All very rich, I know, coming from someone like me. Someone who’s never driven anything larger than a bicycle, unless you count Tube trains.
People seem to think it’s preposterous that I should be in charge of an Underground train on a daily basis when I don’t have a driving licence. To which I say: It’s a completely different set of skills. No-one ever needed to put a Tube train through a three-point turn. And in fact one of my workmates, mentioning no names, lost his licence for drinking, but he’s still legal driving a train. It tickles me to talk about my years ‘on the road’, which is what we always call it, but I enjoy being a little misleading. Every trade has its quirky way of describing things.
First question I ask, if I meet another driver, is ‘Which line?’ Which line does he drive. And it’s the first thing he wants to know about me. It sounds a neutral thing to be asking, but it’s as loaded as questions get. There’s a tribal thing involved. All tunnels aren’t alike, in fact some of them aren’t exactly tunnels. So if I meet another driver away from work, he asks me which line and I say, ‘Circle’, he knows I don’t go down deep. And if I ask him and he says ‘District’, then we can both relax and consider the possibility of a real conversation. Even Stevens. But if he says, ‘Central’, then we’re just going to circle around each other endlessly, bristling. Because I know the dismissive phrase that’s on the tip of his tongue.
Okay, the Circle Line isn’t like a coal mine, but we don’t just scratch the surface. The gauge of the track is the same, but the bodies of our coaches are actually wider. They’re serious trains.
Still, what he’s thinking, and I know he’s thinking it, is: that’s not a Tube, that’s a cut-and-cover. Where they just sank in a rail bed and clapped a roof on it. Not exactly a great technical achievement. Deep-tunnel drivers can be mean-spirited little snobs.
So I’m thinking: We’re on what was the world’s first underground railway. Dug by hand, just think of that, before the invention of the Greathead Shield took the terrible risk and labour out of it. And he’s thinking: That’s not a tunnel. That’s a trench with a lid.
It would be much easier for me to strike up a friendship with a bus driver, or conductor, or a ticket office worker, than with a deep-tunnel driver. We could discuss conditions of work, depots, the dreaded public, even the weather. It’s not that there aren’t rivalries between bus drivers and so on. I’m sure there are. It’s just they wouldn’t come into play. For all I know, two-man bus crews spit at single operators, and the number 11 has it in for the number 37. But I wouldn’t know that, and the two of us could have a cup of tea and just chat.
So now I have a work life — not a vocation, maybe not what everyone would call a career, but more than a bare job, a work life that gives you something back. And it’s only since I’ve had a work life of my own that I’ve wondered at all seriously about Ray’s.
What did he do with the days? What did he do between the time he walked me downstairs before nine — sometimes a lot before nine — and the time he let me in again at six? Of course, earning their living is the main reason people have to set those hours aside. Going to work. But I’m not so sure.
Suppose that every weekday morning, after I left, Ray put on one of the dark suits I never saw him wear, walked a few hundred yards and worked in an office. Say he was a solicitor.
Of course I’ve run through all the books on Ray’s shelves in my mind, to see if they would fit in with his being a solicitor or anything else. But then I realise that nothing on my shelves would tell you what I do for a living. And if Ray was a solicitor, wouldn’t he keep his law books in a chambers or somewhere?
But say he worked all day making people’s wills and conveyancing. When did he do his wrestling and his martial arts? When was there time for that? Ray wasn’t an amateur — well of course he was an amateur, but he wasn’t a dabbler.
Three times a week I put on the washing machine in the kitchen, and his kit was in it either once or twice. When I lifted it from the laundry basket, it held the smell of his sweat, the unmistakeable savoury tang with its underwhiff of honey. If there’s one smell in the world I’m qualified to authenticate, it’s Ray’s sweat. Once I asked him, ‘Did you have a good session?’ and he answered, ‘It’s called a workout’ so coldly that I never asked again.
But if you go at it the other way round, the picture makes no more sense. If Ray didn’t need to work, if Ray had money, then how did he spend his time? Did he sit around in a dressing-gown, make a phone call to his banker, then take a cab into the West End for lunch? It’s a chilling idea to me that he might have had a world of friends who knew nothing of the bike club, just as we knew nothing of them. Perhaps there was a bridge session, on a Wednesday afternoon, as well as poker night on a Saturday. It’s enough to give you nightmares.
In theory it would have been possible for him to work three or four days, and still have a serious martial arts workout a couple of times a week, but that sort of balance doesn’t seem to tell the truth about the man. His life wasn’t about either responsibility or leisure. What I saw of his life was about excitement, about magic. About casting a spell.
If I’d dared to spy on him, all those years ago, I wouldn’t be living with so much uncertainty now. It wouldn’t have been an elaborate surveillance project, as such things go, to watch Cardinals Paddock from four o’clock if only one afternoon, to see if he came back after that time, and if so what he was wearing, before he came clattering down the stairs at six in his leathers to let me in. True, Hampton isn’t a bustling place; it would have been quite a feat to lie low. But I never even thought about it. If Ray could know I was looking down at him while he washed the bike without needing to use his eyes, I could be sure he would detect any ruse of mine, and would certainly punish it — not the sort of punishment that’s like a reward in reverse, but an absolute cutting off, leaving me to regret my curiosity for the rest of my life. Leaving me to curse myself for not leaving things alone. It would only have taken a little initiative to find out more about Ray, but that wasn’t my department. Initiative was Ray’s department.
I wonder how much time he spent wondering what was going on in my head, in the six years we had together, compared to the amount of time I’ve spent since then wondering what was going on in his. I freely admit I have no idea what it was like for him to lead the bike club on a run in its convoy of menace and glitter. Knowing that everyone was too impressed by him even to feel jealous. I was right behind in the formation. Breathing down his neck. But I know as little as any.
So I tell myself that Ray couldn’t imagine what it’s like for me to take a train into a station. A driver is there in the cab for the public to see, and be reassured. It could all be automated, like the Docklands Light Railway, but even there the public wants to see a face. And if they can see us, we can see them.