Tremors

"Were you there when they crucified my Lord. 
Were you there when they nailed him to the tree.
Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble"

African-American spiritual










Content Warning:
Strong language, homophobia 

Transcript

Tremors

The tube car in which Miles was seated shuddered as it pulled out of Shoreditch High Street. He had risen early, and wasn’t yet as alert as he needed to be for his task in hand, a fact of which he was becoming only gradually aware. Cavernous darkness rumbled around the hurry of the carriages as they clattered; air whooshed, with the passage, through an open window. A young man opposite, somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, possibly a little older, tightly covered his ears, in shelter from the tube’s howls and squeals. The bothered, and yet vacant expression, the sensitivity to noise, reminded Miles of his brother.

            An old hand-holdable satchel, with nothing inside but a battered red hymnal and a few crinkled sheets of sheet music, accompanied Miles on the adjacent seat. His reaction to an old woman, who shook a great deal, (she and the walking stick on which she was supported), was a little delayed and she admonished him with a look of almost abrasive insecurity. Miles removed the satchel and she lowered herself into the newly, belatedly vacant seat with many angry mutters, but not before the train burst out from the tunnelled blackness into the sun, promptly pulling into Hoxton station, almost as soon as it had done so.

            Miles was immediately swift in his flight down the stairs and through the gates. He crossed the highstreet and threaded his way through Geffyre Estate, meeting Main Street at the intersection point, the chemist’s marking the very spot. The Muslim market would soon crowd the empty stretch of street before the smoky little café, whose familiar red and cream facade Miles was quick to notice. Men, no more of them white than were black, (or vice versa), sat outside the café in hardhats and high visibility jackets. They would soon be hidden from view by stacked fruit, among which robed men and burka-ed women would soon begin importuning passing folk. The Irish pub, Howl at the Moon, an establishment painted a predominant ebony, with a perfectly white moon hanging in the centre of the ceiling of the main floor, would soon open its doors to patrons. A jerk chicken truck parked outside the dormant pub released a pleasant strain of heat into the air. Miles passed swiftly, and unlingeringly, the street’s two most beautiful, and most native facades: the black and gold of Hayes and English funeral directors, and the green and white of F Cooke’s Pie and Mash shop. Still they slept, behind their glass.      

            A man whom Miles recognised, though dishevelled, seemed jaunty and undaunted as he stumbled towards passing folk. His dreads were filthy and he reeked of marijuana. Reggae recorded in vinyl, perhaps forty, fifty years ago, sidled from the open window of an upstairs flat. The tinkling measures, embellished by steel drums and compounded- even knit, like a spell- in the almost poignant, faroff rowdiness of the voice, seemed to send the man out into the world, turning, and stumbling in chipper disorder. Miles’ quick, efficient flight up Main Street drew in the man:

            “Hey, how you doing today my man…”

 “Good morning!” Miles answered.

 “Hey bruv, sorry to bother you like…”

But Miles didn’t allow the man to finish as he was in a rush. He wasn’t late but felt unable to stop, even to briefly entertain the man.  

“Awright, man, no worries yeah…bless!”

            Miles noticed the bright red phonebox, and then, a stone's-throw beyond it to the left, the first protruding sides of Gothic stone. An undertaker was already stood outside the portal of entrance, smoking a cigarette. Miles crossed the threshold, met eyes with the undertaker, and he reciprocated a silent goodmorning, just a nod.

            Miles did not know the man whose funeral it was that day. He had seen him on a few occasions at the back of the church, looking very frail, clutching close to him a little green hymnbook which he never even opened. Miles crossed himself as he crossed the threshold, passing through the baptistry, where the stout font stood. He was immediately met by the must of old, dried incense, faintly fragrant in many a beam. The retired thurible swung the tiniest trifle in a sealed off chamber of the church. Miles climbed the stairs up to the loft, passing through the sacristy where a ghostly set of Eastertide vestments lay heaped upon the vacant, upholding shape of a dressmaker’s dummy.

            In the loft, Miles readied the old, wheezing instrument, and the requisite books for the man’s service. The warden, Lou, had already placed a service sheet on the bench. Miles regarded the face that fronted it but not before he took in the name, and his lips tittered with its six syllables. Michael Lawn Anderson. And the precise span, to the day, of this Mr. Michael Lawn Anderson: 3rd, May, 1960- 8th, March, 2024. Miles took note of the specificity, those two marked points in time, across which spanned that life, a complete, imperfect arc. A photograph of a much younger Michael Lawn Anderson, a 1998 Michaael Lawn Anderson, maybe a 2002 Michael Lawn Anderson, answered Miles’ gaze. A sad face, Miles thought, full of all the lines life sets down upon the flesh, deep dimples sunk by the least smile, crowsfeet raying out in the dark temples. Forehead lines, a retreat of the eyes, which indefatigably shone all the same with an unappeasable brown glassiness. The shade of the flesh was not very dark, oak-like, a little coppery, but it seemed darker against the white flash of the big central smile. It was a smile that meant something, a deeply felt smile, and one which hid as much as it revealed.

            Miles heard a figure enter the sacristy and he wasted no time in descending to greet them, quite certain that they were clerical. It was indeed a clergyman who had entered. Miles and Fr. Liam greeted one another and corresponded quickly and efficiently over the ensuing proceedings. Northern Irish, fat, a little effeminate, Miles presumed that his involvement in the London Anglo-Catholic community came of his being a gay Belfastian ex-Catholic, or something close to that. Miles estimated that this Catholicised branch of the Church of England was the sole not-perfectly-fulfilling alternative, a second sphere in which to weave a ministry. He was mostly cordial and a little brusque, he spoke in a manner to which Miles was well used, and felt comforted by. It was an authority that held him tight and, in Miles' experience, made services better not worse (especially as pertaining to their musical component).  

            Miles returned to the loft with as good a grasp as he could ascertain of the proceedings shortly to follow. He took from his book-satchel two examples of the melancholic, funereal fare he had come armed with. He felt certain that the music was going to fall or be blown from the music-stand over the console, that what little magic it was within his abilities to summon would be quickly terminated by some chance cockup or error. He brought the organ to life: slow, pulsing measures of music out of the wheezing silence of the ailed, ungainly machine. Its chipped pipes seemed, like a face, to frown. The wood shuddered softly, the lofted floorboards too. At first, every note had to be coaxed, beat upon beat. But then, after about a minute of teasing inspiration, the instrument was singing, almost on its own, and the stone walls of the building with it, sympathetically. Into this perfected, sheltered temple of sound, people started to arrive.

            Of course, concerns of a practical nature interrupted ritual. Before it was allowed to stretch seamlessly into metaphor, the late arrival of the coffin held back the service from such sanctities. Miles was left in a stuck state of silence, as the minutes ticked by, not knowing what he should do. Six minutes late, seven minutes late… He’d timed his playing to cease on the hour, the final crescendo and culmination with which he concluded the entrance music to more or less coincide with the coffin’s arrival. He couldn’t find a way to resume. He couldn’t rely on the handy Catholic bell, there was spoken liturgy without precedent bell ahead of the procession down the central aisle of the church. So he had to just wait, and all the mourners, not a great number, sat in a silence that had fallen accidentally. It was a crude, gappy, apologetic silence, not one generously bestowed by ritual or rubric, and so Miles felt panicked by it.

            But, at last, inevitably, tardily, the coffin arrived, the body of Michael Lawn Anderson hidden within it. Up it was lifted, and carried up the stairs. The hearse driver, and all the pall-bearers, like black, deathly acolytes, though as solemn as ever, seemed a little tired and bored, unable to manage even a little of their usual spell, that sacred, understated sternness. They were professional but some jadedness in their manner told. It was just another job to them, that day.  

            The mourners seemed sparsely arrayed, unjoined and unknit by this man, a knowledge of whom they all had in common. Miles felt that at funerals a line can so easily be drawn between the compulsory and the voluntary guest: a world of distance comes icily between the two separate sorts of attendee. Emotional complicated stone-faced daughters (he took note of one tall lady who seemed authoritative and impressive, who stood out); more freely, frivolously emotional step-children; melancholy nephews to whom the deceased had never been anything more than sweetness and lights. In one place, a regular parishioner who simply had nothing better to do than attend the funeral of someone she hardly knew. In another, a guilty, reluctant, bewilderedly atheistic nurse, who had tended to his final needs. They disparately assembled in the church, not all but a number, a significant number, of the lives deeply, weakly, indefinitely, indelibly touched by the dead man whose box had now arrived.  

            The Crimmond “Lord’s My Shepherd” began. After a brief play-over of introduction, the hymn’s verses made their calm and pleasant progress. It was a fitting opening hymn. The sound from the mourners was thin and breathless, not one of the hymn’s five verses ever even began to bulge with that engulfing, many-voiced life Miles loved and wished he could inspire, as the hymn meandered through its familiar moods, sinking to hellish depths, that dark vale of the third verse, and then climbing back to the pinnacle of perfect joy up in the house of the Lord by verse five. The papal sensuality they love, the quaint, lovely words of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican Hymnal less so, Miles thought, as he concluded the hymn with a little but deliberate deceleration. He felt that bleak feeling, something to do with silence. He had used his own little red hymnal...the five stanzas lay on the pegged pages before him, for the most part- to his mind- unsung. He became aware of a silence among the people below. The heads were weightily planted, held still and wary: taciturnity packed between them- all among them-, like a marsh. The unvoiced verses of that opening hymn were just a part of a deeper, broader quality of the unsaid that had made its progress among the gathered people, just as Michael Lawn Anderson had made his slow, solemn progress, in his casket, to the front of the church.

            The priest censed the coffin, and drew upon the upper face, just below where a supine crucifix was attached, a signature in holy water, plucked from an adjacent stoop. The clergyman seemed quietly moved as he daintily bestowed, like for like, his splash of the substance that had greeted Michael Lawn Anderson when he was born. He had been baptised in a font just like the one that stood at the back of the very church where he now lay, in his mortality, before the altar in the soft luminous gloom, the vested priest pottering around the blessed box, dwindling clouds of incense lingering in almost helical decoration. Peering over the wooden balcony rail, a darkly beautiful vista lay before Miles. Just that one dead body, that one hidden corpse, temporarily interred among holy artefacts before a crowd of living mourners. Death's one example in this place, perhaps on this street, perhaps for many square miles.

            The priest concluded:

            “O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered: Accept our prayers on behalf of thy servant Michael, and grant him an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of thy saints; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”

            A swift, tepid sign of the cross broke out among the front pews of people, shuddering across their persons like a spasm from long ago. Miles kept his eye upon the order of service: Sally Olowu (step-daughter), the elect reader, rose to her feet and approached the pulpit at its instruction. She offered herself to the room with great apparent reluctance, nervously folding her right hand over her left, as if to still it upon the pages heaped at the lectern.

            Her voice was calmly emotional but tuneless, meek, almost improbable among the violet and luminous certainties of humming stone. A vague aural impression went creeping through the resonance of the place, as she said:

            “To every thing there is a season, and a time for every matter under heav'n…”

            A chain of maybe seven motorbikes roared impudently past the exterior of the church, and the quiet of the parked, flowered hearse. A faint ray from each bike shot through the portal door onto a patch of cracked, palely plastered wall. In the quick motional beam, the shadow of a saint’s pressed hands loomed and revolved, loomed and revolved, and finally rested still again in the praying statue that had been the shadow’s source. Having obscured the words of the reading more or less entirely, the pandemonium of the motorbikes grew distant and finally expired altogether.

            “A time of war, and a time of peace,” she concluded. She paused, and then almost barked, with scathing irony: “The word of the Lord”:

            “Thanksbetogod,” came the efficient, slurred reply. Sally Olowu (step-daughter) was in her seat again with surprising haste, beside her husband, who softly squeezed her leg. The hand tightened and then untightened and then slackly hung again. 

             A young nephew had to be reminded of his role. An old woman nudged him on his way and he took the floor, the guarded space before the squat, hatted patience of the priest, to read a psalm.

His young voice rang out loudly, with beguiling confidence as he approximately faltered his way through the psalm’s assertive, beauteous measures:

“The days of man are. But as grass: he finishes as a flower of the field.

For as soon as the wind goes over it, is gone: and it shall no more be known in that place.”

The priest raised an insouciant Alleluia, and the nephew shuffled back to the pews. The congregation struggled uncertainly to their feet.

The priest read the Gospel and delivered a short homily, an address which, though brief, was genuine, and godly, and humane. Then he invited the deceased’s firstborn, Ira, to come to the lectern, and deliver the eulogy.

A very tall, elegant woman, (one of the first people Miles had noticed), with dark, dark skin rose to her feet and very deliberately took what seemed a long time to cross the distance between the bench where she had stood up and the lectern, at whose flat, winged stand she was the latest orator, depositing a few pages of handwritten notes upon it. A new shaft of sunlight lay upon the pews. Miles was filled with peace, and awe, to look down from the loft and behold it, the rarity of its golden slant, to quite suddenly recognise the imperceptible arrival of that soft blast that had improbably broken through the grey of the London clouds, and the central stained window surveying the sanctuary, before now unlit. Now, a Calvery sky of passional marmalade was enlivened by a beam, which passed through it but did not stop until it lay, spread, upon the central aisle up which Ira Anderson walked, bowing before her father, before she spoke.

“I love my father,” she said. “I loved him when I was small, and I love him now I am grown. I loved him when he was alive and I love him now he is dead. I love him, I wish to call it out to these old stones among which he worshipped and I once worshipped when I was young. I wish it to be known.”

A shuffle went over the room, a twitch in the stillness. The priest, reseated, scratched his ear. After a few seconds, a hush descended. Miles attended closely, peering inquisitively over the rail, from the loft. The organ’s off-duty bellows sighed softly all the while.

“He lived in Hoxton all his life. All his remembered life, that is. I don’t think he had any recollection of what came before, he certainly never discussed it. He travelled from Grenada, with his mother, in 1963, across the Atlantic, part of the generation that came to Britain with hope in their hearts, some of whom still worship here, in this church, many more of whose children still worship here. And their children's children. The same year, Ray Charles sang about a storm, hold your head up high, and don’t be afraid of the dark. At the end of the storm is a golden sky, and the sweet silver song, of the lark. That was my mother’s favourite record and I remember it turning in my childhood, just as it turned in my father’s. Sometimes he listened to it with us, sometimes he sank into morose silence. Sometimes he instructed us to turn it off. Sometimes he embellished this instruction with language I cannot repeat in church." Brief laughter answered, a low, assured sound. 

"His father was estranged from he and his mum, they left behind complicated and difficult circumstances and landscapes whose green beauty contained the memory of so many generations of misery, so much suffering at the hands of colonial rule. My father and grandmother, alone, made London their home, their new home, and it took them a long time for them to do so. Society of the late, mid- late twentieth century did not make it easy for them.

Anglo-Catholic from the start, this place, this church, was a sanctuary to them, a place of great meaning among a city that so often seemed confused, and troubled, a hostile mess…this church was light in a dark world, a place of hospitality in an inhospitable society. He was a Christian, a seeker after truth, a believer. I’m not sure whether he expected eternal life, but he certainly hoped for it. He was an honest man, always, even brutally so. This place mattered to him, it matters to me, and I feel, quite acutely, that it demands the truth of me. Being a believer, to me, is that feeling that someone is listening. So…

He suffered from tremors, all his life. Tremors that sometimes became seizures, and sudden, dangerous losses of consciousness. He was a very unwell man. It took many decades for his disorder to be finally identified, not as epilepsy as some people thought but acute panic attacks, brought on by traumas and stresses he had never dealt with, never even expressed. I don’t think anyone would have listened, would have heard him if he did. I think, all too often, we failed to listen…to his stories of suffering, and anguish. He suffered anguish in a very private way. I think that’s how he thought anguish was meant to be suffered…alone.

He went to school in Hackney, hated it, went to secondary school in Hackney, hated it even more. Didn’t go to university. He worked in restaurants, and pubs, and hotels. He was an air host, a short-order cook, an usher. He outgrew his tremors- that’s what he called them- tremors- for a while. He fell in love with a woman he met…actually I don’t know how they met, the story kept changing…she delivered his post, they found themselves sat next to one another in a cinema…anyway, however it was, they fell in love and had a child." She paused briefly to take note of her own emergence into the story of her father's life. "Then my brother came along, Steve.

He never said that they fell out of love, he and my mum, he talked about loving her, still loving her, even in much later years. Within a year their marriage was over- they didn’t get married here- they lived in Brighton at the time, Hove to be precise- granny wanted to be by the sea. She died after that, by the sea. That’s when my dad’s tremors came back.

He could be aggressive, even brutal my father. He complained of feeling constantly as though he was about to be betrayed, that anything good that happened to him would soon end. He was a man with deep insecurities, a feeling that he didn’t belong, that he was an imposter. He told me once when he was drunk- and he liked to take a drink, my father, as I'm sure many of you know- that those first months of courting with my mother were the happiest in his life. He had one of his attacks in public once- it usually only happened when he was alone. She attended to him, she held him, she nursed him. She loved him, loved him in the truest and most active sense of the word. She was the only one who understood, he said, the only one who could comfort him. At some point, I don’t really know why or what happened, he did something, or something happened which caused her to stop understanding, or stop being able to- or willing to understand.

            Life went on and I know he tried his best. I’m grateful to him, I empathise with him…his sense of loss, in Sara, in his mother, his aloneness. And he could be exceptionally honourable my father- our father- exceptionally brave, loving, tender. And funny as well. He had this dark, rye, almost indignant humour. Hated politicians, loved the royal family. He cared deeply about words and songs and images. He loved the company of his fellow woman. Not so much his fellow man. At any engagement or affair or in any social setting, he would always ignore men in favour of the nearest woman, doing those terrible impressions of movie stars that he used to do…”

            There was a strange titter of laughter. It seemed as though her voice which, up until now had rolled with such filling, pooling melancholy, was at last starting to fail her.  

            “He married Mavis in 1999, and they had two more children, daughters, Nancy and Nina…” in the same instant as she alluded to them, she indicated in the general direction of this Mavis who sat with cold, faceless silence, her head bowed, her young, bright-faced daughters beside. 

Miles perused the photographed scenes of Michael Lawn Anderson’s life in the pages of the booklet. The story became clearer to him. The late beam went away. A cloud crossed the sun, and the shaft withdrew from the stone floor, and from the passional pane ink of the Calvery sky in that great sanctuary window. “Having been a black cabbie- a black black-cabbie as he always used to say- in the intervening years, and later on a bus driver in the early noughties, he had to give that up. He had a seizure while driving the- what was it...? What was the route he did?"

 Somebody called something out.

 "67X yes...that's it...it was while he was driving the 67X in 2004 that he had a seizure, or the beginnings of one at least. No-one was hurt, he managed to stop the bus just as soon as those terrifying, lifelong tremors of his began, and get everyone off in time. He was quick-thinking enough to spare every soul on that vehicle from catastrophe. He handed in his license the same day.

            That was a defining moment in his life, I think, a moment in which he acted with genuine courage and nobility and honesty. I’ve always- we’ve all always admired him for that. After that, it was as though there was nothing left to be done. He felt a sense of guilt, I think, about all the years he’d spent being a driver, how potentially dangerous that was.

            He cycled a lot in his last years, before age caught up with him. His one seat vehicle…and if he…if he…if it was just him he knew he could do no harm…” she started crying. The priest leaned forward, beginning an act of consolation, but a man from the front pew got up and embraced Ira. It was her brother, Steve.

            She concluded: “I love my father. His life was rich and complicated and sad and unusual and joyful. He was beloved. He could be so sweet. He became a grandfather in 2017.” A small child in a little waistcoat, rocking back and forth on the front pew, didn’t seem to recognise the allusion to him. An old smile found him. With Steve still by her side, Ira continued: “We’re going to hear a song he loved now, called “Dance with my father” by Luther Vandross.”

            Without emphatically concluding, she retired, spent, and the song’s twinkling beginning began from a bluetoothed speaker. Synths sustained themselves in wispy strands, as the drum kit softly chugged beneath, counting the passage of time. When the recorded voice entered the texture it was speechlike, unstrained, freely wandering, with, every so often, an occasional swoop, marked by a brief waver of intensity.

“Sometimes, I’d listen

Outside her door and I’d hear

How mama would cry from him”

            Miles didn’t like the song at all. He felt himself react yet more violently against it in his heart as he surveyed the bowed heads, and became aware of a soft snuffling as people succumbed to sobs, helplessly ushered there, to that crying place, by the song’s simple sadness. He was jealous. He wanted to feel moved with them, but he hated the song.

            After an invitation to bless the casket with holy water, of which all those closest to the deceased clustering on the front two pews availed themselves, one after the other they took generous splashes from the bucket on the casting brush, and with a motion not unlike flagellation, bestowed their sorrowful blessing of farewell.

            “We now sing a hymn that Michael chose himself,” said the priest: “When we all get to heaven. Please stand if you are able.”

            Miles launched into the hymn, which he had already displayed and pegged to the stand along with a truncated “Where Sheep May Safely Graze”. His fingers were stiff with unuse, the sparsity of the funeral service’s musical requirements. The Protestant jauntiness of the phrase was at first jarring to Miles as it rang noisily out from the pipes in the reflective, memorial quiet of the church, still highly-strung and saturated in the testimony that had just resounded there, but he warmed to it, and it was better known to the present mourners than the Crimmond. It had Calypso roots, and the amassed black voices were carried to the rafters by something in the music kindred with their identity. The priest stared blankly on, in almost mortified silence, not at all familiar with the hymn.

“While we walk the pilgrim pathway

Clouds will overspread the sky…

When we all get to heaven,

What a day of rejoicing that will be”

            The service was concluded by the priest’s dismissal:

            “Let us now bear Michael to his place of rest”.

            The pall bearers assembled at the front and uplifted the coffin from its place of sojourn, beginning to bear it away, in symmetrical array upon their practiced shoulders, to its permanent rest. There was no churchyard and so the burial was to be in a nearby cemetery, of vast proportion. The box went back up the path it had come down, without precarity, while the organ warbled softly, drawing, bar upon pulsing bar, for the standing congregants below, a soft green paradise, an idea of fields, and grazing sheep undisturbed, and distant hills with their heads in umber clouds. Perhaps these were notions, elements, images of a heaven Michael Lawn Anderson had never desired or aspired to. But he was of course well beyond the capability or need of protest, swaddled as he was in the undisturbed, untremoring stillness of death.

            Miles concluded the music of exit. He pushed back in the small number of summoned stops, opened the swell box, closed every hymnbook, flicked off the console and pedalboard light, closed the console doors, and switched off the blower. The organ ceased with a jolt of something like relief and then quickly wound down to silence. Footsteps sounded here and there; uninterrupted chatter streamed down the aisle from the baptistry, placidly lighted in the midday’s natural light. Miles looked at the face of Michael Lawn Anderson on the front of the service sheet one last time, and said his tacit adieu to the paper likeness, almost as though this was the last time that this man would matter, the last impression he could make in the living world, the last possibility of relevance among it, before all tactile trace of him disappeared and he became what the dead mostly are, a guarded and pallid remnant stowed behind locked doors, secret in the shelves and drawers of family homes, the street ever bereft of their steps and their tremors.

            Miles didn’t bump into the priest again, he was already well on his way to the cemetery- but he did encounter Lou, the warden, who thanked him.

            “Just send us an invoice as soon as you can and the diocese will pay it within two weeks, alright…”

           Miles never like to bring up finance after a service, or any such secular matters, especially after a funeral. But he felt glad that his needs were being attended to. “Oh thank you, Lou, that’s just fine, I will…a hundred did you say in your email?”

            “A hundred, yes.”

            “Okay. Bye bye now, see you…”

            The hearse was already going, slipping down the street in a watery way, an elegant glimmering craft. It turned left the at first opportunity to do so. Miles turned right, back to Hoxton station.

            He returned by exactly the way he had come, quitting Main at the chemist, turning onto the Geff Estate. A faint hubbub of activity buzzed in the highstreet, but for the most part the streets he forsook were uneventful, almost sombrely so in the colourlessly clouded sunlight.

            The tube hurried off, back to Liverpool Street, quickly leaving the platform behind. Hoxton was overground but the train was in darkness soon enough. The steep downward incline, a sudden squeal, and then: Dark dark dark, the tunnel over every clattering carriage-head.

            The car was busy. Miles was standing up, in the same alcove as the double doors by which he entered, grasping a ceiling ring in his right fist to keep himself steady. He cast his eyes along the lines of people. Londoners, tourists, commuters. Two Orthodox Jews. While he speedily wound the city’s coal-black veins, he pondered the funeral service, its majesties, its inadequacies, its upliftments, its disappointments, all of them legion.

            From Miles’ right, up the train, a figure came. He progressed slowly, with a zombified, deadened slouch. He emerged from the rumbling gloom, his repetitive moan began to sound only gradually over the subterranean cacophony, as he came closer. The figure had black skin. He was hooded in a hoody, over which he wore a raincoat. The rest of him was dark, nondescript. His mind seemed languid but his body angered. Every so often, he twitched and shook, spasmodically. He took a crumpled cigarette packet from his pocket, and took from that his last cigarette. In a curious motion, he played with it between all five of his fingers, rolling it about between the jittery balls, mostly of middle finger, forefinger, and thumb. He spoke in a long, weary slur, jerkily interrupting himself each time that his person was seized by one of the jerky, intermittent tremors:

            “Awright guys sorr to bovver you, yeah, but I’m homeless, just tryin’ to get enough money for the nightshelter…

            Addressing no-one in particular, it was difficult to respond. He just made his petition blindly and vainly at the barrage of passengers before him, tightly packed on either side. People mostly ignored him. Occasionally he received a slight headshake, a mouthed Sorry, no.  

            “Please…anyone hear me…” he muttered. “Fuckin’ hell”.

            The two Jews, one with glasses and one without, each in a long length of black, each hatted, their black beards copious, and a long tassel of hair symmetrical on each side of their two faces, seemed to stand out to the man. He went up to them. As he shambled in their direction, a spasm tore his right arm up and he cursed, dropping the cigarette. The spectacled of the two Jews bent down and picked it up, cordially handing it to him. Just as their hands made contact, the dainty white with the calloused black, the man said:

            “Don’t stare at me. Don’t fuckin’ stare at me”.

            The Jew did not reply, nor his companion.

            “I don’t like it!” he snapped. Worry went over the faces of the two Jews, and a protective wariness across the people in their immediate vicinity.

            “I don’t like gay men! Fucking gay men!” the man snapped.

            We are now approaching. Whitechapel, the announcement said.

            “It’s okay,” the spectacled Jew said. He reached out and softly touched the man, about where his heart was.

            The man’s eyes were wild. Every so often the iris was rolled back, and, for a fearful instant, his eyes were white. Whitechapel was reached and the man got off the train, plunging into the outflux of departing passengers, into the dim darkness of the underground. Someone asked the two Jews if they were alright; one or two others did the same. Miles was empathetic but shy. He was relieved that others had shown their empathy, so he didn’t have to.

            The doors closed and the train pulled out of the station with a whirr, a crescendo. It hurried off into further darkness, deeper into the seemingly endless, sepulchral, and arcane supply of it among the bowels and tunnels and unquiet catacombs of the old, old city.