Baptism Page 2

  Cruor Christi was an evangelical Christian order that welcomed troubled souls. Varick was a troubled soul himself. His own personal experience gave him vision and understanding. Tommy had been something of a special project for him. Fiercely intelligent yet damaged, when Tommy had first come to Madoc Farm he had been like a coiled spring. Varick thought he could save him; he thought that Cruor Christi could succeed where other institutions had clearly failed. It was a struggle but he had known that it would be. Tommy’s childhood traumas and his time fighting in Afghanistan had left him in a dangerous state of mind, one in which he would surely have ended up in prison if Varick hadn’t taken him in. Owen, however, was convinced that Tommy and his sister Belle, who had joined the church before Tommy and had encouraged him to join too, would be disruptive influences at Madoc Farm. Owen and Varick had clashed over this a number of times. Now it looked as though the old man had been right all along.

  Feelings of dread and fear came to Varick just as they had done in the old days, the days before he was born again. He looked at himself in the mirror on the wall. He looked old. He would be fifty next birthday. But he was still big and strong, still resolute. He would do what had to be done.

  With the door to Brother Thomas’s room closed behind him, Brother Varick walked back along the corridor. There was no point knocking on Brother Simeon’s door; he knew the room was empty before the beam of the torch on the empty bed confirmed it. He closed the door and continued to Sister Belle’s room. Empty. Tommy had his two foot soldiers with him.

  Varick could hear other brothers and sisters stirring in their rooms, awoken by the disturbance, no doubt, and reaching for candles and matches. At the end of the corridor, kneeling next to Father Owen’s body, Brother Alistair continued to sob, but more gently now. Looking up as Varick approached, he said, “Tommy’s gone hasn’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Varick. “He’s gone. All three of them have gone.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to London.” This was enough to stop Alistair crying. He looked afraid as Varick continued. “We’re going to give Father Owen the last rites and then we’re going to London.”

  “Me too?” Alistair shook his head as he asked the question, as though willing a negative response.

  “Yes, you too. We’ve got to find Tommy and the others and we’ve got to make them stop.”

  6:45 AM

  Inside 14 Highfield Road, South Wimbledon

  George Wakeham’s radio alarm clock clicked on and the voice of the travel-news reporter filled the room. It was the Scottish one with the singsong tone who spoke cheerfully of job action by baggage handlers and security staff at Stansted, which had affected outbound flights. The 43 bus route was diverted in Muswell Hill; a truck had shed its load on the A40 in Acton causing eastbound delays; the Strand Underpass was closed and the Hangar Lane traffic circle was “snarled up through sheer weight of traffic.”

  “And now to the tube . . .” George listened more intently. Of the two hundred and seventy-five stations on the network, one was closed due to construction work—Southfields on the District Line—and one—East Acton on the Central Line—was shut due to staff shortages. Aside from these flies in the collective ointment, all remaining stations were open for business as usual.

  “London Underground has issued a travel warning, following predicted daytime temperatures in excess of ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. Travelers are advised to take a bottle of water with them on their journeys and people who are susceptible to heat-related disorders are advised to stay at home.”

  There he was, the Scottish bloke, sitting in some air-conditioned office explaining that it was going to be the hottest day of the year. George could have done without that. He had been awake since four. His insomnia had no specific cause. It was just the standard issue middle-aged paranoia that gives you a shove in the middle of the night and sits with you, prodding you until any thought of sleep is futile.

  The sun was already beating down on the roof of George’s small terraced house in South Wimbledon. He could feel it coming through the ceiling and the walls, ceiling and walls in need of paintwork, his paintwork, work that he kept meaning to get around to but never seemed to manage.

  They would issue a warning for just about anything nowadays. Like people were too dumb to realize it was hot and they should behave accordingly. They needed someone to warn them, patronize them. Like the posters cautioning against reckless drinking, paid for by the liquor companies. Treat people like morons and they’ll behave like them.

  The electric fan at the foot of the bed blew gusts of warm air across George’s body, a body pretty much unchanged from his days at school when he played on the wing in the first eleven. His arms and legs were still muscular but around his middle was proof of his sedentary lifestyle, proof that was beginning to creep over the edge of his belt.

  His hair needed a trim too. The spiky cut he had gone for in the spring was long grown out and his sideburns were bushy and accentuated—or so he feared—his full cheeks, depriving him of a face that had led a former girlfriend to comment that he looked like a young Albert Finney, an observation he had proudly mentioned a number of times since, long after said girlfriend had become someone else’s. He sometimes wondered if his Albert Finney similarity might have continued with age so that he now looked like Albert Finney at forty, after a few too many pies.

  George enjoyed the breeze from the fan but the time on the radio alarm kept niggling at him. It was always the same. As soon as he felt like sleeping, it was time to get up. Maggie didn’t have that problem. She was asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow and she only woke if Sophie or Ben stirred in the night. It was like she had a sixth sense as far as the children were concerned. But neither of them had woken and Maggie slept on with her back to him, the sheet pulled tight around her shoulders.

  When he and Maggie had first met and started seeing each other, he had struggled to believe that a woman so good looking could find him attractive. She seemed to like the fact that, unlike her friends from college who studied business and marketing and wanted to go out and do well for themselves, he wanted to lead a more—he hated the expression—alternative lifestyle. The fact he had no money—he was the bass player in a band called Crawlspace at the time—was not a problem. Maggie had a good job in the West End working for a theater-marketing agency and she could afford to indulge his artistic ambitions.

  What had kept him going as a young man while he trawled from one low-paying job to another was a supreme confidence that there was some great creative achievement awaiting him just around the corner. At varying times, he had planned on being a pop star, a writer, a comedian, and an actor, but every time he tried to establish himself within his chosen field he gave up at the first taste of rejection. If he had concentrated on one specific vocation he might have made it; perhaps he spread himself too thinly—an expression he had overheard his parents use about him when he was a boy.

  Ten years before he had seen a notice in the Evening Standard for staff at Morden tube station, the most southerly station on the Northern Line and not far from where he lived. He applied for a job and he was successful. It was a stopgap, he told himself, until something else came along. But after a few weeks, he saw an advertisement in the weekly Traffic Circular and applied for a position as a train operator. Again, he got the job, and after a short training course, he was “on the handle”—a London Underground train driver.

  It was a novelty at first; it made him feel like he was breaking away from his middle-class roots to work with “the people.” It appealed to the left-wing principles he had developed at college, where he had briefly studied psychology before dropping out. He joined the union, ASLEF, and went along to a few meetings with the intention of trying his hand at politics but found that he was too shy to assert himself among the shop stewards. What was that Smiths song about shyness stopping you from doing things in life that you’d like to do?

  All tha
t music he had listened to over the years. All those records—he still had them in boxes, all those bands with integrity and passion and fire in their soul, all those manifestos for a different life he had believed in as a young man, all now pushed to the back of the closet on the landing. What use rebellion when you’ve got storage requirements for jumbo packs of Pampers? It was funny how life sanded down the corners of your idealism. One minute you’re a spiky young guy in black clothes with a dedication to the pursuance of cool that is as serious as your haircut, and the next you’re an overweight dad with a receding hairline and a scary mortgage.

  He still harbored dreams of artistic endeavor. He still wanted to be the guy who wrote that book—it’s really good—did you know he was a tube driver? Or the bloke who played guitar for that band—he used to drive a tube train, you know? Anything so long as he wasn’t just George Wakeham, tube driver.

  When Maggie worked for the agency in Soho, he sometimes accompanied her to the first nights of shows. There were all the comedians, the television personalities and the celebrities of the day—the ones only too eager to accept free tickets to the opening of another bloody musical—and he convinced himself that deep down he had more talent than they had. He just needed to find some outlet for it. This yearning for artistic success was motivated by vanity, pure vanity, he knew, and this self-knowledge helped fuel the creeping anxiety that he was wasting his life, wasting his potential driving a tube train all day.

  If only he could accept his lot like the other drivers and station staff. That would make life a whole lot easier. But he couldn’t. Maybe they couldn’t either. How depressing was that? He envied people who enjoyed their work, people for whom the job was enough, people who were happy. There was a time when driving a tube train was just a day job, something to pay the bills while he tried to pursue a creative career. But now he was a tube driver—that alone—and nothing more.

  The red diodes on the clock radio were taunting him: it was time to wake the children. He pulled at the clammy sheet that had become twisted around his waist but he was lying on it and it stuck fast. For a moment he felt a twinge of claustrophobia before he managed to release himself.

  Sometimes he could go for days without feeling anything, but then he would be held at a red light in the middle of a tunnel for a couple of minutes and the sweating would start. If he was stationary for anything longer than a few minutes he knew he would be in trouble.

  All was well when he was moving. The fact that he was locked in one of the deepest and narrowest railway lines in the world meant nothing. When he was motionless in a tunnel, on the other hand, that was something entirely different. Every two or three months there would be a lengthy delay. Perhaps five or six minutes. He could deal with that. He would feel wretched but he could cope. Only once had he nearly come unstuck. A passenger had run amok with a knife at Elephant and Castle and the station was closed down. George’s train was stuck in the tunnel for nearly an hour.

  The discomfort had come in waves, each wave peaking that little bit higher, sustaining itself that little bit longer, until it broke. Each time the claustrophobia had struck, he knew that the only way to deal with it was to move even if the train itself was stationary. There were only two ways to go, either through the J door, as it was known, between the cab and the passenger area, or out of the M door at the front of the train leading out onto the track itself. To make a run for it in either direction would have meant the end of his career as a tube train driver but during the final few minutes of his ordeal it seemed like an increasingly small price to pay. Finally, the all clear was given and he was saved. Never had he been so relieved to see a green light and he set off once more, sweating, hyperventilating, but safe.

  He knew it was ridiculous, comical even. Did you hear the one about the tube train driver who suffered from claustrophobia? But George didn’t find it funny, not today, the hottest day of the year.

  6:58 AM

  Highfield Road, South Wimbledon

  Simeon sat in the backseat of the car outside the train driver’s house and ruminated—as he had for the past few hours—on why they were proceeding with the plan a week early. If it was a rehearsal for the real thing then why bother waiting for the driver? He might not even be on the same shift rotation this week. But whatever the truth, Tommy wasn’t saying. He was in one of his moods where it was almost impossible to get any sense out of him, fielding all questions with his usual enigmatic bullshit.

  When Tommy had come to fetch him just after midnight, he was wiping blood from his arm. Simeon asked him whose blood it was. What the hell was going on? But Tommy had told him, whispering, that they were on their way to London and they had to leave immediately with Belle. When Tommy had said that he would explain everything later, Simeon immediately had a bad feeling about the whole thing, which was compounded when he heard what must have been Brother Alistair sobbing. He didn’t have a chance to make further inquiries, just collected his things and left with Tommy and Belle.

  It was Belle who led him to believe that it might just be a dry run. As they waited in the car outside Madoc Farm while Tommy loaded his things into the trunk, Simeon had asked her what was going on.

  “Just practicing,” Belle had said, and before he could question her further Tommy was in the driver’s seat, and they set off down through the mountains in silence. From where he sat in the back, Simeon could see Tommy’s face reflected in the rearview mirror. Tommy stared ahead at the narrow winding roads lit up in the flare of the headlights but his thoughts were clearly elsewhere.

  As they made their way along the M4, Tommy said that he and Belle should try and get some sleep. Simeon didn’t want to push the questioning but he tried again: “So we’re going early? Or is this some kind of rehearsal?” His and Tommy’s eyes met in the rearview mirror. Even though Simeon couldn’t see Tommy’s mouth, he could tell that Tommy was smiling. He could see from the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes. The bastard was enjoying this. Tommy didn’t even answer his question, just went right on smiling.

  As they sat in the car outside the train driver’s house, Simeon could sense Tommy’s and Belle’s nerves. They weren’t behaving as though it was a dry run. Tommy was alert, acutely focused. Belle watched her brother intently and waited. Simeon felt compelled to speak.

  “So we’re going to go this morning?” He tried to sound hopeful, like this was something that he had dreamed of. He never was much of an actor, always avoided drama classes at school.

  “Surrender,” said Tommy, turning around in his seat and smiling right at him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Surrender to God’s will.”

  As soon as he heard Tommy say this and saw the mobile phone and headset in his hand, Simeon knew that today was no rehearsal.

  7:06 AM

  Inside 14 Highfield Road, South Wimbledon

  George made his way through to the bathroom. Maggie was still asleep. Being the first one up, he could avoid the rush. He looked at himself in the mirror. He was forty years old. His parents used to say of the passing years, “Where does it all go?” and he didn’t know what they meant. Not until now. The name of a Charles Bukowski poem summed it all up, although he had never actually read the poem itself. He was reading a Charles Bukowski book, Post Office, and one of Bukowski’s other works listed at the back was called The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills. And it was true, they did. Bukowski was right on the money.

  As he had grown older, he had found himself becoming more emotional, more likely to tear up at a sad moment in a film or a tragic incident on the news. It might have had something to do with his recent “one under”—his first suicide on the job. For a while, he had been appalled but also strangely intrigued by the prospect of seeing someone jump. It wasn’t as though he was chasing a perverse thrill, far from it, but if he had to come to terms with its likelihood then what better way to do so than with an air of mild curiosity? Some of his colleagues were traumatized by the experience wh
ile others didn’t seem to give a damn. George often wondered how he would react when his time came. It would come eventually—there were over a hundred incidents every year. He wondered how it would feel to watch someone die. It happened to most tube drivers if they drove for long enough. Then, one day, sure enough, it happened to him.

  He was pulling into Warren Street station six months previously. It was about five o’clock. The platform was full of the usual late-afternoon crowd, people trying to beat the rush—and failing. He was about halfway into the station when one of the faceless hordes, a smartly dressed woman in her early fifties, launched herself off the platform edge straight in front of the train. As an exercise in efficient life termination, it was spot on. She timed it perfectly. Her body slammed into the front of the cab and dropped down under the wheels. She was killed instantly. George was lucky in that respect. He guessed the woman was too if she was serious about her desire to die, and he could only presume from her very definite leap that she was.

  Colleagues of George had told him about instances where people had jumped and were only injured, trapped under the train. That could be harrowing for all concerned. So he was thankful that his one under, when it came, was mercifully quick for both himself and the jumper.

  Giving evidence at the inquest was more difficult than he had anticipated, especially seeing the woman’s grieving relatives. After the verdict of suicide was returned, the woman’s husband had approached him outside the coroner’s court and apologized for his wife’s actions. George had found the experience extremely moving.

  He took the leave he was entitled to and accepted an offer of counseling, not because he felt he really needed it but because he had never had any counseling before and wondered if it might help him with his anxiety and corresponding insomnia. It didn’t.