East-West Read online

  There’s also perhaps another, deeper reason for the absence. Londoners spend a lot of their time and energy performing themselves. The city is a kind of catwalk. I don’t mean that it is that for everyone, all the time; I don’t mean that that’s the only thing it is. But Londoners do act out versions of themselves in public, and wear uniforms, and signal that they belong to particular tribes. Not all of this activity is conscious, but quite a lot of it is, and even when it isn’t, a lot of it is easily legible. You can stand in a queue at a Starbucks and see in the line in front of you a city boy, a Sloane who has a job doing something arty, a guy working on a screenplay, a mother just back from the gym, three tourists and two policemen (mind you, they’re the easy ones to spot, since they’re literally wearing uniform). Everybody stays in character. The city spaces are performance spaces – people are acting out a version of themselves.

  It isn’t like that on the Underground. Londoners treat the Underground not as a stage set, a place where we’re on display, but as a neutral space, one in which we don’t overtly direct our attention at each other. People sneak glances at each other, of course they do, but the operative word is ‘sneak’. They don’t look openly, in the way they would elsewhere. The main focus of people’s attention is inward. They go into themselves. Or they go into the world of whatever entertainment they’re carrying. Once upon a time, that would mainly have been a paid-for newspaper – but nothing has disappeared as fast and as completely from the world of the Underground as the paid-for newspaper. A couple of decades ago and you would often be in a train carriage in which most of the people present were reading a paper they’d bought. Now, there won’t be a single person. Many people will be reading the paper, mind you: it’s just that they’ll be reading free papers, the Metro in the morning and the Evening Standard in the afternoon. The old distinctions of who read what have disappeared. On the District Line, there used to be a split between the city workers, travelling west to east, who would be reading the Financial Times, and the East Enders, travelling east to west, who would be reading tabloids. Now it’s all free papers. Drivers get a clear view of that. ‘When I walk back through the train the end of the shift,’ a driver told me, ‘I used to see all the papers.’ I asked him if he ever saw the paper I was writing for at the time. ‘Not a single copy in the last two years,’ he said.

  There will be roughly as many people on some form of portable entertainment console or music player as there are reading the paper. I would say the split is broadly as follows: about a quarter reading a free paper, another quarter on their handheld (mainly phones and music players but the occasional gaming-only console too), fewer than a quarter reading a book and a few more than a quarter staring into inner space. While they’re doing that staring, they usually look down, to make it unmistakably clear that they aren’t staring at other people in the compartment. People are very careful about what they do with their eyes on the Underground.

  Again, that’s because the Underground is not a performance space. People don’t go there to be on show, to act themselves in front of other people. They also don’t like it when people do act up and act out – when somebody does that, you can feel it, the disapproval and resentment, the pulling-back. (My favourite fictional version of this is in Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming-Pool Library, when the train stops in a tunnel, and silence descends, broken by the narrator’s friend loudly asking: ‘Could you ever get into spanking?’) While people are on Underground trains, they go inwards, or they go somewhere else, into the world of whatever they’re reading or hearing or playing.

  Not everybody is scared of the Underground, but I would argue that many people, perhaps even most people, find the experience to one degree or other (to repeat the term I used earlier) to be what psychologists call ‘aversive’. It’s not necessarily the tunnels: it’s the whole business of being crammed into such an enclosed space with so many strangers. Looking at a full train, you sometimes think: how on earth do people manage to do that? How do they talk themselves into believing that this degree of crush, of proximity, is something normal? Research into our sense of personal space suggests that the normal radius for personal distance is between arm’s length and about four feet away. Closer contact than that is an intrusion into ‘intimate space’, which is reserved for close family members and lovers. On the Underground, though, when it’s busy, that intimate space is also reserved for the sweaty man with his arm on the strap over your head, and the young woman in a tracksuit listening to dubstep through iPhone earbuds about six inches from your head, and the two suited salesmen types who, you can tell, while also wishing you couldn’t, have just eaten a curry washed down with cider, and a worried and unhappy-looking middle-aged woman trying to brace herself against the compartment wall whose head is directly under your armpit. Even without being jolted along in the dark tunnel – even without coming to a halt in a dark tunnel, for an unspecified reason, for an unspecified length of time, as the heat mounts – this is a profoundly unnatural condition for human beings. We react to it by going somewhere else in our heads. It is the inner space evoked by T. S. Eliot in ‘East Coker’:

  Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

  And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

  And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

  Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.

  (Note the precision with which Eliot specifies that it’s not any underground train, but the Tube – he knew the distinction well.)

  This, I think, is the reason there have been so few depictions of the Underground in visual narrative form. Orson Welles once said that the only two things which could not be filmed were sexual intercourse and prayer. I take him to mean that they were the two human activities whose significance was entirely internal: they were happening to the people who were experiencing them in a manner which could only be experienced, and not depicted. The Underground is like that – not exactly like that, because there are significant differences between travelling on it and either having sex or praying, but it is on the same continuum, because its significance for us is internal. It’s a going-in, a turning-in; not exactly a mystical state, but one which we know deep down inside ourselves is not an ordinary or routine condition. We escape it with distractions, or we try to switch off, but we can’t entirely hide from it. That internal state, central to travel on the Underground, is something which it’s very hard, perhaps impossible, to put on TV. Kim Stanley Robinson, in his SF novel Forty Signs of Rain, has a character float a theory about why this business of being underground connects so deeply with something inside us. ‘He descended the Metro escalator into the ground. A weird action for a hominid to take – a religious experience. Following the shaman into the cave. We’ve never lost any of that.’ And that, perhaps, is why people go quiet in the Underground. It’s the only time we experience a combination of twenty-first-century technology (the trains), nineteenth-century technology and vision (the tunnels, the network) and our paleolithic deep self. A person on the Underground is experiencing the rare chance to be a twenty-first-century Victorian caveman. She is doing something we don’t value enough, in the contemporary world: she is travelling in a direction we don’t prize. She is going down and in. Down under the ground, and down into the self: into the city, into the world, into the streets and also into herself. That, finally, is what the Tube does most and does best. It takes us down and in.

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  First published in Penguin Books 2013

  Copyright © John Lanchester, 2013

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  The lines from ‘East Coker’ by T. S. Eliot are reprinted by kind permission of Faber and Faber.

  ISBN: 978-1-84-614530-8

  Danny Dorling

  THE 32 STOPS

  Lives on London’s Central Line

  To Bethan Suyin Thomas, who loves London.

  Like the trace of a heartbeat on a cardiac monitor, the Central Line slowly falls south through west London, rises gently through the centre and then flicks up north through the east end of the capital. At the start of the journey life expectancy falls by two months a minute. The train is rapidly crossing many invisible boundaries. Between the first four stations every second spent moving is exactly a day off their lives in terms of how long people living beside the tracks can expect to live.1 And it is not so much the exercise people take, or how healthily they eat, or whether or not they smoke that matters. It’s much more who ends up living here. At the very start of the line those who do better in life end up living, on average, further out from the centre. But luck has a lot to do with where you end up living along the line too, good luck as well as bad luck.

  The line is over a century old. Its westernmost station was opened on 2 April 1911, on the very same Sunday that the groundbreaking 1911 Population Census was taken, the first census to make a detailed record of living conditions, main employer and the number of families living in each home. It recorded the industry or services with which the workers of the households were connected, how long couples had been married and how many children were born alive, how many were still alive and how many had died.2 It was the census from which our current coding of social class was first derived and through which we first recorded our intention to improve infant health.

  Everything you are about to read is based on fact. These facts are taken from official records. They come from children’s GCSE school exam certificates, from pensioners’ death certificates recording the length of life of each and assigning each an underlying cause of mortality. These facts come from censuses and surveys, counts of bankers and tax office estimates of average incomes. They also come from others’ descriptions, such as the official summaries of the number of children growing up in poverty in each place. What all these facts do is determine the social gradient between places, in this case between tube stops of the Central Line. They can tell us at which point, and in which aspects of life, we are heading up or down, socially, as we travel west to east, geographically.

  Saturday 2 April 2011, West Ruislip, 6.00 a.m.

  Exactly a century after the 1911 census was taken, and after the furthest tube line west was opened, a couple are arguing in bed. They are arguing about the census and why they chose to live in West Ruislip.

  ‘Don’t forget the baby,’ he said.

  How could she forget the baby? They’d moved for the baby, for the extra room, for the future. The baby was much more important than the census form. The form that had been sitting by the kitchen sink for a week.

  ‘Someone at work was telling me, only yesterday, that people always forget to add the baby,’ he said.

  He worked in town, in Islington, he changed at Bank, but in May the office was moving to Pimlico and then he’d change at Oxford Circus.3 That was the great thing about the Central Line: it didn’t matter if you changed your job or if your job changed its offices – everything was always roughly the same distance away, measured by travel time if not miles. They’d moved here because it was safe and getting safer. Crime in the ward had dropped by 13 per cent in the last year (it would drop by another 15 per cent this year). Such crime as there was could mostly be classified as petty antisocial behaviour. Almost all of it took place in just a few streets. He told her which streets.4

  ‘That’s why we didn’t choose to live there,’ he said.5

  He liked statistics. He worked for the Office for National Statistics. It took him exactly 35 minutes to do most of the Daily Telegraph crossword, leaving precisely a minute to sit down in his seat and precisely a minute to get up.

  Babies do not work to timetables. Babies do not derive pleasure from being told that their parents have mortgaged themselves beyond the hilt to secure them a premier postcode, a place where the average GCSE score is 356 points.6 He had annoyed her intensely when he decided he needed to explain that particular school statistic to her as they were looking at possible semis to buy. Again his colleague at work had explained it to him.

  ‘The average child in London is awarded 337 points for its GCSEs, but the average for West Ruislip is 356 points. Although our child won’t be average; our child will be very clever.’

  He was going to go on to try to explain how GCSE result scores are calculated, but he had lost her attention.

  ‘Babies get left off census forms all the time,’ he had said, just last night, as she was falling asleep. Her nightmare had been about forgetting the baby, not being able to add up the numbers, finding she was living in a place because of the numbers, because of the numbers about the neighbours.

  ‘And it’s 90 per cent white,’ he told her.7

  ‘We shouldn’t be choosing where to live because of that,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he agreed.

  Exactly three minutes down the line is Ruislip Gardens, GCSE point average of 353.

  ‘Almost slipping by a whole grade in one subject,’ he told her, as she rolled her eyes.

  ‘I don’t care about the schools,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about the crime. I don’t care about the numbers. I just want to get one decent night’s sleep.’ But she did care, not as much as him, but enough to agree with him about where to live.

  Ruislip Gardens, 6.30 a.m.

  ‘The thing about three-year-olds is that they think it’s waking-up time when it’s light,’ she tried to explain.

  ‘But it’s Saturday,’ he moaned. ‘When am I going to get my Saturdays back?’

  ‘We’re a post-industrial family,’ she replied. ‘Saturdays are workdays now.’

  ‘Where did you get “post-industrial” from?’ he asked.

  ‘The council,’ she replied.8 ‘Almost five times as many people living here are post-industrial families than in the rest of the borough.’

  ‘What’s a post-industrial family?’ he asked wearily, thinking back to the days of lie-ins.

  ‘Most households are traditional families with school-age children. They generally live in three-bedroom terraced houses,’ she read (from the council pamphlet ‘A focus on Manor Ward’). ‘Five thousand, two hundred and three of us, almost half the neighbourhood, are post-industrial.’

  ‘What’s so post-industrial about living in a terrace?’ he asked.

  ‘Search me,’ she replied. ‘But look, here, there’s a chart of schools – Ruislip Manor is not doing badly, over 80 per cent get Level 4 in both English and Maths at Key Stage Two.’9

  ‘It’s not as good as West Ruislip,’ he said.

  ‘West Ruislip’s results are slipping,’ she replied.

  ‘So are Manor’s,’ he said.

  ‘Look, it’s better than South Ruislip,’ she pointed out.

  ‘But South Ruislip’s getting better,’ he retorted.

  ‘Oh, that’s only
one year,’ she said, exasperated.

  ‘The most recent year,’ he replied, then asked, sarcastically, ‘which schools do you think drive these numbers?’

  ‘Why are we arguing about this at 6.30 in the morning?’ she sighed.

  ‘Teddy’s stuck in plop-plop,’ announced the three-year-old.

  That’s why we’re arguing, she thought, as the father of the three-year-old rushed to the toilet to save Teddy. Luckily the three-year-old’s thumbs were too weak to work the flush.

  ‘Look,’ he said, blow-drying Teddy, ‘it’s not as good as West Ruislip here, but it’s better than South Ruislip. We’re in between. Everything is in between. House prices, schools, everything. That’s why we’re here.’

  ‘And my folks,’ she reminded him. ‘Don’t forget where most of the deposit came from.’

  ‘We owe them.’

  South Ruislip, 7.00 a.m.

  ‘No, you haven’t got school today. Go down and watch telly,’ he pleaded.

  She was only just six years old and wasn’t very good with days of the week yet. He was tired; his wife was still asleep, but waking. It was getting easier, he told himself. But why didn’t she know Saturday came after Friday? She knew how to use the three remote controls it took to make the flat screen work downstairs. But she didn’t know the days of the week. What were they teaching them at that school?

  His wife worried more than he did. They were in a good borough after all, but they were on the edge of the good bit.

  Cigarette, he thought. Had he muttered it out loud? ‘Later,’ he told himself, when the kid wouldn’t notice. It bugged him when she said he smelt of smoke. At work, too, it was getting harder to smoke; he had to go down the road now, not just outside.