In the hazy summer, the light dazzling jewels, a thousand angels dance in the afternoon. The concrete, a galaxy paved on the ground, extends as far as the eye can see. Glossy stones glimmer in the sun, a sea of refracted light, searing bare feet. Heat waves rise up creating puddles stretched out like silk ribbons just beyond reach, mirages wavering and disappearing when you blink, a game of lost reality.
Almost monochrome, rainbow colours are bleached white and silver. Unrelenting, each wave of heat makes you wish you could turn it off as simply as a flipping a light switch, allowing night to fall, a security curtain, to close the day’s play. The city transforms, time slows to a veiled performance, a slow red bull.
A ball is kicked.
It bounces, crossing the concrete, a lone explorer in a sea of stone. It was time.
I turn away from the ball and head towards the gap between Cannon and Walbrook Street. It was time to leave the mad dogs to the mid-day sun and meet Fletch. When we get back to school in September and you get that inevitable question, what did you do during your summer? Fletch and I would have answers. No exotic holidays abroad, or second homes or climbing mountains. But real, hard evidence of the subterranean secret under our feet.
My face feels red and my freckles would have multiplied in the short time in the sun. I pull my hair up and tied it in a large top knot that wobbles as I walk. My feet sweat in the knee length wellies and the rubber knocks the bare skin of my legs. I look out of place wearing shorts and a t-shirt, a large rucksack on my back and a hoodie in hand.
Fletch is already at the entrance. He is taller than the wooden door and seems to have grown since yesterday, his arms and legs longer, his body wiry. I push my top knot a bit higher to give me extra height.
The secret rivers of London are actually no secret. They, the officials, have tried to excavate some of them, and others have been turned into sewers. Treasures have been found: coins, tools, shoes and even jewellery. But we aren’t after lost treasures of the Roman Empire or bones of long forgotten smugglers.
The air is cooler in the alleyway and we open the entrance and the damp air rises up is actually cold and clashes with the summer heat. I pull my sweatshirt over my head and place my head torch over my top knot like a crown and switch it on. We leave the streets of London behind and descend the ladder until we reach the bottom. The water pools around our ankles.
We are travellers looking for an ancient bronze door in the tunnels, perhaps a splintered landmark. The bronze door of London. A lesson taught for fun in history of the strange and mysterious of London. We go deeper than the tube lines. Deeper than the secret rivers. Deeper than the catacombs. Some say it leads to hell. Others, paradise.
I reach out and run my hand along the mossy wall as we descend; the tunnel is desolate. I thought of how empty spaces can frighten and when you are engulfed in emptiness, you can become hollow. A blank, devoid of meaning and purpose. You become nothing encompassed in nothing.
I shake my head and the head torch flicks from side to side illuminating the tunnel in bursts. These are dangerous thoughts and the waste land tunnel is playing tricks on me already.
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The Gold Shoe Writer 