She tried to focus on the book in her hands. It came from the staff library. The Palace of Westminster didn’t pay its workers well, but at least they had access to decent reading.
“Are you scared?” the young traveler opposite asked pleasantly, nodding at the bump beneath her hands.
It was a book on philosophy. She chose it for the image on the cover: Ouroboros, the serpent that devoured itself. If she squinted hard she could imagine the familiar London Transport poster, with its yellow rounded rectangle for the Circle Line, transposed in its place.
“Not at all,” she answered immediately without taking her attention off the page.
There was a paragraph from Plato, a description of Ouroboros as the very first creature in the universe, the beast from which everything sprang, and to which everything returned.
She felt a little giddy when she realized the words of some ancient Greek, who had been dust when Christ was born, made some sense to her. It was almost as if she could hear his ancient, cracked voice.
The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him:for there was nothing beside him.
It was impossible to concentrate. Melanie Darma didn’t want to ask, not really. But she had to.
“Who will remember?”
Before he could answer they clattered into Temple. The bright station lights made her blink. The doors opened. A burly, scarlet-faced man in a creased, grubby dark suit entered the carriage, looked at their half, then the other, and sat down in the seats opposite her, as far away from the young man with the rucksack as he could. She could still smell the rank stink of beer, though.
“And why?” she wondered.
The newcomer grunted, pulled out a copy of the Standard, thrust his coarse face into it. Then he raised his head and stared hard at both of them, as if they’d broken some kind of rule by speaking to each other across the chasm of a Tube train carriage, strangers conversing beneath the streets of London on a breathless July day.
“I don’t know what you mean…” the young man answered quietly.
Perhaps she’d misheard. The train was noisy. She didn’t feel well. But now he had his hands curled round the rucksack the way hers fell in place about her stomach, and his eyes wouldn’t leave her document bag from work, the green canvas carryall bearing the insignia of the Palace of Westminster, a golden portcullis, crowned, with two chains. It sat in the seat next to her, looking important, though in truth it contained nothing important.
The train lurched into darkness once more, for several seconds this time. She wondered whether someone had moved during that time. But when the lights returned they were both in the same seats, the older man face-deep in his paper, the younger, smiling a little vacantly, glancing in her direction.
She thought of the offices and who would be there, waiting. It was temporary work, six months, no more, until her…“confinement” as one of the older women put it. Temps didn’t get maternity pay, even when they were forced to go through interminable interviews and vetting processes, just so they could answer irate e-mails to MPs she never met. The men and women there were, for the most part, kind, in an officious, offhand way. Each day she would nod and smile to the policemen on the door, place her bag on the security machine to be scanned, her ID card against the entry system reader to be checked. Nothing ever changed, nothing ever happened. Behind the imposing, ornate doors of the Palace of Westminster, beyond the gaze of the tourists who snapped and gawped at the great building that sat beneath the tower of Big Ben, lay nothing more than the world writ small: little people doing little jobs, leading insignificant lives, just looking, like her, to pay the bills.
No one ever asked who the father was. She was a temp. There was, of course, no point.
She leaned forward, needing to ask him something.
“I was wondering…” she began.
The man in the creased dark suit glared at her, swore, screwed up his paper and got to his feet.
Her heart leapt in her chest, her hands gripped the shape beneath her fingers more firmly. It was the middle of the day. Violence on the Tube at that hour was rare, but not unknown.
“Don’t do anything…” she heard herself murmur.
There was an exchange of intemperate words, and the thickset man stomped off to sit in the far end of the carriage. The train burst into Embankment with a deafening clatter. One more stop to go. In her early days working at the Houses of Parliament she had sometimes abandoned the train here and walked the rest of the way, along the Embankment. She enjoyed the view, her left side to the river and the London Eye on the opposite bank, ahead the familiar outline of Westminster Bridge and the great iconic symbol of Big Ben beneath which—and this had long ceased to astonish her—she worked, humbly tapping away at a computer.
There was no possibility that she could walk such a distance anymore. She kept her eyes on the grimy carriage floor and said nothing else. At Westminster Station she got up and left the train without looking at anyone.
The day seemed brighter than when she first went underground. She glimpsed up at the impossibly tall clock tower to her right, blinking at the now-fierce sky.
Then, patiently, as she always did, because that was how she was brought up, she waited at the first pedestrian crossing, until the figure of the green man came and it was safe to walk. It was only a few hundred yards from the mouth of the Tube station to the heavily guarded gate of the Palace of Westminster, close to the foot of the tower, the entrance she had to use. As always, there were police officers everywhere, many carrying unsightly black automatic weapons in their arms, cradling them as if they were precious toys.
No one looked at a pregnant young woman out on the street in London. They were all too busy to notice such a mundane sight. She walked over the final stretch of road when the last pelican crossing allowed, wondering who would be on duty at the security post that day. There was one nice police officer, a friendly sergeant, tall, with close cropped gray hair, perhaps forty, or a fit fifty, it was difficult to tell. She knew his name: Kelly. Everyone else among the staff who scrutinized her bag and her ID card from time to time, asking pointless questions, picking curiously at her belongings, was still a stranger.
Twenty yards from the high iron gates of the security entrance she turned and saw him.
The young man from the train had his rucksack high over his head. He was running and screaming something in a language she didn’t understand. He looked both elated and scared. There were policemen beginning to circle him, fumbling at their weapons.
Melanie Darma watched all this as if it were a dream, quite unreal, a spectacle from some TV show that had, perhaps, been granted permission to film in the shadow of Big Ben, though this was, she felt sure, improbable.
She walked on and found herself facing the tower of Big Ben again. Kelly—Sergeant Kelly, she corrected herself—was there, yelling at her. He didn’t have a weapon. He never carried one. He was too nice for that, she thought, and wondered why at that moment she chose, quite consciously, not to listen to his hoarse, anxious voice.
“Melanie…!”
The bright, angry sky shook, the horizon began to fall sideways. She found herself thrust forcefully to one side, and felt her hands grip the shoulder bag with the golden portcullis close to her, out of habit, not fear, since all it contained was the book on Ouroboros, a few bills, a purse containing £20 and a few coins.
Falling, she clutched the canvas to herself, defending the tender swell at her stomach as she tumbled toward the hard London stone.
Two strong arms were attempting to knock