THE GREEN LINE

by
Clare Azzopardi

Translated by Albert Gatt

She has to get on the train.

She has no say in the matter because her brother and sister have left her with no alternative. Stepney Green to London Victoria on the District Line. Taking the bus is not an option, because her brother’s never been on the tube and the idea turns him on. As for her sister, an hour on the bus doesn’t appeal to her because there’s so much she wants to see and so little time.

If you’ve been fighting cancer for eighteen months and have spent days on end hooked up to a bag having chemotherapy dripped into veins that slowly wither and die before your eyes, nothing frightens you so much anymore. Likewise, if your husband left you for another man, and the boyfriend you’ve been seeing for just a few months takes his own life when he finds out about your husband and his boyfriend, nothing frightens you so much anymore.

Her brother’s 24 and was diagnosed with lymphoma. Her sister’s thirty; her marriage broke up after three years, and the first man she started dating after that left her a suicide note a month ago, in which he cited her as the reason.

So they’ve both made it amply clear. Better to die in a terrorist attack than pine away from depression or cancer. She thinks differently. Her legs feel numb as she descends into Stepney station, and the whiplash of tail wind across her face makes her feel sick. And then she’s on the train with her sister and her brother.

The train is completely deserted.

Everybody else is still under shock after the events of a couple of days ago, with the exception of her siblings, whose orders she feels she has to follow, although quite frankly, this whole who-gives-a-fuck-about-death-and-dying thing is getting to her – dying is serious business as far as she’s concerned and let’s face it, the prospect is pretty distant, probably further away than the last stop on the green line.

The other thing is, her brother and sister want to play the part of the tourists to the hilt. She doesn’t. The last time she was in London she was studying here, so she didn’t qualify as a tourist. The last time she was in London, she’d decided she wanted to move here for a few years because she loved the city, it didn’t put her to sleep despite the darkness which seeped into her veins. In fact, the city usually gave her the energy she now lacked because her brother and sister had squeezed it out of her, down to the last drop. She’d been the one to encourage them to make the trip in the first place.

Prat.

And suddenly, London just wasn’t the same anymore.

Whitechapel.

Her brother glances at the tube map. “Eleven more stops to go,” he says.

Having made up her mind that she hasn’t got much longer to live, she begins to think of all the things she would like to have asked her father, things she’s never managed to extract from him.

“Do you remember the time we used to go down to the playing field and there’d be this box of preserves on that old woman’s doorstep?”

“No, not really.”

“What was her name?”

“Don’t remember.”

“You can’t not remember, I was with you a couple times and you told me not to breathe a word about it to anyone.”

“So you shouldn’t be telling me about it either.”

“And you parked some distance away and ran to get the box, dumped it in the boot, and then we were off again.”

“No, don’t remember.”

“And what about the time I started crying in the morning because I wanted to go to school and you said I couldn’t ... ?”

“No, you never cried.”

“ ’course I did, and then you were saying that school was out and we were on holiday. And I’d seen the boy from next door go to school, so why couldn’t I ... ”

“That was a long time ago.”

“But you do remember that you went on strike don’t you!?”

“I’d forget about that too if I could.”

“And do you remember how we used to go to the port in Valletta to wait for Pantu to come back from Gozo carrying the boxes of veg that nan Ro¿a would send?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You mean you don’t remember anything anymore?”

“ … ”

“And what about the time nannu got us our first colour tv?”

“Nope, can’t say I remember.”

“Of course, we were the only ones in the family not to have one by then.”

“You’re getting all muddled up here.”

“Did your going on strike have something to do with it?”

“No.”

“And the fact that nannu worked at the dockyard, did that have something to do with it?”

“Why don’t you ask him that?”

“And nannu’d got them all on the black market, or for free, even.”

“Ask him.”

“He got one for himself first, and then one for aunt Jenny, and then it was uncle Manuel and finally we got one of our own.”

“I don’t remember.”

“So why did you accept it anyway?”

Tower Hill.

A friend of hers who’s getting married soon is afraid of going on a honeymoon to Tuscany. Apparently, Tony Blair’s going to be in Tuscany at the same time that he and his wife were planning to go, which some pundits say makes Tuscany the next likely target. And this other friend of hers, a German, she’s lived in London for a long time and says she’d never missed a day’s work until that day, when she woke up feeling queasy and phoned in sick. And she suddenly thinks of Marthese, who also used to live in London but with whom she’s lost contact after a tiff they had in Republic Street, when Marthese had said she was selfish and she’d called Marthese a coward, at which point Marthese took off her top and bra right there on the street, in full public view, just to prove she wasn’t. And though she’d have liked to do something to prove that she wasn’t selfish, she didn’t. So she’s wondering now whether Marthese also called in sick that morning.

And then she looks at her sister, stares into the turmoil in her eyes, is on the verge of telling her that now is their last chance to talk over all the things that need to be cleared up, seeing as they’re about to die. Her sister seems to understand, but it’s so quiet on the train that she picks up a book instead. Some crap paperback, which is all she seems to read.

“Do you remember playing doctor and patient when we were kids, and I’d always tell you to get undressed (though I was the younger), and I’d keep my apron on and give you a full examination, top to toe?”

No, she doesn’t remember.

“You used to enjoy it too.”

She doesn’t remember.

“And do you remember how, on your wedding day, just before we went into church wearing our best smiles, you told me you didn’t love this man and that this was going to be the biggest mistake of your life? And I gave you a dirty look ... ”

She doesn’t remember that either.

“And what about when I told you I prefer women to men, in fact I find men disgusting? You just changed the subject.”

Nope, she can’t remember.

Her sister chuckles at a bad joke in the book.

Monument.

This other friend of hers likes to compare her life to the London tube map. It veers off in all sorts of directions, but each one has a clear starting point and destination, and you knew the time of departure and the duration. The tube colours stood for her (many) mood swings. And the (even more numerous) stops were the relationships she walked into depending on which mood she was in, involving different people on different routes. Right now she’s wishing she could ask her friend about her contingency plan for when parts of the underground have to be shut down because of a bomb scare. Her friend once told her that during a visit to London she’d spent all of her time on the underground. The idea of being able to visit every point on the map with a single ticket appealed to her. She’d get off the train at every stop and then catch the next one out to her next destination, marking every stop she’d been to on the map in pencil. By the time she had them all marked, it was time to go back to Malta.

Blackfriars.

Someone gets on the train, and he’s carrying a backpack. She hates herself for being prejudiced but can’t really help it, her mind just races on ahead oblivious. It thinks its thoughts and concludes that panic is warranted. But what she really can’t get her head around is how someone with a family and a decent job could decide to blow himself to pieces and kill some forty others in the process. And how this someone could decide that she was going to die along with him.

Her throat feels constricted. Glancing down into the crypt of her mind, her brother seems to notice. She’s about to tell him that since they won’t be alive for much longer, now might be a good time to go over that day when he’d thrown a pointed kitchen knife at her during an argument. She tries to remind him by staring flick-knives into his eyes.

“Do you remember when you threw that knife at me and missed me by a hair’s breadth?”

He can’t remember.

“And I picked it up and was on the verge of throwing it right back at you, then I went out and left a scratch on the mudguard of your new car instead.”

He doesn’t remember.

“It might be a good idea to apologise, we’re going to die pretty soon anyway.”

He’s not paying attention.

“And do you remember the time when the oncologist told you you had a tumour? And then the next doctor you visited said it wasn’t a tumour at all, just a hernia, and that evening you were telling me about it and we were both in fits, and when you blacked out I simply kept on laughing ’cause I thought it was all part of the act. And then you didn’t get up and we rushed you to hospital. We left the hospital without you.”

But he’s still counting the remaining stops to London Victoria.

It had turned out not to be a tumour in the end. It wasn’t a hernia either, though.

Temple.

Then there’s this paranoid friend of hers, who’s always convinced that someone’s going to break into her flat during the night. Not that she’s afraid of being raped or anything like that, she’s convinced that it’s her laptop they’ll be after. Her laptop contains the beginning of a novel she’s been hacking away at for six years. So her friend saves the novel every Saturday morning (thieves tend to pay their visits on a Saturday night) and hides the CDs in different parts of her flat. She used to find her friend’s behaviour hilarious, but now she’s the one who’s in the grip of paranoid thoughts, making the sign of the cross every time a bearded man with a backpack gets on the train.

She takes her mobile phone out of her handbag and starts writing a text to her friend.

if I live tru today
we ll go tru w dat plan
to fnish Lowell off d minute
I’m back If I do die The funny thing is, she’s now started to generalise in exactly the way she’s always hated. This Lowell guy, for instance, he’s a fascist, obsessed with racial purity, and the reason she wants to kill him is that he made a commitment to kill all the illegal immigrants who make it to Malta. Bastard got 1,600 votes on the strength of that alone.

The son of a bitch.

Turns out there’s no network access down here, so she saves the text to send later. That’s assuming she’ll have made it through.

Embankment.

Why is it, she starts to think, that when someone is pissed off, he can’t just lock himself up in the toilet and scream his heart out, instead of bumping himself and about fifty other people off. That’s what she does, for example, whenever her mother starts gabbing about premarital sex, or her father asks her on a Sunday morning whether she’s been to church. At this point, she shuts her eyes and thinks of her mother and of the last row they had, feels this strong urge to tell her that finally she’s going to be rid of her once and for all, because this is it, her daughter’s going to die, so she won’t have to worry anymore about what the neighbours think of her daughter. She’d also like to ask her about aunt Cett, as she always does, just to try and get her to talk straight for once.

“So what about aunt Cett and Pina?”

“What about them?”

“Well, they’re inseparable!”

“Right.”

“Oh come on, ma, doesn’t everybody know that your sister and her friend are always sticking together!”

“I’ve no idea what you’re on about.”

“Well, stands to reason ... ”

“What?”

“It’s all inherited down your side of the family!”

“What is?”

“Nan’s sister was like that too ... only they had her down as an old spinster.”

“I can’t remember.”

“Funny, that, ’cause I do remember.”

“How could you remember? You were six when my mother’s sister passed away!”

“She had a girlfriend too. Ġanna, I even remember her name, she was always talking about her.”

“I simply don’t remember.”

“And now Pina’s started to sleep over at aunt Cett’s.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“ ’course it does.”

“She’s sick isn’t she? She needs someone to take care of her.”

“You know, you’re so gullible, you’ll buy anything you’re told, even from a couple of sixty year-olds.”

“You really keep going on about this, don’t you?”

“You never admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“That’s why you’ll never understand.”

“I still have no idea what you’re on about.”

“That’s ’cause it’s suits you better not to know.”

“Know what?”

“Let’s face it, this business with aunt Ċett and Pina ... ”

“Yes ... ”

“There’s no way I’ve got that wrong.”

“It’s not important.”

“So why is my business so important?”

“We’ve got enough on our plate as it is, without having to worry about someone else.”

“But that’s just it, this isn’t a problem ... ”

This morning her cousin told her he’d like to sit in the underground playing the guitar sometime, not really for the money, just to try it out, see whether anyone would stop and listen, whether they’d like the songs he writes. Her cousin lives in Stepney Green and calls himself a Londoner. He insists that he wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, despite the racist jibes he occasionally hears on a bus. He says that although he isn’t blond and good-looking, he’s made up his mind to stay put, because, rundown as this place may be, it’s his birthplace. And he said that whenever something was bothering him, music was the only escape valve he needed, so he’d made up his mind to play in the underground, just to make the point that he wasn’t scared. Then he asked her whether she’d spare a little change if she was ever passing through and came across him playing, at which point she just lost it and chucked a shoe at him in reply.

Westminster.

It’s stifling in here. There’s a smell she can’t identify; the sensation in her sinuses reminds her of Duncan’s fingers penetrating her nostrils the day they had a row over a bit of weed. She can almost feel the blood trickle down as it did that time. The wobbly feeling in her legs reminds her of that evening spent on Hastings Bastions with her shoes in her lap and her legs jutting off the edge, catching the cool breeze. It wasn’t long before she started crying though. Then she’d lit a cigarette and repeatedly stubbed it on her flabby thighs. It hurt. Which again brings these people to mind, who take it into their heads to become suicide bombers. Why don’t they lay into themselves with a blade until the pain becomes unbearable, as she does whenever she feels angry at the whole world, feels like taking it out on the whole of humanity. Another thing they could do is light a fag and stub it out on their eyelids, it’s a pretty effective reminder of how much burning hurts. That’s what she does when everything and everyone seems to have it in for her. But to just bump yourself off, not to mention a whole lot of other people, jesus fucking christ that’s ... just not on, ever. She knows, she’s tried it several times and has never managed to go through with it. Hurting yourself when you were pissed off she can understand, though. Works every time, too.

She glances once more at her brother. “We’ll be there soon,” he says. She feels the urge to tell him that she loves him, and wouldn’t want him to die even though they have these nasty rows and he calls her a git because she can’t seem to hold down a job for longer than three months. Then he tells her she should consider becoming a train driver ’cause it seems to be an easy and fun kind of job, she might even manage to stick it out for longer than three months. So she aims a kick at him. What she’s dying to tell him is that they should probably start taking life a little more seriously, stop taking the piss out of each other, because they’re about to die.

Victoria Station.

A desert. This is the first time she’s seen that station in such a desolate state, waiting for the people to turn up, sending off train after empty train, forlorn in the absence of the morning rush ... what is she doing here?

She needs to look happy because this is the first time her brother’s been abroad. Her sister looks as if she’s standing on the cusp of the new world. She herself used to feel that way when she was in London, except that now everything seems to have died, and she’s even begun to consider the possibility that maybe this isn’t the best place to spend the rest of one’s life after all. Then she sees the policemen with their dogs. Shortly after, a man in civvies walks past carrying a squarish brown briefcase and looking as though he’s searching for explosives. Her brother finds this really cool, and takes a picture of him. She feels a strong urge to shove her head into a dustbin and feel sick, but there are no dustbins in Victoria, and it’s probably not such a good idea to make a mess on the station floor.

This other friend of hers wakes up at five on the dot every morning and eats 100g of Special K, then goes right back to bed and sleeps until six thirty, when she gets out of bed and heads straight for the loo. Her friend is convinced that this routine makes her life so much easier compared to other people who don’t get up before eight and then have to rush to be at work by eight thirty. So one day she asked her friend what would happen if she didn’t hear the alarm clock ringing, or woke up to find that she’d run out of Special K, but her friend assured her that neither eventuality had ever occurred. If she could, she’d ask her friend now what she’d do if she found herself on an exploding train, and was taken to hospital where they simply didn’t serve Special K at five am and moreover, going to the loo at six thirty was out of the question. But her friend is probably too laid back to even think about things that don’t concern her directly, which is probably why her life is so much easier, and she wishes she could be like that herself, but just can’t see herself waking up to a bowl of Special K at five in the morning. She’d be sick of the stuff after a week anyway. And anyway, it would take her mind off the events of the day, which to her are like drugs coursing through her veins.

Meanwhile, her brother and sister have been looking up the route to Leicester Square. The Piccadilly Line. Part of it has been shut down, but they can still catch a train to Leicester. She’s feeling dizzy and her legs seem to be made of lead. She just can’t face another ride on the tube. Why not take a walk? It’s not such a great distance. The police are still sniffing around with their dogs. The man with the briefcase is still around too. Her brother and sister take off in the direction of the Piccadilly Line. She starts to have visions of her friend eating her Special K, her cousin strumming the chords of Julia somewhere in the underground, her mother praying, her father saying the rosary, her friend staring at the tube map, the bearded man getting on the train, her brother at Boffa Hospital, her sister in bed all alone. She needs to feel the chill of the ground beneath her feet, so she takes of her shoes and socks, rolls up her jeans, and walks barefoot.

* * *

She gets home and shuts the door behind her, turns the keys in both the top and bottom locks, slides the bolt home on the side window, and stumbles the last few steps into her bedroom. She draws the nylon curtain, then the drapes with their stripy pattern. The light outside is as irksome as the repetitive yammering from a scratched CD. She takes off her belt, undoes the button of her trousers and unzips it with some difficulty, releasing the flab on her stomach. She tears her shirt open with such livid force, the buttons come off and she hears them as they hit the floor: One, two, three, four. They remind her of the beads she used to play with when she was a little girl, of how when she got tired of playing with them, she’d try to feed them to the cat, hoping she’d swallow them and choke. She takes off her shirt, drops it behind her onto the bed. She pulls her trousers and panties down. First one leg, then the other. Unfastens the clasp of her bra, lowers the strap over first one and then the other arm. She looks in the mirror. Grabs a bottle of perfume in her right hand, squeezes it tight between her fingers. Stares at it. She lifts her right arm, squeezes the bottle even harder. She draws herself back a little and...screams.

Her body slams down hard onto the bed, she shuts her eyes.

Getting up after a few minutes, she stares once more into the mirror and is aware of a tear teetering over the edge of her eyelid, reluctant to take the plunge. She walks to the bathroom. Opens the door. Walks in. Shuts the door behind her. Turns the key, sits on the toilet and hugs the cistern, holding the handle of the flushing.

And she thinks of good sex. Of how she felt like throwing up after sleeping with Silvan that night. Of her mother, of every time she tells her, “sleeping with a man is a sin, sleeping with a woman is three times as sinful.” And then, of her father, of when her father asks, “Which Mass are you going to this morning?” She remembers her time in London with her brother and sister, how everything had happened at once and she’d felt like stubbing out a hundred cigarettes on her thighs, and had ended up walking barefoot through the station instead. And she wishes there was some way to ascertain that the bathroom is in fact the safest place to be.

With her arms around the cistern to keep her solitude at bay.

© Clare Azzopardi
Reproduced with permission