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  *

  Haji jumped after the thing inside him wouldn’t stop growing. For years he fed it with samosas, curries, koshary, gin. At sixteen he stepped back from the mirror when his mouth looked unrecognisable, cruel, superimposed.

  School meant trying to sit still in lessons pretending he didn’t feel disconnected from his limbs. He took to carrying a wind-up man in his pocket which he’d place on the playground floor during breaks, starring at it in deep concentration, trying to find the centre of its movement as though it would reveal something. Girls would giggle at the edges, finger their pleated grey skirts and say, “Are you okay Haji? You’re acting funny.”

  “Go away,” he’d retort, barely glancing their way, listening for more important things such as a second heartbeat he was sure was winging its way to his lean, rangy frame.

  “Why don’t you disappear? You’re a weirdo,” the girls would snap, narrowing their eyes, reducing him to a tiny flint as they stomped off before breaking into fits of laughter again, coddled by the headiness of youth.

  On Wednesday 26 February his life came crashing down, a broken mauve eggshell on the black and white kitchen floor. The photo of the boy he once was with a laughing woman rested on the counter top, the wooden frame still greasy from an incident during which he couldn’t feel his arm; he’d been shelling prawns when that horrible, murky feeling came. He grabbed the photograph as though it was a lifeline.

  It irked him that he had no memory of the photo, only that they were happy. He picked up his egg shell with trembling fingers, dumping the fragments in the detachable head of the blue bin, a purgatory for all the wind-up men that had accompanied him over the years. He brushed his teeth, downed a glass of orange juice. He didn’t close the fridge door, shut the windows or check the plugs were turned off. The chipped purple door of flat 49b slammed shut.

  Outside, the air was cold on his skin. The sky snatched facial expressions, swirling them grey. Haji observed the scenes around him; a man paying a bike messenger outside a tall, soulless office block, laughter between two charity fundraisers shaking their orange buckets at the traffic lights, a shop shutter door opening, its slow, mechanical sound reverberating in his ears.

  At Bank station the platform was hot. People avoided each other’s gazes. Their voices were locusts scratching his throat. The time was 11am. The clock had hands on its face, which made him laugh and wonder what it would be like to have fingers and limbs sprouting out of his face. The station was one cavernous passage, churning out passengers bearing faded bruises from 5am till 1am daily.

  The feeling of sadness persisted, holding his body hostage. For ages he had felt nothing, had been numb. He had simply functioned. Now he thought about the tube train and how it ran through tunnels, heartbeats, chests, through guts that grew comets and tongues twinned the flame. The tube transported worlds intersecting. Oily spillage slipped through its programmed doors. The underground brought deliverance. The rumbling train approaching presented an exit. The sound of shutter doors trapped in his ears and the train wheels screeching seemed to be in collusion. To Haji, the driver was an angel in disguise who could change at any moment in his neat, private carriage.

  Haji’s right arm went dead first. He leapt in front of the train just as his left arm was about to, making the woman in the cream Mac jacket standing behind him gasp for breath. Everything and everyone shrunk, reduced to deflated things orbiting in the distance, the past. He landed inside the void, the thud of his fall splitting the driver’s head, leaving miscellaneous anxieties there to torment him for months.

  *

  She stood punching the tunnel walls with its thick black cables, frustrated her fists weren’t scraped raw. It was after 2am and the trains had stopped running. Mice scurried along the tracks in quick bursts. The glow of light from the platform made parallel worlds split. She stopped punching, fists by her side. She glanced at the walls, silently cursing. Haji wondered why she didn’t pick up the crooked smiles that had slipped from passengers and were circling her feet. It was one of the beauties in this afterlife. The dark lay behind her, waiting to swallow. Haji ambled over, the soles of his shoes gone. The tracks had eaten them.

  On closer inspection, the dark-skinned black woman with locks hanging down to her shoulders had a newbie’s air about her with high cheekbones and a stubborn, full mouth. She wore a blue Betty Boop T-shirt. She turned to face him. Betty moved too.

  Betty sat in the blue, hand on jaw and frowned. “Let’s see if this schmuck will be of any use,” she said.

  “Shut up, Betty!” The woman ordered. “Can you let me think?”

  “Hey, you okay? I’m Haji.” He stretched his hand out awkwardly, as though he’d borrowed someone else’s arm and was adjusting. He always did that in close proximity of an attractive woman.

  She ploughed her fingers through her locks, shoving them back. “Can you help me? We’re lost. We’ve been trying to get out of the underground for days and just end up going from one station to the next. We can’t seem to leave and it’s driving me crazy. I’m October, this is my T-shirt Betty,” she said.

  “Um yeah, I know Betty Boop,” he answered.

  October leaned forward and whispered, “Listen, Betty’s in between jobs right now. You know, with the whole economic climate thing? She’s a little sensitive.”

  “Okay.” Haji shot a cautious glance at her T-shirt. Betty was playing cat’s cradle with the smiles; she paused momentarily to flutter her lashes at him. “I’ve been down here for a long time,” Haji continued. “There are limitations to what I can do.”

  “But you can help us get out of here, right?” October asked.

  “No, you jumped. There is no way out for jumpers into the real world.”

  “No, no, no, no, no! I’m lost. I keep trying to tell you people this but nobody down here seems to understand. I have a meeting to go to.”

  “I’m sorry, but you jumped, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Look,” she said urgently, “I didn’t have a reason to kill myself. I have no need to be here. Is there a way out of this place or not?”

  Haji grimaced, his mouth thinned into a flat line. “Yeah, there is. It’s an opening near the old bomb shelter. It will take us a while to get there, even then there’s no guarantee we can get through.”

  October rubbed her head roughly, as if it was a scratch card with numbers underneath. “Can’t you get us there any quicker? You must know all the shortcuts,” she asked.

  “Look,” Haji said, his impatience rising to the surface. “I’ll take you the way I know, okay?”

  “Fine.” October started marching ahead.

  “Loser,” Betty chimed.

  “Where did you get the T-shirt?” he asked, rubbing his jaw.

  “You mean Betty? Sense charity shop in Deptford. It was the last one on the rack,” she answered nonchalantly.

  Haji felt beads of sweat popping on his neck. His brown eyes moistened at the memory of his mother taking him T-shirt shopping, how opposite their tastes were. His latte-coloured skin looked pallid in the light.

  “Also Betty asked me to,” October remarked, running her tongue over her lip. “She said, ‘Honey, can you get me out of here? The sound of that register is driving me insane’.”

  Haji laughed and Betty yawned. October stopped, turning to face him. “So why did you kill yourself?”

  *

  The city carried you like its infant child then bled you. It put the night in you, snacking on all the injured silhouettes you acquired. The city taught you how to build fortresses of sound you could never dismantle. It kept you falling till hitting the ground became the necessary act of an unnamed religion.

  In the old life, when he talked to himself in his empty flat, he imagined his internal conversations were collected like shiny coins slotted in machines. When the loneliness got overwhelming, he’d sit in cafes just to listen, curling his hands into balls. He’d watch people come and go, wanting to fill their bags with things t
hat had galloped inside him, grazing his organs to leave their mark. After his shadow had abandoned him, running off with the dawn, he started loitering in those cafes, sometimes unable to feel his left side, convinced that Nuri had lured it away from the city.

  Years ago, that bleak afternoon, Mama took to the sitting room with a headache. She switched off the freezer so the ice fell in soft, melting chunks and unplugged a blender filled with tomatoes, chilies, onion and coriander. Were it not for the rain, they would have been outside in the garden, firing sticks at tin cans sitting like targets waiting to grow legs.

  He and Nuri, aged twelve and thirteen were bored, play-fighting with two squash rackets through the house. They fought on the maroon carpeted stairs before Nuri dashed into the bathroom. He ran after her, waving the racket, playfully twisting his face into a menacing expression. He pushed the door open. Nuri slipped and smashed her head against the sink. It happened so quickly he barely caught his breath. The room stood still. Nuri didn’t get up, her racket free from her grasp. He couldn’t recall dropping his racket, although he must have done it. A feeling like pins and needles took over his arms. He wasn’t be able to move them. Her head was bleeding, the blood running into the stillness. He stumbled against the silver towel rack, noticing his old Action Man figurine on the window sill, Nuri’s blue roller-skates in the tub, wheels coated in mud and his father’s big white pants slung over the shower railing, waiting to fall like some deflated parachute. How he’d made it downstairs escaped him but he’d always be haunted by the slow horror that crept into his mother’s gaunt face and coming back up to be with Nuri; her not moving, talking or breathing. He was hypnotised by the small Action Man beside her, blood running into its eyes, his mother screaming and him not being able to remember whether he’d moved the Action Man.

  After they buried Nuri, his parents started arguing in Arabic constantly. For months his mother’s face always twisted into an expression he couldn’t get away from. Nuri’s death had been an accident but his mother never recovered, abandoning them and moving back to Egypt. He was left with a father who chewed pine nuts relentlessly, barely spoke to him and looked at him as if he were nothing. So he stored his guilt in limbs that increasingly felt alien to him. Sometimes he’d sit in Nuri’s room, punching the body that had let him down, holding her roller-skates, crying, trying to forget. But the memory of he and Nuri carrying atlases and hopping over low fences remained, as if they were holding worlds and crossing them simultaneously.

  *

  He told October about Nuri while watching the light dance in her hair. She tucked her arm through his as though it belonged there. “I’m sorry. You’re never the same after a loss like that. Have you run into your sister since?”

  He shook his head, drew her closer. “For a while, I kept expecting her to show and she’d be the same you know? The same age and have that recklessness about her I remember, coming at me at full speed in those blue roller-skates. It never happened and I can’t go to her.”

  “Why not?”

  “I told you, I’m trapped here.”

  They paused for a bit, looking up at the blackened ceilings as if a constellation of stars would crash through that they could give individual names and identities. Betty sat up sucking her thumb and blinking at them.

  In a carriage, October folded her legs like a Buddha, her lips pursed. Haji wanted to taste and trace her most recent memories; he felt a yearning to be close to her. He missed the taste of Guinness, missed the sky at night. He missed watching mindless TV while the roots within him begged to be uprooted and eating kebabs late at night with girls who could be slotted into neat categories.

  October levitated, floating towards him.

  “Show-off,” Betty muttered.

  He wanted to tell October he didn’t ever want her to leave. She was the one person that made him long for company since he’d been dead. He wrestled with the thought, as if somebody had dropped it inside him while he wasn’t looking. He didn’t know what to do with it.

  October began to spin, whipping through the carriage.

  “Stop it!” Betty whined. “You’re making me dizzy.”

  October continued, gathering speed, light.

  “I’m going to be sick!” Betty yelled.

  October stopped, tugging down the T-shirt that had shot up, exposing her belly button. “I have my appointment in a few days.”

  “You still think that’s happening?” Haji asked sarcastically.

  October’s face fell and Betty struggled for breath in the blue.

  On the Central line they stood on top of trains and pretended to be airplanes taking off runways. The Northern line brought leaps off the heads of passengers. Inside a District line carriage Haji lay his head on a woman’s chest listening to her heartbeat because he sometimes got nostalgic. He smiled when she touched that exact spot and the hairs on her arms stood like soldiers to attention.

  They pressed their faces on the windows to make masks of glass that would fade instantly. They held onto coattails and skirts, laughed when the people tried to get through ticket machines with them in tow and the machines read Seek Assistance. All the noise was a black and frothing sea they swam in. They removed the company names and logos from adverts. They napped on escalators and Betty moaned throughout. Haji showed October how to steal shoelaces from passengers and make model parachutes using them.

  Along the way they passed other ghosts he had helped, who would nod sombrely. Sometimes Haji introduced her to them, like Manny, the pimp, who had a penchant for wearing jumpsuits. A metallic jumpsuit had clung to him when he’d been shoved onto the tracks by a vengeful prostitute at King’s Cross station. He’d been dressed for adventure, a couple of LSD pills inside him, but all that waited were black train tracks. There was Laurie Lee, the blonde American who ran around in her dirty wedding dress. She’d died on her wedding day having caught her groom fucking her best friend in the church toilet an hour before they were to say I do. Carried along by despair, shaky and disorientated, she’d slipped to her end at St Paul’s station. And Bruiser, the thirteen-year-old boy who’d always wondered what it would be like to fly. One day at Oxford Circus station he’d thought he could. He’d flown to his death. Every time they bumped into him he asked, “Have you seen my rabbit?”

  They all had stories to tell.

  Four days of discovery passed for October. They swung off fat cables on the walls along the way, relishing how agile their bodies were. They sought refuge underneath the trains, catching sparks with keen tongues. They pilfered abandoned purses from platforms, pretending the items were theirs. They travelled neon silhouettes on fate’s blueprint. The tunnels kept unfurling and breathing as the dark, fat veins of the city.

  After

  It was early morning, footsteps above echoed around the room. October flew at him. “Liar!” she yelled, pummelling his shoulders. “There is no way out of here. I’ve followed you to every one of these stupid shelters and you’ve led me on some wild chase for nothing. You said–”

  “I wanted to get to know you, to spend time with you so I told you what you needed to hear. I don’t feel bad about it, it’s hard down here sometimes,” he replied, wiping his hands on creased brown trousers, a result of their night spent in the shelter.

  Betty stood, looking back and forth between them. Haji turned his back, stalking off towards the direction of the main station.

  “That’s right, walk away, don’t finish what you started,” October spat, following.

  Haji paused, his face contorted as though some internal battle was happening. “You’re meant to be here, that’s why you are.”

  “What?” October replied. “That’s not true.” She shook her head, eyes watering.

  “Get rid of that T-shirt,” he demanded.

  “No!” Betty yelled. “Don’t listen to him. He’s a liar.” Her huge eyes were saucers of rage. October pulled the T-shirt against her body protectively.

  Haji pointed his finger at her. “Stop
doing that! I’m not going to pretend anymore.”

  Betty covered her ears. “Don’t trust him. Can’t you see what he’s doing?”

  “The night you died, you didn’t get that part, did you?” Haji asked.

  The sound of a siren began to flood her head. One of the last sounds she’d heard that night. “I told you, I was celebrating, I got cast in this new show due to start filming in Manchester and it is a big part…” Her words petered off.

  “And this appointment you’ve been singing about non-stop?” Haji said.

  “A meeting with the directors. I need to find a way out, they’ll be wondering what happened. They scouted me for it you know! That night on the platform, it was Betty who told me to jump. I had been drinking and I listened to her.”

  He grabbed her shoulders, shaking them. “Stop it! You jumped, Betty’s not real. Stop pretending she is.”

  October crumpled to the floor. “You’re jealous of Betty! You’re just another person telling lies about her.” She began to cry, tasting the cut on her lips from her leap all over again, remembering reaching for a light she thought she could mould in those seconds, a snapshot in the memory of passengers on the platform.

  He held her while she sobbed against him, contemplating an afterlife of skylines in tunnels, the sound of trains and the desire to slip into the spaces between them. She thought of time spent haunting carriages, people who leave and take their nomadic tendencies along with them. She screamed.

  By 6am Clapham Junction station was a hive of activity. On platform 1 lay a crumpled T-shirt on the floor beside a clear, plastic half-filled bin. It twitched. A man in a grey suit with a flapping purple tie bent over it, stretching his hand. The cartoon figure of Betty Boop looked up at him, still in the blue.