Platform Seven Read online

  ‘Ouch,’ I said.

  ‘It’s right here,’ he continued. ‘It’s called the branchial motor, it’s part of the facial nerve system. If you press on that and the back of the head at the same time you can really disable someone. There’s a technique to manipulate that nerve: you have to use the pad of the thumb, not the nail. If you use the nail it breaks the nerve rather than manipulates it; incredibly painful, apparently.’ I tried to move my head but the other hand held it still. ‘I know all about your nervous system, you know.’

  He released me, turned away and picked up his phone from the bedside table.

  I gave a small laugh. ‘Jeez, is that what they teach you in medical school? Honestly, Matty, really …’ I stretched my mouth as I spoke. It had all been over in a second or two. ‘Seriously, sometimes it’s like you’re trying to give me a glimpse of what you’d be like if you were a bad person.’ I spoke lightly, a laugh still in my voice. I was careful to do that. I leaned over and picked up my book from the floor, opened it again, still stretching my jaw.

  He was still turned away, his back to me, looking at his phone. ‘Maybe I am a bad person,’ he replied.

  PART FIVE

  15

  It was January: five months after Matthew and I had begun dating, and two months after we had moved in together – the bleakest part of the month, the mid-point, Christmas long gone and savage February ahead. Dark, darker, darkest, that’s the way it goes in the run-up to Christmas but in December it’s masked by coloured lights and parties, wrapped up in red and green. Then we all pop out the other side of the festive season and go, oh no, it’s January. We all hate each other and we’re broke.

  My birthday is 29 January – hard time of the year to have a baby, as my mother said to me, more than once. The winter I was born, they had an old boiler that kept breaking down. She described to me the difficulty of those nighttime feeds, the sensation that you were the only person awake in the whole wide world, at the mercy of this tiny monster made entirely of need. It made an impression on her, clearly. Even into my teenage years, she would say during the particularly grim parts of winter, ‘Oh, this reminds me of when you were a newborn, Lisa!’ I was a little affronted, in my solipsistic way – she’d had me, after all, her choice. It was only later, when I had my own flat and also had cause to be awake in the small hours during winter, although not with a baby to feed, that I understood more of what it can be like: the depth of the cold and the isolation, that feeling.

  I went through a period of insomnia not long after I bought the flat, I’m not sure why. I would rise to consciousness around 4 a.m., body still but mind turning as I struggled not to think. The things I did think were always weirdly philosophical. Who was I? What was I doing, living this life? Why wasn’t my life different or, more precisely, why wasn’t I different? Why wasn’t I not-me? Sometimes I experienced an odd, floating sensation, as if my body didn’t exist and I was nothing but my thoughts.

  Eventually, I would have to concede that if I was feeling as though I was nothing but consciousness, then I probably was actually conscious. I would get up and make a cup of tea, bring it back to bed and read for a bit, to take my mind off all the existential questions that were washing around inside my skull. I would sit up in bed, the reading lamp on and a book on my lap while I stared ahead to stop myself from watching the digital alarm clock on my bedside table. I’m not given to that kind of introspection in daylight hours, only at night. As anyone who has experienced it will know, it is unhelpfully circular.

  Round and round the minutes, then the hours would go, round and round … 4.30, 4.40, then 5.10, then only 5.13, then 5.55 – at last 6 a.m. arrived. I was obviously going to be awake the entire night but at least the entire night would come to an end at some point … Eventually I would relax, put down the mug and the book, tentatively, as if it was a risky thing to do, turn off the light, settle down beneath the duvet, the pillow plumped and squished beneath my head … and then … I would drift off into a world where thought was not possible, not conscious thought anyway. Images, yes, of the sort you get in dreams, pictures that didn’t make any sense, snippets of conversation – sometimes there wasn’t even that. Sometimes it was just the beautiful blackness of sleep: how blissful it felt, in the moments before it happened, to at last be at that point – as long as I didn’t think too hard about how I was going to fall asleep now and wake myself up again. Usually, as I finally fell, I felt nothing but perfect peace.

  I was always in the deepest of sleeps when my alarm went off at 7 a.m. And waking myself up, rising from my bed, was every bit as hard as the reverse process had been a few hours earlier.

  *

  It was only a phase. At the time I met Matty, I hadn’t had insomnia for years, nor any absence seizures. I had been clear of my epilepsy diagnosis since the age of twenty-six and my NES blackouts were few and far between; the last one had been two years previously. I was well. I didn’t do much proper exercise but I walked everywhere and was on my feet all the time at work. I ate properly, had friends and hobbies. I was as good as I’d ever been, at the point in my life I met Matthew Goodison.

  *

  My birthday that year was my thirty-sixth: an odd one – is it your mid or your late thirties? When you’re a single woman, this distinction matters, to other people at least. I hadn’t been in the practice of making that much fuss about my birthday but there was something about having Matty that legitimised going to a bit more effort, just another of the small benefits that accrue when you’re part of a couple. He had met most of my friends by then, and my workmates. We were established. I couldn’t help recalling all those years I had had to organise a small get-together bravely, on my own, and wake up bravely on my own the next day and think about it to myself. This time, I had someone to go home with afterwards, someone I could say to the next day, did you talk to so-and-so?

  I reserved the three tables in the front room of The New Place – not a private room as such, just the area at the front of the bar with a bay window, some very low coffee tables and several sofas – the rest of the bar was a short corridor walk down towards the back of the building. It was around fourteen or fifteen of my friends and colleagues: my Head of Department Adrian came and brought his wife. They were the oldest people there – I hadn’t invited my parents, I would be seeing them separately at the weekend. I’d got a deal, buy three bottles of wine and get a fourth free, so I’d gone for four white and four red, and I’d ordered three platters of deep-fried objects: chicken goujons, sticks of courgette in batter, rings of something white and chewy that might have been onion and might have been squid. They were quite tasty when they were brought out from the kitchen fresh and hot, and disgusting ten minutes later when they had cooled down, after which they lay there on their platters on the low tables waiting for everyone to be drunk enough to eat them anyway. There was also a large blue bowl of mini sausages coated with honey and mustard that were great at any temperature and I ended up eating a dozen of them. When the wine I had bought ran out, other people bought more. By then I was slumped on one of the sofas and letting people pay court to me. It was only a Thursday, but that didn’t seem to be stopping anyone, least of all me.

  I’m not very good at drinking. It’s never been my forte. It isn’t a great idea when you have seizures – my mother hardly ever drank, just a glass of brandy at Christmas, while my father stuck to the odd glass of stout. The wine culture of my friends and their parents wasn’t something I had grown up with and although I tried, occasionally, I secretly viewed drinking as something that was on the long list of things I was a little bit scared of and a little bit scornful about.

  Everyone brought cards and presents, which was sweet – pointless presents, mostly: scented candles, to join the row of unused scented candles that rimmed my bathtub; a set of pencils decorated in different coloured patterns with a matching notebook; a cookbook that I already owned. I knew that at some stage, there would be cake. Rosaria had already been up to the bar
a couple of times and done a bit of nodding and whispering.

  Most of the people in the group had met Matty by then. While I was being queen of the party on the sofa, he was talking to Rosaria’s stepsister Jasmine on the other side of the room. Jasmine was a nurse and worked at the hospital. She was twenty-six years old. She wasn’t pretty like Rosaria but she had a quality about her that I recognised as the sort of thing men liked and other women didn’t, a kind of hair-flicking pseudo-shyness, a way of looking wide-eyed, younger than her years. She was wearing a black off-the-shoulder jumper that showed her smooth skin and had her dark hair in a messy bun at the nape of her neck. Every now and then, a strand of hair would escape the messy bun and fall over her face so that she had to flip it back behind her gold hoop earrings. The frequency with which this happened implied it was no accident. Matty had a beer bottle in his hand and was smiling at her. They had been talking together all evening. I had decided not to notice.

  Someone bought a bottle of rosé wine, which disagrees with me but I drank it anyway once the white had run out. The cake came out, carried aloft by a grinning young woman and supervised by the man from behind the bar. It turned out Rosaria had had it delivered that afternoon. She had ordered it specially from the Polish bakers that liked to decorate their cakes with icing rosebuds and fresh strawberries. It had nine candles.

  ‘Why nine?’ I shrieked after I had blown them out, while everyone was still whooping and applauding.

  ‘Three and six!’ shouted Rosaria, pointing at the way they were arranged. ‘Three and six, you idiot!’

  Singing ‘Happy Birthday to You’ had made everybody raucous. Two of the blokes, Jamie and Lemmy, started stamping their feet and whooping. ‘Speech!’ shouted Gillian, a history teacher from school who I had always thought of as a little dull but who was more catastrophically drunk than anyone there, which was saying something. She had spent the evening on her feet and every time I looked at her, she appeared to be standing at a rash diagonal. She had a thing for Jamie and kept touching his arm, letting her hand linger there, then pulling it away very suddenly as if she had only just noticed she was doing it. I had the uncomfortable feeling that she was the kind of woman who flirted with handsome gay guys in a way that suggested she thought the joke was on them, rather than her.

  Jamie and Lemmy changed their chant to ‘Li-sa! Li-sa! Li-sa!’, clapping loudly. Lemmy put two fingers in his mouth and made a shrill whistle. Matty and Jasmine were both watching and smiling, shaking their heads.

  I demurred, throwing my chin to and fro so emphatically it made me nauseous, taking a large gulp of wine so I couldn’t speak. I’ve never been good at impromptu speeches. I felt dizzy and odd, and had a rush of panic I might black out but quelled it with the thought that as I was sitting on a sofa already, it wouldn’t matter. And Matty was there, he would deal with it. I had had one seizure since I had been with him, back in November, in this very wine bar and of course he had been brilliant. I trusted him completely to look after me if anything went wrong – it was the main reason I had felt able to relax and have a few drinks on my birthday for once. Everyone was looking at me: everyone was clapping and smiling.

  Matty pushed past Jamie and Lemmy and stepped up on the coffee table in front of my sofa. The cake had been removed by the young woman, to be cut into pieces, but there was still a platter of congealed fried food that he was perilously close to standing on. Several people who had put wine glasses on the edge of the table snatched them to safety.

  Everyone fell silent and looked at Matty. Was he going to make a speech? Matty looked down at me, raised his arms, and began to sing.

  ‘Outside the school gates, by the traffic lights, I’ll always stand and wait for you at night …’

  His voice was a little clipped but in perfect tune. For the first couple of lines, the bar staff in the background were talking, but they fell silent very quickly. Everyone stared at him, including me – I couldn’t believe how good his voice was. He could really sing. ‘… I’ll wait for you, the whole term through …’ The young woman came back into the room with another oval foil platter on which she had fanned out pieces of cake, each in its own individual napkin. Arrested by Matthew’s singing, she stopped just inside the door.

  Jamie began an accompaniment, blowing through pressed lips to mimic a low brass instrument sound. Adrian’s wife, standing next to him, started to sing along in a querulous treble, murmuring when she couldn’t get the words right. ‘Lili Marlene’ is one of those old tunes lots of people seem able to hum along to even if they don’t know it. If you had parents or grandparents who grew up in this country during the war, it’s in the collective subconscious, somehow, from old films on television at the weekends, perhaps: the romance of wartime in black and white. Lamplight. Lost love. Barricades.

  Several of the others were humming along now. Gillian had stopped trying to touch Jamie’s arm and was staring at Matty. Jasmine was too, her mouth agape, and she looked to the people either side of her with wide eyes, as if for confirmation. Only I knew Matty had done it to rescue me from being the centre of attention. See, I thought.

  As he finished the final line, staring at me the whole while, his voice rose, quavering, ‘My Lisa of the staff room, My on-ly, Mar-lene!’ ‘Lene’ was a whole octave higher – he hit the final note clean. By now, he had both elbows raised and his hands pressed to his chest. He froze in that position.

  There was a moment’s pause, then everyone went berserk. A young man behind the bar cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, ‘Bravo, mate, bravo!’ My friends whooped and applauded. Rosaria, on my left, shoved her shoulder into mine, knocking me sideways. Everyone looked at me as if they were expecting me to cry. Matty looked down at me, and bowed.

  The only person who didn’t join in the whooping, apart from me, was Rosaria’s cousin, Elena, who was sitting on my right. I didn’t know Elena very well, she only joined our group occasionally – she was very small and olive-skinned and the kind of person who spoke only when she had something to say. I liked her a lot: sometimes I thought I liked her more than Rosaria, who was one of my closest friends. The hubbub died and everyone took a swig of their drink or looked around as if they were wondering what was going to happen, what form the next part of the entertainment might take. Matty was still standing on the coffee table. Elena said thoughtfully, to me, but looking straight ahead as if she was addressing the general company, ‘I wonder what it’s like, going out with him.’ Her tone was quite serious, and something about her seriousness made me panic a bit and glance at Matty.

  Loudly, I declared, ‘Oh God, it’s a nightmare, you’ve no idea!’ Everyone looked at me and Matty raised his eyebrows, amused. ‘It’s like going out with an enormous puppy!’

  Matty jumped off the coffee table and landed in front of me, then raised both his arms in front of him, but let the hands flop down from the wrists. He threw himself on top of me, making a series of loud barking and snuffling sounds and licking at the side of my neck while I shrieked and tried to push him off.

  The group broke apart in noisy glee. Rosaria pushed herself backwards. I shoved at him laughing. Everybody hooted and applauded. Elena rose and went to the bathroom.

  The event broke down into individual conversations. Matthew slithered off me and knelt before me where I was still slumped on the sofa. He took my face in his hands and pulled me towards him, planted a rough kiss on my lips and said, ‘Happy birthday!’ then pushed me back. He clambered to his feet and looked around for his drink. Across the room, Jasmine had turned away and was talking to Lemmy, her back to us.

  I felt I should move around the room, talk to other people, but knew I would stagger if I stood up. Safer to stay where I was. Elena returned but didn’t sit down on the sofa again so Rosaria and I shuffled up a bit, and I laid my head on Rosaria’s shoulder and murmured through my hair, ‘Thanks for my cake … s’lovely …’

  ‘You haven’t had any yet, silly,’ she said, and leaned forward – dislodg
ing my head from her shoulder – and picked up a piece in its napkin. ‘Here,’ she said, clearing my hair away from my face and shoving it at me. ‘Get this down you. Sugar rush.’ Then she put her mouth close to my ear and spoke in a fierce whisper. ‘Seriously, he’s crazy about you. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ She pressed her lips together and hummed, ‘Here comes the bride!’

  ‘Fuck off!’ I laughed, pushing her away from me.

  Later, I went to the Ladies. I was drunk in a bad way by then. At other events I’d acted drunk, talked the talk, swigged it back ostentatiously then just left my glass unlifted for longer periods than anybody else. Nobody ever noticed. Many times over the years I had slurred my words and behaved stupidly like the best of them but I had never been in earnest – until now. It was careless of me to make my own birthday an exception, especially on a midweek night. I would pay the next morning – it felt as though I was paying already, which was sort of unfair. The evening had slowed and stretched and everything, even going to the toilet, was effortful. What time was it anyway? It felt late, but then we’d started early. Soon, we would all go home.

  As I was applying blusher in the mirror, smearing it across my face with my fingers in the absence of a make-up brush, a tall young woman at the neighbouring mirror – I was so drunk I had scarcely noticed her standing there – said to me, her voice sounding a little tearful, ‘You’re so lucky, you know. I’d love someone to sing to me like that.’

  A few people who weren’t part of my group had come into the front bar during the song – they must have been on their way into the wine bar and stopped to see what the singing was about. I didn’t know what to say so made a murmuring sound of assent, looking at my reflection. With my make-up freshly reapplied, I thought I looked better than I probably did. It’s all relative, after all. I fluffed at my hair. The tall young woman had a large nose and heavy eyebrows. Her hair was dyed very black. I wondered what its natural colour would be. I saw myself through her eyes: a short, pretty woman with lots of friends and a boyfriend who sang to her in public, a woman who was given cake. Our reflections stood next to each other, staring at themselves, assaying the differences between us. The tall woman gave a small, single shake of the head and turned away.