Mind the gap

[Content note: mental health, suicide, gore]

It doesn’t look good, does it? - to be late for the job interview. I had thought of every possible delay in advance and had taken every reasonable measure to guarantee my arrival on time: the night before, I had planned my route across London and packed a bag – Keys, wallet, laptop, I say under my breath like a spell – and had laid out my shirt, suit and tie with the devotion of a priest laying out the altar cloth. I had accounted for delays on the underground and even left myself ten minutes to buy a coffee at the station. So why do I, now, find myself running late?

Everything had been going to plan. I had woken before my first alarm, put on my shirt, suit and tie, made coffee and left the house in plenty of time. I had walked from my apartment to the hot, yawning mouth of Angel tube station, pausing a moment to watch as it swallowed the morning flurry of commuters, eyes fixed on phones or on the pavement, anonymous. So many, I thought, snatching the line of poetry from my memory, I had not thought death had undone so many.

I had descended the gum-studded stairs, picking up a newspaper that I wouldn’t read, a coffee and a pastry that I wouldn’t eat from the kiosk at the bottom. I had swiped through the ticket barriers and taken the escalator down to the Northern line. Joining the escalator, I placed each foot carefully, avoiding the lines between steps like a child playing the game where you avoid the cracks – if you stand on a crack the bears will get you! As the steps separate and the escalator moves me to the very top of the abyss, I feel the familiar gut-tug of vertiginous panic looking down to the entrance of the southbound station two hundred feet below me. As we descend, I am certain my stomach remains at the top, I can feel my intestines trailing up the escalator behind me.

To distract myself, I focus on the merry parade of advertisements that dance in phantasmagoric procession under the long white strip-lights of the escalator. The first promises me whiter teeth, the second tries to talk me into a new couch I don’t need in the narrow box of my apartment, the third shows me how good my life would be if I only had time to attend this gym four hours a day. I picture the man I would be: handsome, white-smiled, toned. I would sit forward on the smooth beige leather of my new sofa and lean into the camera that every man, to a certain extent, imagines being focussed on his life, his every move. I would flash my white smile, dazzling and as empty as a summer sky, and say: I can do this.

Such a man would never be late for a job interview. He would never see the disapproving glance exchanged between the interview panel as you walk in late, stammering an apology you haven’t had time to formulate or practise. He wouldn’t have to imagine the tart comments in the staff kitchen afterwards: Well for an ad man, he didn’t exactly sell himself!

I’d wanted to work in advertising since childhood. Adverts, those crisp, loud-coloured snippets of utopia, of a life lived better, if only we had x, y or z product, had always fascinated me. I fast-forwarded the cartoons to get to the adverts. Walking through the streets of London, billboards shouted at me, promising me in large appealing letters and elegant photography a better life, a better future, a better me.

It was about six months ago, the lustre of it all was clouded. The ideas didn’t come, I sat behind my desk pretending to reach hard for the next great campaign in a feat of creative gymnastics. But in reality, advertising had lost all interest for me and my head was as empty as the blue sky my boss was always alluding to: Blue-sky thinking, ladies and gents, that’s what we need! Except my boss always saw the blue sky as the empty canvass onto which the bright white clouds of creative ideas would paint themselves; my head remained empty, nothing came.

Perhaps it is as simple as a midlife crisis, boredom, the need for a new job.

That is how I came to apply for the job at one of the tall faceless office blocks of the London Bridge central business district. It would be a fresh start, a new sky. The idea-clouds would come bustling into mind with all the vivacity of a spring cumulus, promising better weather. I would be like the man in the advert, successful.

And everything was going to plan. I had reached the safe concrete shore of the southbound platform at the bottom of the dizzying escalator with two minutes to spare before the next train. Joining the crowd of commuters on the platform, I feel a prickle of heat down my spine under the freshly dry-cleaned suit. I loosen my tie, which is the same bored shade of blue they paint offices, and undo the top button of my shirt with one hand, clutching the coffee and the pastry in the other. My mouth feels dry. I take a sip of coffee, but the warm embrace of the liquid only serves to fluster me further. A bead of sweat runs down my forehead.

I try to distract myself, rehearse the answers to standard interview questions I’d been practising for days: The ultimate measure of success of an advertising campaign is how well it fulfils the client’s specific goals, be it improving brand awareness or boosting sales. I would utilise tools such as Google Analytics to establish whether the campaign had driven up key performance indicators such as click-through rate and conversion rate whilst driving down the cost per acquisition.

Good, I think, I’ve got this. I try again: The ultimate measure of success of an advertising campaign is – something about boosting the brand. Something about click-through rate and conversion rate and cost per acquisition. But I’ve lost the thread of my thought and the cardboard cup is burning my hand and sweat is misting my glasses. Through the fog the red circle and blue line of the Angel sign blur to purple.

And then, suddenly, the atmosphere changes, clear as if I were outside and could sense a turn in the weather. A hot pant of a breeze begins to blow from the black tunnel mouth, a warm whisper of the approaching train. The rats on the tracks, feeling the same vibrations that are running up my legs and shaking the skin of cream on my coffee, abandon their foraging and disappear down holes in the concrete. It’s coming.

Soon I can hear it – the rising squeal of metal on metal, carriages roaring through the guts of London. The headlights of the train splay a bright white flare of light across my fogged glasses.

It’s at that moment I realise – realise how easy it would be to step forward. I wouldn’t even see the tracks coming – I could stride forward into the mist of my vision, across the yellow lines, into the abyss. A split second of free fall, and perhaps regret, before the train would hit. Perhaps I would catch the driver’s eye, see the horror of powerlessness, the horror of necessity. Perhaps his life would flash before his eyes, as mine would, his scream unheard above the scream of brakes on wheels.

Afterwards, perfect stillness for a second. The air smells of iron – the hot metallic tang of burnt break pads, and of blood.

There is a few seconds of screaming before the tannoy rattles into life and the calm voice of the operator comes on to smooth over the panic like my mother would, smoothing out a rumpled tablecloth after a row over family dinner – her bright, brisk movements like the soothing lull of the operator’s voice, ineffectual.

‘This is a staff announcement: Code Christmas jumper. Repeat: Code Christmas jumper…’

Once the platform had been evacuated and decked with police tape like so many white and blue festoons for my departure, once the photographs had been taken, the evidence collected, they’d come to scrape the red smear of blood, guts and bones off the tracks, like an artist correcting his painting of some hideous mistake.

*

The next second, the mist on my glasses clears in time for me to see the doors shutting with their customary rattle and beep beep beep, the train pulling off to leave the station at peace once again.

People walk by, unaware of the stranger who missed his train standing still in the seething crowd.

Before me, rising like a deus ex machina on the tunnel wall opposite the tracks, is the Angel sign blazing a phoenix-trail in red, white and blue tiling. They say there’s always someone watching over you, I guess.

I got the next train, and would have been in plenty of time if it weren’t for the sudden fit of nausea that overtook me at London Bridge station. I run to the gents’ and heave my guts onto the white porcelain, shaking. Leaving the toilet, I pour the tepid coffee away, bin the uneaten pastry.

I got the job. Despite the poor opening move of being ten minutes late, I got through my speeches on key performance indicators and Google analytics and shook hands with the interviewers without revealing too much the tremor in my hand.

It would have been a mistake – I see that now. Yes, I still have bad days and no, everything’s not fixed. Hope blooms like the defenceless snowdrops in the grounds of St Mary’s church – naked white wounds on the earth, ready to be torn petal from petal, limb from limb, in the raw spring winds.

But I work my new job, commuting every day under the guardian wings of Angel station.

I still remember that day every time I hear the voice of the underground tannoy: Please mind the gap, please mind the gap…