This is the story of Alicia, who lost her train ticket.
Chapter One – 8 am
The London Gutter
London’s muck – on the hour, every hour.
27th July 2012, 0800
ATHLETES: WE’LL RUN IT OURSELVES
With just 9 hours until the Opening Ceremony, the Olympic Village is getting stroppy.
Yesterday’s row over pay is turning into a full-on lover’s tiff.
Free food, a free village and chasing shiny medals isn’t enough for the athletes. The runners and jumpers want even more. They want power.
“We’re sick of governments and governing bodies pocketing all our money and telling us what to do,” said the athletes’ spokesperson, “So we’re taking control. We’ve declared independence. From now on the Olympic Village will be an independent state, running its own affairs.”
As of 0745, insiders say that the Village is forming a government. Experts agree that any Olympic Village country can only be a disaster.
“There isn’t a hope,” said our sports boffin, “Athletes can’t run a country. Some of them can’t even run a relay without falling over.”
“They’ll give up way before the Opening Ceremony starts and we can get down to the real business: cheering on Team GB!”
When asked to comment, he chairman of the World Official Olympic Federation (WOOF) said he was playing hard-ball.
“The athletes will be jumping through the Olympic hoops before too long, I dare say.”
In other news
It’s Raining! Celebs get their coats!
Five commuters you won’t have missed this morning. Phwoar!
22 Signs That You’re Late For Work
This Hour’s Weather
Chance of rain: 107%
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Alicia had mistakenly picked up the rag this morning. Now she was badly tessellated on a crowded Docklands Light Railway train, a square jammed between triangles, the victim of a failed game of Tetris, and could not toss the paper away. She tried to balance it over the rail, but two schoolchildren blocked her way. She attempted to drop it behind a burly official, but he was pressed too hard against the doors. A bobble-hatted commuter smiled from the side of a mouth, but did not lend a hand in help. Alicia gave up, and folded the paper in unkempt, tatty disgust.
An ordinary Friday, she thought. Rain outside the carriage. Rain inside the carriage, dripping from every hidden umbrella, wrapped in the folds of every darkened coat, gathering stealthily in puddles on the floor. Little tears of rain trickled down the burly official’s bald head, yolk running down a hard-boiled egg. Suit sleeves pulled too tight as their owners gripped the overhead rails, as if they could be swept to the floor by the train’s motion, drowned in the woollen, grey ocean.
“The train has reached its destination. Please exit by the right-hand doors of the carriage in the direction of travel,” intoned a recorded, disembodied voice.
The woollen ocean stood, as one, to nonconformist attention, turning noiselessly to the left-hand doors of the carriage. The train stopped, the doors turned, and they poured from the train, tiding Alicia along with them, an industrial revolution more powerful than any locomotion.
That was when Alicia noticed her travelcard was missing.
Across town, over in Jermyn Street, a man’s ‘H’ was missing.
‘Is name was ‘Arry, and ‘e was a tailor. Finest tailor in Jermyn Street, folks would ‘ave you believe, folks being ‘im, of course.
‘Arry would greet you inside, ‘e would, and take your measurements. Get you a cuppa, go into a back room, fix up a suit. All in an ‘our. Maybe ‘alf an ‘our, if you was little. But today ‘is assistant was running late, and ‘Arry couldn’t find ‘is letters. No business with folks in Mayfair if you ain’t got your consonants.
‘Arry leaned out ‘is door. “Walter, ‘urry up!”
A dotted figure down the street hastened into a trot. The figure hadn’t added up to much, hadn’t sparked any power in the razzamatazz of Central London. There was only one street in the whole of Mayfair with an ‘H’ in it, and Whaltherh didn’t put it there.
“Come on, not got all day! Finally!”
‘Arry proffered ‘is ‘and. Whaltherh, wearily, shook it.
“Let’s see. Haberdashery. Cloth. Hosier. Hirsute. That’s much more like it. Thank you, time to get back to business. Good day.”
Harry smiled a quotidian smile, backed into his shop, and closed his door. A little ring of the bell signified Whaltherh’s work was done for the day. He shambled away, morose.
Whaltherh had been born with a peculiar talent, one shared by few in this world. He could add the letter ‘h’ to things. He could turn trees into threes, rates into haters. Once upon a time, Whaltherh had turned a cap into a chap, but the chap thumped him. Turned out the chap had rather liked being a cap, and it was extremely presumptuous of Whaltherh to go about making caps into chaps. The chap sued, launching criminal proceedings, and Whaltherh lost heavily. What’s more, the judge had prohibited Whaltherh from ever shaking hands with a man named Alf, just in case he accidentally hewed Alf in half.
Whaltherh shuddered at the memory. It had been very embarrassing. Not particularly costly, as he had changed his crime into a chimer and hauled away a stately old grandfather clock, but embarrassing nonetheless.
Being the H Man just wasn’t very helpful. The ‘h’ has already been squished through the English language, and Whaltherh couldn’t fashion much more with it. Nothing needs another ‘h’. He was stuck in Mayfair, fitting tailors with elocution, and there was nothing else to do. Imagine if he had been born the E Man, he often said to strangers on trains. He might have made mad men into made men, and made their wins into wines. The H Man brooded through the streets, feeling the rain fall, and his head fell, too. An E Man would have rowed upon this downpour.
The H Man was miserable about the weather, but he wasn’t the only one.
Over in the Home Office, a civil servant called Curble sat moodily at a desk.
“What a morning, Angela,” he said to Angela, who had just popped in to the office. She bobbed up and down on pogo-stick feet.
“The bus was late,” he continued, “and I like my buses exactly on time, thank you very much-”
He waved a finger didactically, while she pogo-d her feet more urgently.
“-and then the bus stopped at all the red lights from Liverpool Street Station! Every single one, I do believe. Now I’m not one for the Tube, never have been-”
Angela unconsciously lifted her umbrella, ready to burst upon any interlude.
“-never will be, but even I was tempted this morning, sitting on the top deck outside Charing Cross. It’s pouring out there, really heaving it down. The Gutter gave it a 107% chance of precipitation, but I think it’s higher than that, myself-”
He paused for breath, and Angela burst.
“Gerry, there’s a horse in the office.”
He disagreed. “Hoarse? No, you’re sounding perfectly lucid-”
Before he could pick up where he left off, Angela took the gap in the traffic.
“No, I’m not hoarse. There is a horse. There is a horse in the office.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s a… there’s…” she was struggling to find a simpler way of expressing herself. “There’s a horse in the office.”
“You can see a horse from the office? There are horses on Horse Guards’ Parade, that’s why it’s called Horse Guards’ Parade, because of the horses.”
“No, in the office. There is a horse in the office. Gerry, there’s a horse in the office.” She wondered if she was getting her point across. He looked a tiny bit dumbfounded, a square face in round glasses. She recalled the training day last week, the workshop on different types of learning, and decided to try a different approach. Picking up a whiteboard marker, she drew a picture of a horse.
“What is that?”
She stood back to admire her handiwork, zooming in to add some hooves.
“Some kind of animal? A sheep, a bird, a Yeti?” Gerry didn’t understand why there was a Yeti on his board.
In exasperation, Angela wrote the word HORSE under the horse. Huffing, she beckoned Mr Curble to stand up and follow her out of the room. He obliged.
They walked out of the room and into the main section of the office. Like most early mornings, it waited patiently for its civil servants to arrive, an eager host for the day’s machinations. Unlike most early mornings, there was a horse.
A big, white horse, chewing the printer paper absent-mindedly.
Gerry stood there, in both awe and horror.
“A horse.”
“Yes,” Angela replied.
“A horse in the Home Office! This is nearly as bad as my bus being late,” Mr Curble said. He had never actually seen a horse before. It was bigger than he would have imagined, not that he ever had.
“What’s its name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you check its passport?” Mr Curble asked.
“I don’t think horses have passports. I mean, they have some sort of official documentation, or at least their owners do, but I’m not sure they carry them around.”
“What’s that in its mouth, then?”
The horse did indeed have a passport in its mouth. Several more passports lay by its feet, pages torn unsympathetically.
“Oh, it got at the passport machine,” Angela explained. “Took it from there, I think.”
Gerry wasn’t listening. “Let’s take a look at your documentation, then,” Mr Curble said to the horse, which promptly vanished.
“Ah, an invisible horse!” Mr Curble remarked. They must all be invisible, he supposed, except the ones that were visible. The passport had fallen from the horse’s mouth and flopped on the ground.
“So we have…” he examined the passport closely, “Montague. Eileen Rachel Montague.” A picture of a middle-aged woman frowned back at him. “Eileen? Eileen!” he called, as Alexander might have called his Bucephalus, or Eileen might have beckoned her cat Fuzzykins from the garden. “Eileen!”
He turned to Angela.
“If you see Eileen – here this is what she looks like,” Mr Curble said, handing Angela the passport and pointing at the photo, “then take her down to the Customs Department. It’s all in order. She’s from Wolverhampton, says so here.”
Startled, she managed to stammer a reply.
“What if I don’t see her? She’s eaten most of the printer paper already. And when I do see her, she disappears or flies away. And she’s done unmentionable things to the hotdesks,” Angela finished, helplessly, but Mr Curble had ambled back to his room, determined to begin his paperwork.
Perhaps the horse explains how the Home Office missed an enemy invasion.
It started slowly. The Swiss always start slowly. At 8 o’clock sharp, a prim, tall figure strode through the pedestrianized area outside Southwark Cathedral, balancing a tray of expensive watches.
“Watches,” he murmured to busy walkers, “Authentic Swiss watches.” No-one paid any attention, just as he planned. The invasion had begun.
A second figure, just as tall, just as prim, with hair swept to the other side of his head, appeared at 8.10 precisely, emerging from the cathedral shadows. In his arms he carried luxury chocolate.
“Chocolate,” he whispered, seductively, to sleepy walker-commuters. He knew, of course, that it was too early for chocolate. “Luxurious Swiss chocolate.” The two figures made no eye contact, but, at 8.15, they nodded to one another.
A young blonde woman, uniformed in a coat, emerged into the rain. She carried a great roll of red fabric, which she unfurled rhythmically, purposefully. With her two co-conspirators, she erected the banner beside the path.
VISIT SWITZERLAND, it read. The blonde woman admired her handiwork for a second, then stood still, hands clasped gently in front of her body. She smiled the smile of an estate agent, and the invasion was truly under way.
Switzerland was, in a way, responsible for the disappearance of Alicia’s train ticket, but she didn’t know it yet. For the moment she was scrabbling on Tower Gateway’s platform, searching through her bag for the travelcard.
Alicia carried round her own miniature planet. For some people, bags are designed to hold essentials, transport things they might need during day-to-day life. Alicia’s bag was not like that. Perhaps, a long time ago, it was as a functional accessory, but it swiftly developed the fanaticism of an unsightly conquistador. At first it had been modest, pragmatic, cloaking an extra loyalty card or two, but then it became colonial. Soon packets of sugar and over-ambitious hotel shampoos found themselves embroiled in in its fabricated fervour, quickly followed by restaurant leaflets, religious pamphlets and long-forgotten receipts. Eager to win the world, the bag pocketed everything, becoming, to all intents and purposes, entirely useless.
Alicia was suffering from that uselessness now. She was being thrown around in the sea of coats, unable to find her ticket, her compass in these storm-tossed waters. The schoolchildren clambered around and between legs, practising orang-utan acrobatics on commuter climbing-frames. The bobble hat swam buoyantly in front, sinking down the exit steps. Even the burly official made his serious, eggy journey towards the way out. Alicia, meanwhile, found pens, discarded staplers, and a small packet of biscuits. She discarded old maps, a shiny hairbrush, warranties, crinkled sachets of lemonade powder. None of these would pay for her train travel, she mused frenziedly.
There was, of course, one option. There were no ticket barriers on the Docklands Light Railway. If she could just walk past the ticket-swipe machine confidently, she might not have to pay at all…
She tightened her coat and stood up straighter. Act brave, she thought, act tough. Reaching the stairs, she put her left hand on the handrail, and began to descend.
It was then that she saw them.
Ticket inspectors, three of them, at the bottom of the first flight. They half-blocked the passageway, slowing everyone down. Wild in panic, she stopped, clutching the rail hard, and looked around her.
Only one idea came to mind. Alicia turned and ran, holding her hold-all tight. It was a pity, really, that she had only searched her bag, and not her trousers. The ticket was not in her pockets either, but the thief had placed a note there. Perhaps London’s fate on that wet July day would have been entirely different, had Alicia merely checked her pockets as well as her bag. She had always looked on her bag as an empire and, like many an emperor before her, did not find conquests helpful at the flood.
A portrait of Napoleon, dry and comfortable within the National Portrait Gallery, might have attested to that, if a painting could attest to anything.
Napoleon, however, would not be dry and comfortable for long. He was about to come alive.
Paintings do awake from sleep sometimes. That’s why The Scream can never be placed in a greenhouse. Cartoons were invented when Leonardo Da Vinci caught his Mona Lisa popping out for a sandwich. Napoleon had never awakened before, but he had long been dormant.
His portrait, a foot-high Third Revolution monstrosity, stood next to a miniature of Wellington, inhabiting a room of forgotten curiosities. As it happened, most of the other curiosities were similar-looking portraits of Victorian diplomats, who had long since retreated tactfully from history. Napoleon and Wellington joined them more for the mediocrity of their painters than the majesty of their subjects.
No-one was in the room, unless you count the guard, but he was more asleep than the portraits. His wet footsteps unsettled the dust, if only slightly.
Napoleon emerged from his portrait yawning. It had been a long exile. He surveyed the room around him soberly, without surprise or alarm. Diplomat. Diplomat. Diplomat. Wellington. Diplomat. Diplomat.
Slowly, Napoleon turned back to his nemesis. Suddenly, after two hundred years of waiting, he had the chance to strike. Raising his tiny sabre high, he rushed at Wellington’s canvas, tearing it from the frame with four quick, practised slashes. Wellington fell to the floor, more serene in paint than he ever was in life. The mighty French emperor scrunched the canvas into a ball and, summoning all his paper-fragile weight, jumped up and down on it in fury, bouncing every inch of his foot upon the hated portrait. Soon the fight was over and Wellington lay in tatters, centuries of Corsican fury avenged.
Before Napoleon could return to his own frame, however, and complete the perfect assassination, the guard awoke. In normal circumstances this would not have been a fair fight. Napoleon, Emperor of France, Conqueror of Europe, commander of the greatest army in the world, brilliant military tactician, against a bus conductor volunteering in the museum on his day off.
(Incidentally, Mr Curble’s bus had been late because the company forgot they had one fewer driver on a Friday.)
Circumstances, however, were not normal. Napoleon was one foot high, two hundred years away from his power, and made of fancy paper. The bus-conducting volunteer had a very big stick.
Napoleon, employing his military strategy to the utmost, legged it. He scurried between the sleepy guard’s legs, making for the exit. Despite the volunteer’s chase and subsequent – unsuccessful – attempts to operate his radio, Napoleon climbed through a window, finding himself, rather ironically, in Trafalgar Square.
Alicia was running too. Having climbed back up the stairs, pushing past half-awake pedestrians, she was back on the station platform, with a vigilante ticket inspector yelling behind her, scrabbling up the steps. There was one more exit to the station, straight ahead, far ahead, at the far end of the platform. She pushed towards it, through marginally surprised commuters, shoving aside expectations of a woman in a wet, clean coat.
“Where do you think you’re going?” panted the ticket inspector again. Having failed to slow her down once with the phrase, he prudently thought it worth trying for a second time. Alicia dashed ahead, ignoring all the disapproving glances. Nobody tried to stop her: disapproving glances didn’t cost a penny, whereas a new ticket would be at least twenty quid. No guards appeared in front of her – perhaps they were only checking at one entrance, she thought, the only thought she was capable of processing with an angry ticket inspector chasing her.
The note in her pocket told her where the inspectors were, if only she had read it.
Alicia passed the ticket office, turning left towards the escalators. If she reached them, she was safe. In Central London nothing can travel faster than the speed of escalator, as she knew from long experience.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Passers-by studiously ignored Alicia as she grabbed the escalator rail. She was safe now – the escalator went right down to the station’s exit, outside the ticket inspector’s jurisdiction. Perhaps she would have to find another way home for a while, but everything would be fine. Or so she thought.
Alicia, relaxing, put her hands in her pockets, immediately finding the note. Odd, she thought – she rarely put anything in her pockets, it just wasn’t her habit. She pulled out the note and, above, a camera focused on her face, clicking excitingly.
Unravelling the paper, Alicia frowned, reading its message.
A message had arrived for Mr Curble, interrupting his first cup of tea. The tea had, in turn, interrupted his preparation for a Big Ben meeting at 0930.
“Gerry,” Angela’s boss – Michelle – stuck her head round the door. “A couple of messages. We’ve got a task for you around the horse.”
“Eileen?” Mr Curble asked, just in case Michelle was talking about another horse. He didn’t know how quickly they multiplied.
“The magical horse eating the printer paper, yes. We’ve had a bit of a breakthrough with her.”
“Is she going back to Wolverhampton?”
“No, Gerry, and this is where you come in. We got Environmental Health in first, but they’re just rat catchers. Tried to put down a couple of traps, but she kicked them away. I mean, they’re made for small rodents, not massive shape-shifting mammals. No, we need your expertise to control the situation.”
“Of course. I am an expert on horses, you see. What do you have in mind?”
“We pooled our knowledge on how to get rid of horses, and the maintenance man found some fruit. We created a trail for the horse, but we only lured it to the lobby. There’s a bit more fruit, and we need you to guide it somewhere else.”
Gerry looked appalled.
“If you can get hold of some hay,” she continued, “that would be ideal. Thanks, Gerry.”
“Isn’t Angela available?”
“No, she’s cleaning the hotdesks again. We need you to do this.”
Michelle left. Mr Curble dimly recalled there being a hay market somewhere near Trafalgar Square. He decided to borrow Angela’s umbrella.
“I have borrowed your travelcard,” started Alicia’s message.
“There are ticket inspectors on the left-hand exit. Do not descend the steps. Go straight to the escalators by the ticket office and leave there. Go straight to St Paul’s to collect your ticket. Do not be followed. Do not attract attention.
Do not disobey these instructions. The success of the Olympic Opening Ceremony tonight depends on it.”
Whoops, thought Alicia.
Jezknee 