Self-control came easier back in the cold street air, but I still felt that my inside was coated with grime and soot. Coughing would not shift whatever had been exhaled from the tunnel. My efforts instead brought up a belch that made me rush to the nearest bin, ready to puke. But I did not, disappointing the couple of passers-by who had turned their heads and scowled. I sat on a stone step with a view of the top of the station escalators, waiting for the alarms, the stern announcements, the fire engines.

Wishing for them, in fact. A real emergency, an event that I could live through. I knew the shape of it: an exodus up those escalators and a crowd forming around me. Long minutes of confusion and shared fear and excitement, people thrown together, enjoying the interruption to their routine even as they cursed it. Then the adrenalin would turn to cold and boredom and mere annoyance and we would all call our offices or appointments and tell them we were late.

Or more serious than that, and my imagination was disgustingly eager to spill the details into my reverie: a fire in the tunnel, fumes spreading fast, national news, fatalities, this stretch of line closed for days, an inquiry, a slow trickle of consequences over months and years: fund-raising, one or two of the survivors being held up as inspirational figures for saving others or overcoming horrible injuries, marathons completed, popular books written, mayoral bids considered. A plaque at this station, perhaps only feet from this cold stone step, and if I came by this way with someone, I’d go a little quiet and break my pace, and I’d say, ‘I was here that day, when it happened,’ in a voice that really stressed how I didn’t talk about it often but it had stayed with me, picturing a great dignified weight, the memory of those x souls, my gratitude at having escaped in time, tempered with noble guilt at being a survivor, my respect for the emergency services. Perhaps poor oblivious Alan would be among the x, intimately involving me, bringing the whole sad story closer, making it far more authentic.

Or nothing. The same steady procession out of the station. No sirens, no evacuation, no space-suited firefighters, no strengthening fountain of smoke from the depths. I wanted there to be an emergency not for ghoulish reasons, but because the alternative was an internal emergency. The smoke, the suffocating need to escape – for me that was real, but it never happened to anyone else.