A Pack of Lies by Geraldine McCaughrean Page B

morsel of wet. ‘What’s wrong with it?’ he snarled into the face so very close to his.
    The windows turned opaque with the steamy breath of a hundred travellers, and wept condensation. It got very hot indeed in the corridor. The oiled aran sweater heated up and loosed acrid, choking fumes reminiscent of a dead sheep. The commuter’s nose gave an unmistakable twitch and his top lip curled. With a disdainful flick of the wrist, he threw up a newspaper between them. It chafed against Tresillick’s wet aran and left it black with newsprint.
    The train gave a lurch as it came to a halt in London’s Paddington station, and the girl in the high-heeled shoes stumbled and trod on Tresillick’s foot: spearing it with her heel.
    He limped off the train, and felt suddenly like a drunk thrown out of a pub at closing time. For in place of every one suited commuter he could see two, three, four. In place of every one umbrella, a forest of umbrellas. A dozen trains were disgorging identicalpeople, and each had three legs: left, right and umbrella. Tresillick stopped, in sheer panic, at the top of the escalator leading to the Underground. Hosts of men with umbrellas were gliding downwards like the damned trooping down to Hell on Judgement Day. He turned to run, but the crowd was all pressing in one direction. A woman with a suitcase barged him on to the sliding wooden escalator, and there was no escape.
    The flood of people washed him into an Underground train, a beast he had never seen before, which writhed its way through the ground like a giant bloodworm and carried Tresillick where he had no wish to go. His eyes ran wildly along the advertisements until a picture of a businessman in suit and bowler hat jeered at him, brandishing an umbrella, telling him to ‘drink Ovaltine every night’.
    ‘I don’t want to!’ whimpered Tresillick.
    The Underground train spat him out at Charing Cross. He climbed up towards the light, but he could not shake off the host of black-suited, three-legged demons who pressed themselves against him, behind and on both sides, with a horrible, indecent intimacy.
    Then he was out in the fresh air and the rain. He turned his face towards Heaven and thanked God for the gentle, soothing, cooling drops that splashed across his nose and cheeks and bald, sweating head. He had no idea where he was, but at least he was out in the rainy air!
    With a bang that made him cry out with fear, a woman opened a telescopic, automatic umbrella right beside him. ‘A new invention!’ she said, laughing as he staggered sideways. ‘Marvellously handy, aren’t they? Super!’
    Around him, the black-suited hordes opened their umbrellas in front of their bodies, like the great round shields of Viking invaders. Tresillick was a Celt once more, a dark-eyed Celtic peasant. Twelve hundred years of history melted away at the sight of those black,domed shields with central spike. A rainy mist blotted out the buildings and left only the giant, primeval River Thames writhing beneath them as the Vikings swept on to Charing Cross Bridge.
    There was a wind blowing down the river. It buffeted and pulled at the myriad umbrellas, and the men plunged their bowler-hatted heads deep inside their umbrellas and marched on, blindly. As Tresillick turned to ask directions, the commuter behind pulled his brolly hard down over his head to keep out of the rain. The point of a single spoke sank into the top of Tresillick’s bald head and gouged a tramline in his tender skin.
    The pain robbed him of his last remnant of self-control.
    He let out a blood-curdling cry and reached up, in self-defence and fury, and took the body of the umbrella and crushed and rended it into a buckled knot of spokes and rags. He snatched the handle out of the owner’s hand and beat the wreckage against the bridge parapet, over and over and over again.
    ‘I say!’ cried the owner, as the rain pattered for the very first time on his tender bowler hat. He went to the