Chapter Twenty-three

The lobby was quiet when Jay stepped out of the lift. He stepped forward and looked around himself. There wasn’t even a sound coming from the direction of the gym, although Jay knew that it was open twenty-four hours a day. Next to the entrance to the gym were the double doors that led to the small shopping precinct that formed the bottom floor of the building, and then at the opposite end of the lobby were another sent of double doors that led out to a small security space where another set of doors controlled access to the street.

As Jay was staring at these, they suddenly opened, and a couple walked through them, into the lobby. With them, came a short wave of cold from the street. They were holding each other around the waist and laughing. Sharing opinions about something that had happened to them that evening. Jay moved aside and they both smiled at him and headed for the lift. Jay tightened the knot in his scarf and buttoned the last buttons of his coat to protect against the cold, and stepped towards the security space.

Walking outside after so long was quite a shock for Jay. He stepped out into a world full of harsh noises and sensations. The first of these, almost immediate, was the noise. The electric bubble cars themselves that sped past him now were not noisy themselves, but their drivers all seemed to be broadcasting music from inside their carbon fibre shells. The mixture of all different styles of music caused a babble of different codes and signals, instruments and singing voices that seemed to be trying to tell Jay something. Whatever it was, he couldn’t understand it. The other overwhelming sensation was the cold. He had become so used to the regulated temperature of the inside of his flat, that never changed, that the cold seemed to eat away at Jay’s face and penetrate the skin beneath the layers of his coat and clothes. He doubted that it was really cold, as there were people walking around outside without coats on, moving quickly up and down the street, disappearing into doorways of apartment blocks, or the bars with their gary video boards above the entrances advertising special offers and flashing up images of dancing girls and shouting out laughter and hard-to-believe claims.

Jay walked down the steps to the street level of the tunnel. He felt dwarved by the towers that surrounded him on one side, and the video walls that occupied the whole of the other side. He’d never thought about it before, but the fact that there were no buildings on part of the other side of the street meant that beyond the wall was the outside world. He walked down the street, in the direction of the restaurant, which was quite near. He would have to cross the traffic though, and he looked for a subway. He soon saw the entrance to the crossing, and started to descend the winding steps that took him below the surface of the road. At the bottom of the stairs, a door opened to allow him into the underground crossing. He was alone now, and felt slightly uneasy as the roar of the traffic above became gradually muffled. There was a stink of urine, and the walls of the subway crossing were covered with grafitti.

Jay walked for two minutes before he realised he was not alone. As he walked on, he became aware of the increasing pace of footsteps behind him.

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