SearchChapter One – The People’s Republic of Love
Winning doesn’t matter. Not any more. Charlotte would rather not play at all, but it’s in the contract. In the large as well as the small print it says that you can’t just leave the game, you have to lose it. You have to be a loser.
Sounds so easy
She steps into the escape room amid excited murmurs from the other contestants, the air charred with a touch of oil, though the machinery is almost silent. In a moment spotlights will snap on, illuminating whatever horrific scenario they have created. Escape. You just have to escape. Ignore the puzzle, even if it’s simple and easy to solve – don’t solve it. Fingers cold, pressed against your temples. You can do this.
Water starts swirling across the linoleum floor, and at once Charlotte knows what is going on. She knows instantly, as though a cloud has passed overhead and cut off the sun. Liquid gushes in, soaking her canvas shoes, and her companions make worried and disgusted sounds, sharing this primal aversion to a rising water-level. At first it is a lukewarm ocean broth, but then there is the tang of sewage, so subtle you would hardly notice – unless you were expecting it.
Charlotte covers her mouth and nose. She squeezes her eyes shut and, involuntarily, her brain strings together images of all the people she loves, like fairy lights, lingering on her friend Tamsin’s amused smile, the hug as they parted, the cool press of her rain-ruddy cheeks. If you don’t share it, it never happened. They’d enjoyed arguing about this, a psychometric survey question for this very show. She handed Tamsin the umbrella, and that was the last time they saw each other.
Now her skirt is plastered to her legs again, and home is far away. She takes a deep, juddery breath, then a tiny step, finding it slippery underfoot. People are calling her name. The filthy liquid consumes her knees, then chills her thighs, and she holds her arms aloft and keeps moving, hollow and heart-heavy as she comes to a decision. This time, she’ll have to play the game.
Part One
TUNNELFAIRY
Sometimes you step inside a building and sense, instinctively, that it’s unsound. It might be a crack in the corner of your eye, a creak on the edge of hearing, or a right angle that looks wrong. Tamsin slows as she walks through the office. There are too many people here – surveyors she hasn’t seen for months, graduate engineers who should be on the floor below. They are grinning like they know something she doesn’t. In a paperless workplace, people are clutching sheets of paper, the dry crackle unfamiliar. For some reason they have used one of the photos from the recruitment shoot to mock up something resembling the front cover of Vogue, and have printed several copies.
‘You got me,’ she shrugs. ‘It’s a bit of a pose.’
Honestly, though, why is everyone acting like it’s such a big joke? She grabs one or two of the printouts and fulfils requests for autographs, writing personalised abuse. The photo is pretty good. She is by the brick arches of London Bridge station, one bum-cheek on the wall, a strand of hair wisping from her hard-hat, laughing in the lemony sunlight that so captivated the photographer when they emerged from the tunnel.
Finally, she makes a beeline for the office she shares with her supervisor, only to close the door and find him looking at her like she has burst through from another dimension.
‘What?’
Ted has been described by older members of the team as having something of the Womble about him. When Tamsin looked up this reference, she could see what they meant. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and mustard stubble crinkles below pursed lips.
‘Did you give permission?’ he asks. ‘I assume you did. I was just a bit surprised.’
‘Permission for what?’ She yanks off her body warmer and hurls it at the coat stand.
These days you can only buy printed magazines at boutique shops, so she is not expecting Ted to hand over a glossy edition of Vogue. On the cover is a sticker saying HR COPY DO NOT REMOVE. Something begins to spiral through her innards, a combination of excitement and dread. This can’t be happening, but here is an actual magazine, and she is on the front. Written across her hip, it says Careers edition and something about women in science and engineering.
‘The marketing department have fingers in a lot of pies,’ says Ted. ‘Would you like a drink of water?’ No doubt the colour has drained from her face. He nods back to the open plan office. ‘They’re chuffed to see their little Tam, suddenly a star.’
She doesn’t know what to feel. Help us recruit more female graduates, they said. Get something for the ‘Visibility’ section of your employee assessment – the section she falls down on year after year. Tamsin doesn’t enjoy having her photo taken, but she was willing to grin and bear it for the sake of her career. Plus it was a noble cause. Despite being one of the biggest engineering firms, Ogilby Dobbs lags behind on diversity. It pays well and gives her experience on huge projects, but culturally it needs a kick up the arse.
Her middle finger trails across the cover. Maybe it’s not so bad. It is not exactly an embarrassing photo, though her top looks a bit tight. The photographer has caught her in a post-laugh glow, a bit of blush in her cheeks from having carried the core drill up the incline of the tunnel, her skin dewy. They had been flirting, just a little, since she assumed the shoot was over. Did the words pass her lips, as the camera flashed unexpectedly? ‘Don’t use these!’ She can’t be sure. He must have been lucky with the images. That perfect turn of her head, and the makeup… perhaps she reached for the mascara that morning and triggered a whole day of flukes.
London’s rickety old Underground is springing leaks as water levels rise in the clay, and repairing it is a job never done. Often, in her dreams, Tamsin floats through tunnels and finds fissures appearing, mud dripping down onto the tracks.
At her desk, she sips the grey-hued coffee Ted has made and steals glances at the magazine. The picture makes it look as though she is on a site visit without a protective coat, her hat worn like a fashion statement.
‘Do you think it matters that I look a bit… informal?’ she asks her supervisor.
He shrugs, stirring his breakfast cup-a-soup.
‘The usual suspects have had things to say about following PPE rules on a site visit. But you know what it’s like around here, the arse doesn’t know what the elbow is doing.’
Her stomach sinks into her boots.
‘But I did follow the rules. We took so many pictures with me in full gear.’
‘And you wonder why they didn’t use those, with the jacket reaching to your knees…’
She turns away from his permanent, cynical half-smile. It’s not her fault that PPE is one-size-fits-all, and that size is ‘Yeti’. The only way she can work in gear is by making ruthless use of the Velcro straps and securing her rolled-up trouser legs with hair elastics. She spent an hour in the tunnels being photographed in neons and steel toe cap boots, then relaxed for two minutes at the end. It’s hardly fair she has been immortalised as unprofessional.
What makes it worse is that she is the last person to cut corners. Getting here has been a long road. The drop-out rate on the Ogilby Dobbs graduate programme is two in three. Survival meant months – even years – of being ignored, baited and talked-over, or occasionally coddled, feeling a sweat-heavy jacket land on her shoulders during some impromptu outdoor lecture, or being given whispered ‘tips’ she already knew. Supervisors used to snort and roll their eyes at her cautious approach, and for a while she thought she’d be among the quitters, the ones who hid tears behind smeary goggles as they nodded along, falling behind. That was until she began to study the gangly coffee-fuelled men who ran the place. She learned to stand her ground, to cultivate a steely gaze. Now she can blag with the best of them. She takes zero shit and has a laugh when they go out for drinks. Her feet are far enough under the table that it has felt safe to relax now and then, to let her guard down. Was that a mistake?
‘Let people say what they want,’ Ted goes on, ‘you’ve just got Ogilby about a million quid’s worth of publicity, so they’ve got nothing to complain about. Have you seen the rumpus online?’
He leans across her desk and brings up the company’s Social page, headed, of course, with her picture, the sight of which is already beginning to curdle her stomach. Why are there so many comments? It takes a minute of reading to realise that, perhaps inevitably, someone has accused Ogilby Dobbs of using a model for this shoot instead of a real engineer. Tamsin’s mouth drops open as she reads:
So Ogilby Dobbs is making amends for their past sexism by trying to recruit more women… using a hired model who looks like a construction worker’s WET DREAM. *Slow hand clap gif*
Then, in a move that must have given the HR department enormous satisfaction, there is a chirpy little retort from Ogilby:
Tamsin Wilde, @TunnelFairy, is a geotechnical engineer working to keep your London Underground running safely and smoothly.
What a curveball, to include her handle. They must have thought they were doing her a favour. She switches to the LOVE social network, to her profile, and tumbles down a waterfall of new comments. The numbers are unreal. Since it is semi-automated, anyone who shows more than a passing interest is added as a follower, and people are looking her up to establish if she is a model or an actor, or just AI-generated. A cold vibration runs through her bones as she reads the remarks. Inevitably, people describe her as ‘cute’ – always a bugbear since school – but it gets worse:
OMFG! She can have a go with MY helmet
If she really does work at Ogilby … WHAT A WASTE.
A hard-won qualification, followed by five years of tunnel engineering experience, and the world just wants her to get her top off.
Shutting it down, she turns instead to the three-dimensional hologram model of a tube station projected above her desk. There is a service hatch that needs looking at, but her mind is going to other portals, doors she opened years ago. Doors that can never be closed. There is, of course, a reason she avoids posting selfies on her LOVE feed. It is safer that way. Occasionally a certain group of people find her photos. They make gleeful remarks. Sometimes they paste her face onto their websites, like a deer’s head nailed to the wall. This is how Tammy May Wilde looks now. Imagine the excitement this new windfall will generate.
A grunt draws her attention to Ted, who has melted his sandwich packet to the kettle and is scraping ineffectually at the molten plastic. She tries to focus on her scribbled calculations, the strata beneath her station, but part of her is still scrolling through that torrent of joyous outrage against Ogilby Dobbs: people digging up old scandals, questionable views expressed by the CEO, sexual harassment allegations, and that story about waste oil dumped in a river, settled out of court. Amid so much sleaze and spin, the company would surely think nothing of dressing up a model as an engineer… and so she is caught in the middle, the internet on one side, her employer on the other. Ogilby have trumpeted the positive quote she gave about working there, slapping @TunnelFairy on everything. Now countless strangers are following her. Following her – has no one noticed how creepy that sounds?
She pushes the coffee away, wishing she had a pint of ale instead, that she was sitting with Charlotte at their favourite sooty-fronted pub. Her friend would tease out the lighter side of this situation. ‘You lucky git,’ she’d say. With all these fans falling into her lap, Tamsin would be the envy of anyone working in the arts. You don’t get signed or auditioned or published without a decent following, and you don’t get the followers until someone cuts you a break. It took Charlotte years to escape this chicken-and-egg situation. When she finally won a dating show and was famous, one of the first things she did was to recruit other influencers as mentors for young artists, doing what little she could to pay it forward.
Right now Charlotte is back in the fray herself, cut off from the outside world while filming a reality television show. It is easy to forget this, to start typing a message only to remember she cannot be reached. As Tamsin turns back to her tunnels and escalators and ventilation systems, she is ashamed to remember that she promised to keep up with the episodes. It is difficult to find time, now the end of this project is so near, the final calculations that will ensure her station structure stands firm amid the treacherous London mud, which often catches you out with a few metres of quicksand. She needs to focus, but the cover of Ted’s magazine reflects a lot of light, like a small rectangular puddle in which she can see her watery, distorted face. A ripple of fear crosses her heart. Please don’t let this be like last time.
The People’s Republic of Love
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