The doors slammed shut. He had only just made it onto the Circle line. He liked cutting things fine, it added to the excitement. Up till now, his life had seemed like a race. Everyone always banged on about ‘life’s a marathon this’ and ‘life is about finding your pace that’, but not from his experience. Since he’d left Primary school, he always felt like he was running against something. It wasn’t like he was competing with anyone, not anyone he knew at least. When you’re in first place however, you cannot see the people behind you. That’s how he looked at it. So even if he was racing against someone, he would never have known about it.

This was true of much of his life apart from where he was now. Since moving to London he had felt inner peace like never before. This was strange as most people had warned him about the soulless plights and people of the city. How everyone lived so close to one another, yet each person inhabited there own world. He’d often try and bump into people walking the streets to see if he could shake them from out their trance, an almost plea for some form of emotional response. He’d found that the more formal they were dressed, the less likely they were to react. Why was this he wondered. Was it the self confidence or emotional control that these people owned? Maybe it was the clothes that gave them this sense of control. No, it was neither of those things. It was that they were so far entrenched by the game, the chase of the city, the pecking order, that they dare not break free the from the course. To do so would show their weakness, to do so would reveal that they weren’t cut out for the top. The suit and tie would only provide so much of a disguise for the city that watched overhead.  Once he figured out who would crack and who wouldn’t, the game got boring to him, so he stopped playing.

He tried other ways to understand the people of this bustling place. Eventually he discovered the dynamics of the city’s underworld. He wasn’t referring to the any form of illegal happenings, the gangsters or the elite circles that would often delve into the underbelly of morality in the city’s dark corners. No, he knew nothing of that world and wanted to keep it that way. The world’s wrongs were clear enough in the daytime. The underworld to him was the cities transport system. The underground, a place, a system, a symbol that you would have heard of before ever stepping foot in London. Everyone talked down on it. How expensive it was or how no one was allowed to talk to anyone whilst on it. He’d always thought that strange. Perhaps everyone was paying their respects to the world below. Seeing as we buried our dead underground, we felt the need to acknowledge their silence with our own. Mouths shut but our eyes wide open, the only difference between us and those who lay dormant below.

He was not a fan of this silence, although most of the lines were poorly built and screeched as the tube scuttled across the tracks. He often wondered if this was done on purpose, to include this harrowing noise so that people would not attempt to talk over it. Either way, he enjoyed the glimpses of silence which allowed him to observe the various people in his carriage. There were those who read their newspapers, wearing suits from a bygone era, often adorned with a flamboyant pocket handkerchief. You would see these people few and far between which made them all the more enjoyable to observe. London was in their blood at this point. Not the London that most people knew, yet the one that they read about in books or had seen in films. They existed at the upper echelons of the city, the champagne socialists, the old money folk that would carry their old archaic way of thinking around with them like the newspaper they’d just unfurled from underneath their arm. Then you would have the finance crowd. You could tell which one was wealthier by the ratio between their grey hair and how youthful they looked. The ones who were the most successful often had more of a glow to them. This would have been a tell-tale sign of the good food they ate and the quality of wine that they drank. Were the sundried tomatoes they consumed coming from a small town in Italy or were they shipped over from an industrial farm in Morocco. These things mattered to them, and it showed.

There was one point where it was easier to distinguish between the people on board the tube down to the type of phones they were using. The old money folk would not bother with one whilst the businessman would walk around with a Bluetooth earpiece. Not anymore, today’s world everyone carried the same phone, everyone’s pockets were equal but that was about it when it came to a level playing field.

Some of the most intelligent people had been on the tube. Some of the best writers. Some of the best mathematicians. It was after all the quickest way of traversing the city. People would come down from all sorts of levels to get on the tube. No matter if you were working on the shop floor or a corner office on the eleventh floor, ultimately you were sardined next to one another during rush hour. This was more than a form of transport, this was a reminder from a higher power, a way of humbling the people of the city who would get carried away by their office view, their lunchtime expenses or their companies share buying schemes. One minute you would be closing a multi-million-pound deal and the next you’d be smelling the armpit of a PT who had just finished training their last client for the day. It was beautiful. It was human.

One day he could have sworn that he had seen a ghost on the tube. The glass reflections could often play tricks on your mind or even on those days where he was less observant of his peripherals. However, this person wasn’t just ordinary. He knew this because he could see the gentleman carrying his large beefeater hat on his lap. He’d never seen a Royal guard out in the ordinary world. They only appeared in spaces deemed important by the powers that be. They were signifiers of a pre-colonial world, where buildings made from expensive stone were regarded as worthy of protection. Who were they protecting them from? And if the buildings were recognised as such by the public, then surely there would be no need for their protection. It was almost an ironic reminder he had thought. Or he could have been completely wrong and that they were simply there for the visiting tourists. A photo opportunity? a map guide perhaps? an expensive one at that, not to mention useless seeing as though they weren’t allowed to speak. I suppose it all made sense, if they did speak then the whole mystery of the old world would shatter.

The agency of Buckingham Palace lay in the fact that it was untouchable, observant from the outside but never to be step foot in. It was like a grandparent that you could wave at from their drive, they would occasionally smile back, but that was the extent of your relationship. They didn’t hand you a tin of biscuits after a day at school, they never tucked you into bed at night or read you a book till you fell asleep, yet you still loved them regardless. It never made sense to him.

Had a giant Garden Gnome replaced Buckingham Palace, as long as all the pageantry and the ceremony of the Royal Guards carried on, people would still flock from all corners of the world just for a glimpse. It would also mean the red hat that sat on the Gnomes head was simply that, a hat. Not a collection of stolen symbols.

“[T]he heraldry of youth, long grown old” – Fiona Mozley

Check out my other London fictional piece here!