The last train lumbered away from Oxford Circus station with its cargo of drunks and madmen. Like a swimming pool at closing time, the ripples of the day gradually subsided. The blessed silence was infringed only by the clatter of steel grilles up at street level.
In the dirty grey emergency lighting, a shadow slipped along a passage, paper-thin, barely substantial.
Another descended a frozen escalator and moved smoothly away into the gloom.
Sixty feet beneath the barriers was an empty hall, by day a whirlpool, the confluence of two human currents, where passengers ebbed and swirled in the intricate dynamic of train-changing.
It was here that the swift, elusive entities gathered that night.
The Poker Girl arrived first, as her role required. She was a Texan, tall and rangy with a wide mouth and triangular, ice-blue eyes. She was church pretty, small town straight. Women envied her needlessly, for men wanted her only in the way they wanted ice-cream, in passing. She was too frank to spark desire. Yet although she was not attractive, she was a metaphor for attraction.
Next the Actor, late of the parish of Belfast, recently replanted in the Hollywood Hills and raising all kinds of hell there. His thirst for recognition was a broken-bottomed bucket that no volume of fame nor critical acclaim would ever fill.
He was intelligent enough to see frenzied adulation for what it was, but not enough to enjoy it with the attached conditions. He prized the golden goose but could never resist kicking it, hard and publicly.
It was typical that despite his carefully-affected disdain for the rest, he should be among the first to show. He nodded to the Poker Girl with studied indifference: ‘Hey’. She raised an eyebrow, almost imperceptibly.
The Duchess hobbled up soon after on her stick, old and twisted as an olive tree and scarcely more mobile.
Perhaps she wasn’t a real Duchess. But there was about her a lofty reserve bordering on haughtiness, that this company of commoners took as proof of noble lineage.
Next was the Infantryman. He moved directly and with purpose, like an icebreaker. His presence established itself immediately and brooked no dispute. He was one of those whose arrival seems to fill an absence or complete a quorum: some individuals had been waiting, now they were a group with form and cohesion.
‘Wotcha!’ was his cheery greeting to the assembled as he dumped his pack and weapon upon the tiles. ‘Anyone for a brew?’ Without waiting for a reply, he fished a little stove from his pouch and immersed himself in primitive domesticity.
The Madonna and Child appeared almost gradually. Their grasp on life was so tenuous that they drifted like wraiths, or mist. The child was so fearfully emaciated, it was less a living thing than an ebony carving, a juju, a death doll. The mother, her grief tuned inwards, presented to the world a mask as old as Africa. They instinctively adopted the postures of the world’s desperate poor, a bundle of faded cloth in a corner, the face of the ebony figurine pressed against an exhausted breast.
Last came Bram Maelstrom with a measured nonchalance born of twenty years’ carefully-controlled notoriety and well-documented excess. In this dim arena, his light-sensitive shades were almost clear. His guitar case, with its noble scars and flaking tour stickers, he lay reverentially on the floor beside the Infantryman’s gleaming weapon.
The Poker Girl, traditionally, was Usher. She called them to order in a voice surprisingly high and clear. ‘Quiet, please. Will the Committee stand to receive the prisoner.’
The others rose and formed a sort of line, each stretching and straining to make as much as they could of their restricted dimensionality.
Only the Madonna and Child remained huddled by the wall, buried in the most profound despair. A tall cylinder swung into the gallery with a curious pirouetting motion. It came to a halt before the Committee, then unfurled, throwing out a young man who staggered then stood unsteadily, staring wild-eyed at the scene before him.
‘You’re not real!’ he cried. ‘You’re pictures! From the posters!’ He squinted at Bram Maelstrom. ‘You’re from the ad – the one for the new album. I’ve seen it! It’s here somewhere.’ He turned and tried to run for the escalator. But the long Metropolitan Police poster that had delivered him quickly encircled him.
‘What do you want?’ he demanded querulously. He was young – a student probably – and on the edge of tears.
‘Please stand still and be silent,’ replied the Poker Girl. ‘You’re both right and wrong. We are, as you say, images from advertising posters. But we are none the less real.’
The Actor cut in: ‘Real enough to give you a real hard time, Boyo, if we have a mind to!’
‘Hoy, leave it out, mate!’ exclaimed the Infantryman good- naturedly. ‘He hasn’t even heard the charge yet!’
The young man became, if it were possible, even more agitated. ‘Charge? Look, what is this?’ The Met recruitment poster had relaxed its cordon and he looked vulnerable, almost frail in his isolation.
The Actor waved towards the Mauritanians. ‘Neglect, my good friend, gross neglect. Look at them. They’re starving. At death’s door. And they’re coming down tomorrow. Some cosmetics crap going up instead. The moment they come down, the kid’ll be gone. Pouf! Mother too, most likely. Once you’re forgotten, that’s it.’
‘But what’s that got to do with me? What can I do about it?’
The Poker Girl intervened: ‘Could we please abide by the usual procedures?’ She read from a clipboard. ‘Sir, you have been delivered here by the authorities’ (here she nodded towards the police poster with its line of burly constables) ‘to answer charges relating to the plight of these two people who, for want of proper consideration or even ordinary humanity, have been condemned to live and die in an extremity of squalour and poverty, denied even the barest prerequisites of a civilised existence.’
‘Then you’ve got the wrong bloke!’ cried the young man with near-hysterical relief. ‘It’s got nothing to with me. I’m not the government or anything. I haven’t even got a job. Or a home. Why else do you think I’m sleeping down here?’
Bram Maelstrom replied, ‘Sorry, guy. That’s not really the issue. You’re here in your capacity as a Tri-Dimensional. You’re the designated representative of your race.’
‘But that’s not fair!’ he protested.
‘No, chum!’ the Actor snarled, pointing at the rags by the wall. ‘That’s not fair!’
‘Look, mate,’ broke in the Infantryman. ‘We realised a long time ago that if we tried to get to the individuals who were personally responsible for this shit, we’d be here forever.
‘You Tri-Di’s – as soon as we get close, you lay down smoke. It’s like fighting guerrillas. It doesn’t matter what we throw at you, you just slip away into thin air.’
‘And so,’ the Poker Girl explained, ‘we just select one of you, pretty much at random.’
The young man was angry now, and very frightened. He waved a knotted arm at them. ‘But that’s just arbitrary punishment! That’s not justice!’
The Actor barked a bitter laugh. ‘Justice? Fucking priceless!’
The Duchess cleared her throat and there was an immediate, respectful silence. ‘You see,’ she said in a voice like broken glass, ‘Individual responsibility is not a concept that exists in our system of jurisprudence.
‘There are many thousands of us, all identical. One of us gets torn down in Holborn, another stays up in Ruislip for a year. Through no fault nor merit, but chance alone.
‘There is joy and misery. Your Tri-Di buskers sing alike of new love and broken hearts. As our charming young friend’ - she nodded to the Poker Girl – ‘well knows, the fates of individuals are dealt from a well-shuffled pack. But still someone has to pay. And exactly who pays is really neither here nor there.
‘You are a money lender and your client defaults on his repayment. And yet the very next day, the money appears. Do you demand, How did you come by this money? Was it a gift from an indulgent parent or a besotted lover? Did you steal it? Of course you don’t. You are entirely incurious. You take the money and the affair is closed. And this is how the world works.’
The abject bundle stirred to reveal the upper part of the Madonna’s face. The eyes were cast down and the voice was faint and distant, like a breath of wind through a ruined crop.
‘Once I watched a storm sweep over a broad land. The rain fell upon one man’s field and the maize grew full and tall. But no rain fell on the next man’s land and his maize shrank and scorched in the field.
‘No-one was to blame’.
‘And yet,’ pursued the Duchess, ‘still someone has to pay. Balance must be preserved.
‘You Tri-Di’s talk of good luck and bad. But there is no such thing, at least not in the way you mean.
‘When the hawk harries the flock of doves, it may snatch this one or that one. This is not some travesty of justice, but only the motion of the beautiful machine men dismiss as fool Luck but which is actually the holy will of God.
‘Chance is the mechanism that drives the world. It is inexpressibly complicated and you Tri-Di’s don’t understand it. So you shrug it off as a quirk or mere caprice. But it is deadly serious.
‘That is why you are here, now, facing this most grave of charges.’
The young man shouted, ‘But you aren’t real! You! Old woman! You’re not even a picture of a real person! You’re a fictional character from a film. I’ve seen the posters!’
The Duchess smiled thinly. ‘But we are all creatures of fiction. Even you. If you are imaginative and strong, you might have invented yourself. If not, I expect someone else – some other fictional character – came up with you.
‘You are a symbol - no more or less than I am, or my colleagues here, on the Committee.’
‘What do you mean, symbol? I am a human being!’
‘I am a symbol of old age, of useless wealth, of disappointment, of the futility of power and position. You, of impotence, moral weakness, culpable ignorance, intellectual torpor and a hundred sins of omission.
‘Even your Jesus was a symbol. In fact, He most of all. You Tri-Di’s impress us most when you’re most symbolic. When you’re most like us.’
The young man suddenly crouched and bolted for the black mouth of a passage. It took the police poster a moment to gather itself and by then the fugitive was gone.
The Actor groaned, ‘Oh, shit! We’ll never catch him now. We’re on in an hour.’
But then the Infantryman emerged from the passage. The young man was flung across his broad shoulders and bleeding from a deep cut to the side of his head. ‘I’m sorry, mate,’ he said cordially, ‘I didn’t want to clobber you, but you didn’t give me any option. Now sit yourself down and be a good lad. Here – have a drink.’ He proffered an ornate silver water bottle which the young man shoved ungraciously away.
He slumped on the tiles and stared at his feet as the blood dripped unheeded onto his jeans. It was as if time itself were caught in the vortex spun by the converging passages. The minutes seemed interminable.
He reviewed his situation. The Committee’s case was not so much an argument as a philosophical diatribe. They had no notion, it was clear, of Natural Law. Thus they were impervious to his sole defence – that he could not be held responsible for circumstances over which he had no control.
His gloomy musings were interrupted by Bram Maelstrom. ‘If you had shown some will and passion, you might have raised your voice in defence of these poor people. You could have been their champion. Instead, you squandered your intelligence and your education and left them alone to suffer.’
‘It’s a cruel world,’ the Poker Girl observed needlessly.
The Duchess grimaced. ‘It is neither cruel nor kind. These are value judgements attributed by Tri-Di’s, not absolute values. They take Life and draw a line down the middle of it, between what pains them and pleases them. If they judge the world to be cruel, it simply means they drew the line in the wrong place and should move it.’
Then the Madonna rose with great difficulty and gazed down impassively upon the young man. The blood was congealing in his hair and upon his face.
The child lolled in her arms, its huge eyes glazed and unseeing. She spoke with infinite weariness.
‘You are not my enemy, Boy, nor the enemy of this boy. You are both innocent, but you are also both unnecessary. Our god, we say, is blind and cannot count his creatures. And so they multiply because that is what creatures will do.
‘But the god does not need them all, and the ones for which there is no purpose written, he will strike down.
‘This is neither terrible nor wrong. It is just the way.
‘Never until this night have I heard so much talk about a peck or two of unnecessary life. In my land, you would be beaten: you should be drawing water, or planting seed, or singing for rain, or burying the dead. All your talk is stealing good air.
‘Now let it end.’
The Poker Girl nodded to the Infantryman, who took up his weapon then stood over the young man and motioned him to rise. The soldier’s manner was kind as he led him away, but he avoided meeting his eyes.
The body was found by cleaners at 5.12am on the southbound Victoria line platform. The crucifixion had been expertly conducted, said the police. The corpse was nailed to an empty poster site on the far side of the track. At its feet lay a short sword, a replica apparently of the weapon used by Roman soldiers.
To the left was an on-line poker advertisement. To the right, an appeal for famine relief in Mauritania.
