Platform Seven Read online

  Melissa shrugs. ‘Takes all sorts, I guess.’ She hears how uncaring the comment sounds and regrets it but doesn’t know Lockhart well enough to correct herself to him. He will just have to think she is harsh.

  Lockhart turns away. ‘Well, better check my notes. Long night.’

  *

  Melissa and I watch him go. Normally, Lockhart has an easy, loose way of walking, the walk of a young man who is comfortable in his skin, who still believes in duty and justice – it’s hard to imagine him ever being a cynical sergeant or inspector: he’s one of these young men who looks as though he will never be middle-aged. But today, he trudges back along Seven – trudge is the only verb for it. It has, indeed, been a very long night.

  *

  Leyla. It’s a name that comes to me, just at that moment, as I look at young PC Lockhart walking away.

  I see something, an image in my thoughts. It is a picture of a woman in her seventies sitting on the edge of a bed. She is facing away, towards a window where a rectangle of grey light casts a pale glow in front of her. She is dressed in a nightie. She’s cold.

  Is she Leyla?

  *

  Melissa stays on Platform Seven for a few minutes after Lockhart has gone, looking down at the tracks. When she goes back to her office on Platform One, she will have to get on with her day – she is often running around the station or off to meetings elsewhere on the Network. All that is still there, along with all the follow-up this will cause, the interviews with staff, the emails to Head Office, the report to be done. She shouldn’t just be standing here like a prune, especially not when members of the travelling public can see her. But part of her feels unwilling to go back to her office and get on with the rush of it all. She needs to take a moment or two, to apologise in her head to the man, for her own annoyance at his act, her impatience. It seems only right.

  *

  Melissa turns briskly on her heel – the opposite way to Lockhart, to go back to her office via the access ramp. I stay on Platform Seven.

  I think I know what is going on with me: the man’s death is reminding me of me. Perhaps that is my route back in, to my life, I mean, to who or what I was before I died. The death of the man has unlocked something.

  I think about his face. I was so close to it, staring into those large, watery eyes. I think about how opaque his thoughts were. Normally, I can tell what people are thinking and feeling but with him, a shutter was down when I looked at him. I think about the cold sensation I felt when he passed through me, so chilling it felt like scorn, and I know for certain that whatever Melissa has just told Lockhart, I didn’t do what he did. I didn’t throw myself off Platform Seven.

  So what happened to me?

  *

  Time drifts. Soon it is full daylight and the thick wad of cloud that has filled the sky until now melts away. Sunlight appears, as if by magic – who would have thought that would happen, after such an unwilling dawn? As I glide towards the waiting room, two young women exit together, stopping on Platform Seven and standing next to each other without speaking, tipping their faces to the sky in a small act of worship: winter sun, always such an unexpected gift.

  Mid-morning, midweek: how quiet the station seems now the rush hour has gone. The commuters have disappeared. The sky above is clear and blue; the air is light. By noon, it will, for a short while, feel positively balmy.

  I can’t see any trainspotters on Platform Seven this morning. I’ve got quite fond of them. I know most of them by sight and admire their dedication and their enquiring spirit: philosophy for the working classes. A lot of them are on first-name terms with the staff and they will be concerned for them when they hear what has happened. Unlike most of the travelling public, they would never dream of being rude to a staff member. They know better than most the sort of things the staff have to deal with on a daily basis.

  Half a dozen passengers are sitting in the waiting room. The young man behind the mobile coffee cart is playing tinkly tsk-tsk music too quietly for anyone to hear but loud enough to irritate everyone. Four of the six people have earphones in anyway and five of the six sit frowning at their phones. The tannoy bleats, from time to time. Passengers are reminded to keep all personal belongings with them at all times. Not just hang on to your stuff please, but keep all of your belongings with you at all times.

  Not long after this reminder, there comes the testy request that the owner of the suitcase on Platform Six return to it immediately. The sixth person in the waiting room, the only one without a phone or headphones, is an elderly woman with white curls and thick glasses – a little old lady straight out of central casting – who is standing by the cart pouring sugar into her coffee. At the sound of this announcement, she looks around and realises that, yes, the disembodied voice is referring to her. She frowns a little, clearly annoyed that she is receiving this public rebuke. The suitcase on Platform Six is fully visible to her through the glass wall of the waiting room and she knows that it contains not explosive devices but socks and jumpers – she’s on her way to spend a few days with her son and daughter-in-law in Sheffield and their new baby. They’ve called the baby Ivan and she disapproves.

  The elderly woman clutches her coffee as she goes outside to stand by the suitcase, lest it be seized and subject to a controlled explosion. She saw no need to keep a close eye on the case when she knew it contained nothing of value – her purse, phone and driving licence are all in the neat leather handbag that hangs from her shoulder. What self-respecting thief would want her socks? Relying on the guesswork and common sense of petty criminals is something of a high-risk strategy for protecting your belongings but she’s not alone in that.

  None of the five travellers left in the waiting room between Platform Six and Platform Seven has even looked around, either at the security announcement or to watch the elderly woman reclaim her suspicious suitcase. The warnings are so constant and terrorist attacks so infrequent that there is a disconnect between the two – nobody really takes the announcements seriously because of their frequency.

  It doesn’t matter how many times you are told; in fact, the more you are told it, the less you are able to imagine it. You have to be someone to whom something unexpected and terrible has happened to feel that vigilance has a purpose. Until you have experienced the hard slap of violence, you can’t imagine a sudden, bad thing happening. People don’t report suitcases on railway platforms for the same reason that they don’t report a speeding motorist. There is the mundane, then there is the unthinkable – between the two, a chasm into which our imaginations tumble.

  *

  The morning grows old and even though it’s sunny I’ve had enough of Platform Seven, enough of staring out at the housing estate, the Used Car Supermarket, the distant Fens. Boredom: each day, each night, the turn and blur of those non-identical twins – the sameness of it. If all life is, or turns out to be, is a waiting room for death, then why don’t more people hurry it up? I would, if I had the choice, but you can’t commit suicide when you’re already dead, which leaves me in a bit of a bind.

  I can’t afford to let gloom overtake me – I know that much by now. If you get depressed when you are in my state, it can curdle. I’ll start trying to whisper malicious thoughts into the ears of the living, urging them to do what I can’t.

  *

  I go to hang around the entrance. There’s a cafe there, although it isn’t a separate area, just an extension of the small concourse. It’s called the Pumpkin Cafe, appropriately enough for this time of the year, although it’s called that all year round. It’s more fun to hang around here than over there on the far side, where people are doing nothing but waiting for trains or killing themselves. There’s a fair amount of waiting goes on in the Pumpkin Cafe too, of course. You can get your cup of tea-in-Styrofoam and sit on one of the metal chairs in full view of the electronic display, where you can find out, should you need to know, that the 17.32 to Spalding is on time and is Calling at: Spalding. Not all trains are quite so punct
ual. The 17.24 to Manchester is Expected at: 17.25.

  At this time of day, there are half a dozen people ranged beneath the ten monitors that form the display, orange letters against the black screens. People tip their faces upwards and gaze at them for the whole of the time they are standing there, as if they might miss some vital information if they don’t keep looking – a microsecond-long mention of the fact that their train is cancelled, for instance, that will appear only briefly. Their expressions are rapt. I can’t help feeling that Network Rail is missing a trick. Think of the knowledge they could dispense, as opposed to just giving you train times. Watching the people watch the screens I feel the same slight sense of disappointment that I used to feel when I got money from a cashpoint machine and it asked if I required an advice slip. Why did the advice slip tell me how much money I had just taken out of my account? I knew that already. Why didn’t it say: Replace the sitting-room window now before it causes a damp problem or Take an evening class in the history of jazz, you’ll enjoy it or Leave your lover before it’s too late?

  Account balance: £278.31. Call that advice?

  *

  The day passes. There isn’t much of an afternoon rush hour going into Peterborough Station – at this time of the day it flows the other way. As the light fades and evening grows, the commuter trains arrive and disgorge groups of people and through the barriers they come in single-file streams. Half of them are on their phones. Some are bent and frowning, weighed down by the stresses of their day, but quite a few have their faces lifted and their expressions open and relieved. They are nearly home. The barriers are almost always kept open at Peterborough Station: it is a portal. The dividing line between life and the afterlife is porous here. I watch the people and it amazes me that they don’t seem to have realised it yet. I was just like them once but now I feel baffled and irritated that they are all in such a rush. Think about it, I want to say – from my superior perspective – at the moment, you think this is just about going to work and back, but one day you will realise you can pass through at will.

  I wonder if there are other portals in all the other countries across the world – perhaps each country, each culture has its own equivalent? Surely it is arrogant to think it only happens here. Maybe not, though, maybe this is the only one in the whole of the known universe. Peterborough Railway Station: the only place you can cross over.

  The streams of people ebb, recede. The wide sliding doors to the exit leading onto Station Approach are permanently open and without a barrier of waiting bodies, the concourse and the cafe grow cold very quickly. By the Information desk, a young member of staff is clapping his hands together and laughing with the young woman sitting behind it – it has only taken a few hours for the staff’s solemnity to dissipate. A middle-aged man in a smart wool coat wearing very large glasses says to the young man, ‘Excuse me, where is the bar?’ The young man becomes suddenly serious in his desire to be of service and points to the fridge opposite the counter of the Pumpkin Cafe. The man walks over to it and stares at the small selection of lagers and wine in tiny bottles, as if bewildered by his lack of choice. As he stands making his selection, the older blonde woman I often see behind the counter, Stacey she’s called, turns and holds a plate aloft and calls out in a high-pitched, nasal voice, ‘Tuna panini!’ Repeated, it sounds like the cry of an exotic bird. Toonappaneenee!

  *

  I go out of the main entrance – on days like this, the dying light can be lovely. As the sun fades, Peterborough Station and its surrounding area become suffused with a glow. Since the clocks changed, 4 p.m. is a mere hour before dusk but after our blurry, ambiguous start, it has been a clear blue winter’s day. The air is lit up gold. The glow will fade soon, but for a few moments it is stretching and lighting up the brick wall of the multi-storey car park opposite the station. By the side of the Great Northern Hotel, the trees have black trunks and yellow leaves that make a pretty contrast with the deep blue paint on the Crescent Bridge and the way the sky, in the distance, is strung with a little low cloud, tinged with apricot. I can still be caught by this, all the more lovely because of its transience. It is almost possible to believe that the turn of the day into evening, then night, is nothing to be frightened of.

  To my right, the car park is emptying as commuters collect their cars, head home. To my left the road swoops round and the large Waitrose is brightly lit, men and women pushing metal trolleys in and out. Across from the station, the small brick building belonging to the British Transport Police looks like a little house in the middle of an industrial forest. I am missing PC Lockhart. He’s one of my favourites. I wonder when he will be back on duty, whether he was at the beginning or the end of his run of nights, and whether Inspector Barker will suggest he has time off.

  I hang around for a while, in the growing dusk, until the fading of the light gathers pace. Another afternoon is tumbling towards evening, down into another long night. I turn back into the station, cross the concourse and go through the barriers, back towards another stretch of time; aimless, formless, clothed only in dark.

  At the bottom of the stairwell that leads up to the covered walkway, just where I was sitting next to Dalmar this morning – I have been thinking about him a lot today – I see a man. The man has his back to me. He is wearing a heavy navy jacket, a donkey jacket, I think it’s called. Never as warm as they should be, those things.

  Slowly, he turns. He has a black woollen hat and a sea-green scarf that is pulled up round the lower half of his face. His watery eyes gaze at me and in a light, mocking tone, he says, ‘Oh dear, Lisa, did you think you were the only one?’ And then he carries on up the stairs, crosses the bridge and disappears from view.

  My name was Lisa.

  PART TWO

  4

  It is Friday morning, three days after the man in the donkey jacket died: 10.12, to be precise – living on a railway station has made me something of a pedant when it comes to timings.

  I’ve taken to loafing around by the concourse and the Pumpkin Cafe where there is a bit more to look at: people being dropped off, people being met – people doing nothing much, there’s always plenty of those. A railway station’s entrance hall isn’t just a place where people wait for transport; it’s where they wait for life. And to tell the truth, since the man in the donkey jacket, I don’t know, I’m getting a bit phobic about the platforms.

  The bulk of the rush hour has been and gone: the cafe is empty but for an elderly couple sitting at the counter on the high stools watching the electronic display and a young man seated at one of the small round metal tables, near the floor-to-ceiling windows that look out across Station Approach. Outside it is appropriately grey. A few raindrops fall against the glass and once they have fallen, stick and slide.

  The young man’s table has only one chair and he is sitting on it – I’m guessing that when it was busy, people moved the other chairs to nearby tables to sit together. There are four other empty tables but I know instinctively that the young man has chosen the table with the single chair so that if the cafe fills up again, nobody else will be able to sit down next to him. That’s the kind of thing I used to do, I think distinctly, with a rush of fellow feeling for him.

  I’ve been hanging around here for a while and yet I didn’t see him arrive; he seems to have appeared out of nowhere. By the time I notice him, he is sitting down, full and real. He has a Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of him and is stirring the contents absently with one of those little plastic sticks, performing the motion for much longer than is actually necessary to blend two liquids. He is staring straight ahead and moving the stick as if he finds the circular motion comforting, or as if he has forgotten he is doing it. Time turns.

  At first, I assume he is a commuter getting a mid-morning train – a late start because he’s working in the evening, perhaps, or a special meeting called elsewhere. It’s the suit he is wearing: it just calls out office boy. I observe his stirring motion for a while. He lifts the little plasti
c stick from the coffee, gives it a neat, silent tap on the rim of the cup and lays it on the paper napkin on the table. This young man isn’t going anywhere, I think. When you’re waiting to get on a train, or for someone else to arrive on one – I am, after all, the world’s expert on people who are waiting for trains – you look at the board constantly. But not once, during the whole time I have been observing him, has this young man glanced at either the electronic display or the barriers.

  I watch him as he doesn’t watch what is going on around him and think, this quality of his, of waiting for nothing, I know how that feels. I glide over, to take a closer look.

  Nearer, I see that his suit has a slightly shiny quality and I wonder if this is because it is cheap or expensive. I assume the former, as it is also ill-fitting, loose at the hips, the jacket fulsome – either that or he’s lost a lot of weight recently. He looks like he is average height, fair hair cut quite short, well, a mix of fair and brown, dark eyes, nose with a bump in it, quite large but not in an ugly way. Something hawklike in his features, perhaps, or maybe that’s the impression I have because he is so still. In many ways he’s rather nondescript – if you hurried by him in the street you would scarcely notice him – but as he is stationary and I have the luxury of being invisible, his appearance rewards more detailed analysis. And let’s face it, I don’t have much else to do. After a moment or two, I work it out: it’s the fair hair and dark eyes, or rather, it’s the combination. It works in the same way that black hair and blue eyes work, that arresting moment when you have to pause and look for longer than is polite in order to work out what is unusual. The fair streaks in his hair are very light, although not blond, and his eyes are quite small and very dark brown, almost black. They are the kind of eyes that always look as though they are gazing at the middle distance.