She followed the signs to the brown line and arrived on an underground platform. A red-and-white train, smaller than the Bath train, pulled up to the platform. The doors opened like sentient beings, the same as the others. Jane stepped inside the train and gripped a pole running from floor to ceiling. The doors closed themselves and the train pulled away from the platform. It then entered a tunnel, plunging the view out the windows into darkness.
Jane studied the people. Once again, almost every person in the carriage seemed to possess a small thin rectangular box, which they cradled in their hands and gazed at. They smiled at these boxes, laughed at them, worshipped them. Jane shook her head, filled with curiosity at what wonders these little rectangles possessed. She glanced at one and found a theater production playing inside the box. She felt flabbergasted and terrified. Actors reduced to tiny proportions moved inside the screen and waved and spoke to each other. She shook her head and stepped away, gripped with shock. More magic. She understood now why people paid these enchanted boxes such attention.
Next, she studied the faces. Either flower sellers filled the carriage, or people no longer considered face painting obscene. A woman in a spotted coat was painting her mouth red. Another who read a novel had lined her eyes with black, like Cleopatra. One woman exposed the top of her bosoms. A man in a striped evening suit glanced at them, then returned to watching his little rectangular box. How did women and men interact in the twenty-first century? Had things changed? Did marriage still represent the goal? Before she could delve deeper into her anthropological study, the tube train arrived at the station for Oxford Circus. Jane alighted the carriage.
As soon as she did so, Jane wished she could jump back into the safety of the warm train. A scene of mayhem greeted her, with more people rumbling and streaming through the confined space than Jane thought humanly possible. Bodies pushed in and out of the carriages, through and across the stone platform in every direction, like rats escaping a sinking ship. As Jane again looked upward for signs, a sea of people swept her along and moved her forward, whether she wanted to go or not. A sign with a red line loomed overhead. Jane fought her way out of the seething wave of bodies and followed it.
She boarded another two moving staircases at great peril and walked down another tunnel, then arrived at the red line. A train pulled up. Jane boarded the train and found a seat. Before she had time to catch her breath, the tube arrived at St. Paul’s station and Jane alighted again. She exhaled, bewildered at the pace and the noises, the heat and the people. She mounted yet another locomotive staircase, this one travelling upward. She touched her card on the circle once more, exited the gates, and was spat out into the daylight.
Once her eyes adjusted, she fixated on the facade of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which seemed to bloom before her from the ground into the sky. For a moment, she thought she had returned to 1803. The baroque structure stood as it had the last time she was there, but then she turned around in a circle and found monsters of glass and steel now surrounded it on all sides. Giant red carriages with two floors carried dozens of people through the street. Horseless monsters moved everywhere, up and down the street, sounding horns of alarm and anguish.
But if she momentarily thought she had returned to her own world at the sight of St. Paul’s, she banished the mistake when the next building lured her inside. The smell of fresh bread wafted from its doors, and she walked toward it, her stomach sucking with hunger.
Above the doorway, brilliant white letters before a bright orange background read Sainsbury’s. Magic glass doors slid apart as she approached. Her nose followed the wafting smell of hot sweet bread, but her eyes concerned themselves with the most abundant and grotesque display of food she had ever seen. Some sort of indoor marketplace happened there, like the one in her own world on Stall Street, but at least ten times the size. In one direction, a field of exotic fruits and vegetables bloomed across a giant floor. A mountain of oranges spilled forth from a giant wooden crate. Jane had seen an orange once, sitting next to Queen Elizabeth in a painting. Apples liberated from a thousand trees bloomed from another leviathan mound. Giant domes of lettuce squatted across the landscape. Tremendous glass boxes that felt cold to the touch were filled from floor to ceiling with paper cartons, with each carton bearing an Italian title. Bellissima Gourmet Pizza, one read. Huge cases strewn with chipped ice encased rows of haddock, salmon, and sea creatures she knew only from storybooks: octopus, crab, and lobster.
Corridors of shelves were stacked row upon row with boxes and packages of dried foods, biscuits, bottles, sauces, and grains spewing from each ledge. She walked down one corridor at random and the sight of at least a hundred pound bags of sugar wrapped in brightly colored paper assaulted her eyes. A wall of sweetness. If any lingering doubt remained that this was all a dream, she now firmly knew she had travelled through time. Not even in her wildest fantasies could she conjure such a biblical plethora of food. Jane needed to sit down.
“Can I help you with something, love?” a woman in an orange shirt asked her.
“What is that?” Jane replied. She pointed to the woman’s chest, where a name hung on a little sign.
“That’s my name tag. My name is Pam.” Jane felt astounded at the brevity and forwardness of the introduction. People now wore their names on their clothing and introduced themselves before you met them.
“Why does no one guard the sugar?”
