattered into the tray at the bottom. No ticket appeared. He tried another ticket machine, with the same lack of result. And another. The ticket seller in the office was speaking to someone on the telephone when Richard went over to complain and to buy his ticket manually; and despite—or perhaps because of—Richard’s cries of “Hey!” and “Excuse me!” and his desperate tapping on the plastic barrier with a coin, the man remained resolutely on the telephone.

“Fuck it,” announced Richard, and he vaulted the barrier. No one stopped him; no one seemed to care. He ran, breathless and sweating, down the escalator, and made it onto the crowded platform just as a train came in.

As a child, Richard had had nightmares in which he simply wasn’t there, in which, no matter how much noise he made, no matter what he did, nobody ever noticed him at all. He began to feel like that now, as people pushed in front of him; he was buffeted by the crowd, pushed this way and that by commuters getting off, by others getting on.

He persisted, pushing and shoving in his turn, until he was almost on the train—he had one arm inside—when the doors began to hiss closed. He pulled his hand back, but his coat-sleeve was trapped. Richard began to hammer on the door, and to shout, expecting the driver at least to open the door enough for him to free his sleeve. But instead the train began to move off, and Richard was forced to run down the platform, stumbling, faster and faster. He dropped his briefcase onto the platform, pulled desperately at his sleeve with his free hand. The sleeve ripped, and he fell forward, scraping his hand on the platform, ripping his trousers at the knee. Richard climbed, a little unsteadily, to his feet, then walked back down the platform and retrieved his briefcase.

He looked at his ripped sleeve and his grazed hand and his torn trousers. Then he walked up the stone stairs and out of the Underground station. Nobody asked him for a ticket on the way out.



“I’m sorry I’m late,” said Richard, to no one in particular in the crowded office. The clock on the office wall said that it was 10:30. He dropped his briefcase on his chair, wiped the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. “You wouldn’t believe what it was like getting here,” he continued. “It was a nightmare.”

He looked down at his desktop. There was something missing. Or, more precisely, there was everything missing. “Where are my things?” he asked the room, a little more loudly. “Where is my telephone? Where are my trolls?”

He checked the desk drawers. They were empty too: not even a Mars bar wrapper or a twisted paper clip to show that Richard had ever been there. Sylvia was coming toward him, in conversation with two rather hefty gentlemen. Richard walked over to her. “Sylvia? What’s going on?”