The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

have looked like a wolf but was the only man I had so far met who was the right sort, had dismissed me from the rough steps of the half-link drivers' mess and gone back to his paper. Vincent had stared after me, while the somewhat friendlier fellow, Barney Rose, had given a half smile through the window as if to say, 'I'm sorry for you, mate, but what can I do?' I had spent the rest of the day wandering around Nine Elms in a daze, with only the token in my pocket to say I had a job at all.
    I went out into the dark street. The saturated man was there, banging his stick, and the queer thing was that from the look of his face you could tell he was aiming at solemnity. There was a great roaring coming from within the station. It was somewhere between the wind trapped in a chimney and the elephant house at a zoo. I bought a cup of coffee and a cheese sandwich from the barrow under the railway viaduct in Westminster Bridge Road, from which a whole gang of people seemed to get their living. On the other side of the street were three women, not going anywhere. They were next to a brazier with half the cinders tipped out of it. They were all beautiful, but too thin and too dirty, part of the very street.
    As I looked, one of them said something to another, and this second one turned and gave me a look I could not understand. Later, I thought there might have been a question in it - a notion that set my head spinning.
    I drained my cup and set off on my new route from the lodge to Nine Elms: into Westminster Bridge Road with the trams already racing in the rain, then down the steps to the Embankment, with the black river to my right, and the wet, dark gardens to my left. Continuing west, I struck a district of factories: a distillery with high windows that made yellow patterns on the dark water, two gasworks and a brewery. I felt very compressed as I walked along that narrow path between the silent factories and the river, but it did save ten minutes on my journey.
    In the gatehouse I tried to give a cheery 'Hello' to Mr Crook. I had decided to put from my mind the first day; I would start all over again in the hopes of this time seeking out some men a bit more like driver Hughes in The Railway Magazine, as well as getting a leg in with the ones of a more ordinary sort. But Crook just kept his head bent over his metal chequerboard. He had pinned up over the fireplace a new article concerning the weather: ' more fog ', it said, but I hadn't noticed any so far, only rain. When he gave me the token, it was with no friendly word, or any word at all.
    Things got worse too, for I was stopped on the ash patch before the sheds by a red-headed fellow who said he was Flannagan, the charge cleaner. He was at an angle because he had one leg longer than the other; he also should have been Irish with a name like that but he was not. None of these things was his fault but they made me take against him, and he had certainly taken against me.
    I said I was on my way to see the Governor, having been instructed to report to him each day, and Flannagan staggered for a second in front of me before saying, 'He's not in, he's taken sick. I'm putting you to tidying up coal.'
    'But am I not to clean the Bampton tanks Twenty-Nine and Thirty-One?' I said.
    "They're perfectly clean as it is ’ replied Flannagan, and there was no answer to that. 'Get yourself a shovel from stores.'
    The stores were in a long building slotted in the gap between the two middle roads in the shed, which were slightly further apart than all the others. There was a desk with a sort of black brick tunnel behind it that was full of everything that could be carried and had a fire going at the back of it. There was a man in there asking for a set of fire irons: dart, pricker and paddle. The dart was the subject of a jolly chat between him and the storekeeper, and the pricker and paddle caused a near riot of laughter when the storekeeper finally turned them up. But when this fellow had gone