Platform Seven

by Louise Doughty

  Dalmar doesn’t want kindness. He just wants to sit on the stairs. In his effort to not-think about the man, he has been thinking about something else that he wants to not-think about: the boat journey, the heave of the sea, the inarticulate sound the woman made. As the boat drifted away, her cries could still be heard, her head a receding circle, eventually just a dot, then gone. But Dalmar thought he could still hear the cries all the way across the sea, above the slapping sound the water made against the boat’s flimsy hull, even when the big ship pulled up alongside and they were hauled onto it. Even as they sailed on, in the big ship, the immense churn of engines shuddering the deck beneath his feet and the woman long out of sight. People cry for life, every inch of their being yearns for it. It is the human condition, to be desperate for it, to cling to it with both hands even as it slips between your fingers.

  A white woman in a suit with a mac on top mounts the stairs, looking down at Dalmar as she passes, giving him the smallest glance, as if she is wondering – fleetingly – what a security guard is doing sitting there, when presumably he has work to do. For twelve years Dalmar has done his best to be invisible in this country but in that moment he doesn’t care how many passengers see him sitting down on a step or how many look right through him, which is what they usually do. He is thinking of the senselessness, the waste, of all the people he has known over the years who would have done anything to stay alive; the woman, her cries, even when the dot of her head was lost from sight against the rise and fall of the waves. Why would anyone give life up voluntarily? The sin of it. The waste.

  Dalmar’s broad shoulders give a great heave. He is dry crying. The tears in him were used up many years ago, but the sadness he feels inside still lifts his chest and drops it, tightens his throat. He closes his eyes and lifts one hand and pinches at the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger, in order to stem the tears that would flow if they could. He is glad he left the office before this happened. The waste.

  *

  I sit next to Dalmar on the step and if I could cry I would be crying too but for Dalmar, not the man. I cannot summon pity for the man, desperate and bleak as his situation must have been, I’m too upset for Dalmar – the other staff as well, of course, but there is something about Dalmar that fills me with a yearning, a desire to make him safe, in the knowledge that he will make me safe in return: this large, soft man, who seems to be so hard on himself for reasons that I don’t understand.

  And so we sit next to each other, waiting for the inevitable dawn: a ghost that nobody can see and a security guard that hardly anyone notices.

  3

  I leave Dalmar on the steps and go through the barriers, across the station concourse and outside. The arc of night is lightening, from indigo with strands of cloud to pale, smudgy grey, the strata losing definition as cloud blends with sky. The streetlights that appear so orange when the sky is deepest blue are fading too, losing clarity. Nighttime is defined; dawn is blurry. Why is it that we talk of dawn breaking and dusk gathering? Dawn gathers just as much, or so it seems that morning: the day is gathering itself, unwilling and opaque.

  Outside the station, three taxis sit in a row, their engines running to keep the drivers warm. By the roundabout beyond the taxi rank, cars queue to get into the commuters’ car park. Behind me, the train announcements drone, repeat. Twenty or so passengers wait on the small concourse, their faces lifted to the electronic display boards. A group of four schoolboys in maroon blazers chatter as they exit the station on the way to school and something about the sight of them tugs at my memory in the same way as the mother and child: in the next moment, it’s gone. The day gathers pace as the sky lightens until it reaches the point, some time around 8 a.m., where everyone has to accept that yes, indeed, they may not like the idea all that much but it’s time to accept it: they’re awake.

  The insult of that ordinary dawn – no one knows a man has died here. They will find out later, from social media or Look East or the Peterborough Telegraph, ‘Trusted News Since 1948’. But for now the business of the morning turns as it has always turned.

  I am learning what it must have been like after me.

  *

  Melissa arrives just before 8 a.m. She’s early, she will have been called at home, I’m guessing. They wouldn’t have phoned her at 4 a.m., there would have been no point, but they probably rang as soon as they thought she might be up. Melissa is the Station Manager, the head honcho, you might say. She’s the sort of young woman men of a certain generation would refer to as a slip of a girl, although she is in her mid-thirties. She’s been working the Network since she was eighteen – I heard her say this to Tom one day, she started in Customer Services, just like him (although what she didn’t say to Tom was that she was a high flyer from the start, would have gone to university if it wasn’t for her dad’s Parkinson’s). She’s tiny, smart, authoritative. The middle-aged men on the station, some a foot taller than her, some twice her weight, would do anything for her.

  Her heels click-click as she strides into the station in a navy wool coat, fair hair in a neat ponytail, a thick scarf wrapped around her neck. She nods to the two staff behind the Information counter; word has got round, of course, and everyone is serious this morning, rather than the usual jokes and smiles. She turns left on Platform One, smartly, towards her office, which is tucked away behind the West Cornwall Pasty Company.

  Inside, Melissa unwinds her scarf – a lengthy process as it is very long and wrapped around her several times, like a python. Her mum knitted it for her last Christmas and has promised her matching wrist-warmers this year. She hangs up her coat, then puts on her red VTEC jacket. She will go and talk to the staff first of all, make sure everyone is okay, then go to Platform Seven and take a look around. The main purpose of this is to check there is no sign of what has occurred overnight but it is also a kind of homage on her part, an acknowledgement. The least she can do for her staff is to stand there for a few minutes and imagine what it was like for them.

  Last time this happened the parents arrived three days later, their faces bloated with misery, clutching a small bouquet of pink and white roses, neat and tasteful, that they wanted to lay at the end of the platform. They were accompanied by their police Family Liaison Officer, an inexperienced woman PC who hadn’t done a rail death before. Melissa had to take the three of them into her small office where there wasn’t even room for them all to sit down. They managed to squeeze in one extra chair so the mum and dad could both sit, then Melissa perched on the edge of her desk while the FLO leaned against the door. The FLO did the talking while the parents nodded in agreement. They all understood there were issues, the FLO said. They didn’t want to be ostentatious – no sprawling wreath, no fluffy toys or notes – they just wanted to pay their respects to the spot where their daughter had died.

  Melissa waited until the FLO had finished and then said quietly and calmly that she was very sorry but it was out of the question. Any kind of tribute, even laying flowers on the platform, was impossible, because of the risk of copycat incidents. ‘Even the press have to be careful, in the way they report,’ she said. ‘We’re always on to them to be sensitive. And TV programmes too, dramas and so on. There’s guidelines. I’m terribly sorry.’ She did not add that she was furious with the FLO for not contacting her about it first, for misleading the mum and dad about what might be possible.

  It was a painful conversation. The parents made it worse by understanding, nodding slowly, the agony etched on their motionless faces. ‘Of course …’ said the dad in a hoarse whisper, then cleared his throat and spoke more clearly. ‘Of course. Yes. We understand.’ The FLO stared balefully at Melissa over their heads.

  And afterwards, as if it wasn’t terrible enough for them already, the couple had to leave the station still clutching the bouquet. After they had gone, Melissa couldn’t stop thinking about what they would do with it when they got home, whether they would put the flowers in a vase or throw them in the bin. She worried for
a long time that she should have come up with a compromise – leaving them on the Information desk, perhaps, somewhere where it would be okay, normal, to have flowers.

  I had a mum and a dad. They came to the station.

  Melissa smooths her hair, lifts her ponytail free of her jacket, sighs, braces herself to go out into the cold. That one was unusual, a young woman, same age as herself. She’s really hoping this man fits a more average demographic. It’s sad but the older men, well, they often don’t have anybody. Often, nobody comes.

  Nearly two decades in the business, despite her tender years, and Melissa has seen it all. There was the staff member who went onto the tracks at Biggleswade just after being dismissed for drunkenness, the man who leapt off the bridge at Newark and grabbed the overhead wire – he survived, despite suffering what were euphemistically referred to as life-changing injuries. A week after that, Melissa exited her office here in Peterborough just in time to see a hen party of six young women stagger onto Platform One for a London train, two of them clutching bunches of pink helium balloons with very long strings. ‘Pull those balloons down now!’ she shouted at them, so loudly that the other customers and staff on the platform turned to look. She strode up to the women and addressed the bride-to-be, who was wearing a pink satin cocktail dress, a white veil and purple Dr Martens. ‘What do you think those things are made of?’ Melissa snapped at her. ‘Aluminium! It’s metal! Metal conducts electricity!’

  As she turned away, she heard the young women titter, then one of them say, loudly, ‘Fucking fun police out in force today, girls.’ The voice was daring Melissa to turn and remonstrate. The young women all laughed false, horsey sort of laughs and Melissa went into her office and closed the door behind her. She sat at her desk and put her head in her hands, thinking of the moment the young man had leapt from the bridge at Newark, right in front of her, his mouth wide open as his hand reached out for the over-head wire. The flash; the shock on the faces of the people waiting on the platform below; the way an elderly woman had said to her, as the ambulance pulled away outside the station, ‘That young man will be alright, won’t he? Why didn’t you stop him?’

  Paramedics, police officers, firefighters – well, they might deal with emergencies more often but rail staff do it too and then half an hour later they have to explain to a First Class passenger just how sorry they are that their menu choice on the meal service is unavailable. Sometimes Melissa wishes she had just gone on that course to be airline cabin crew. At least passengers on aeroplanes understood the relationship between their chosen mode of travel and sudden death.

  Melissa is about to leave her office – she’s actually reaching for the door handle – when the phone on her desk rings. Against her better judgement, she picks it up and is immediately sorry she did.

  ‘Melissa! I’m so lucky to have caught you …’

  It is Simon. Simon works on a local news website, he’s the son of a city councillor and likes having access to information before the Peterborough Telegraph – and he was Melissa’s boyfriend for eight months in sixth form. Ever since, he has behaved like they are old friends and no matter how hard she tries to communicate she can’t stand him without actually saying it, she has never quite managed to shake him off.

  ‘Simon, I’ve got a lot on this morning …’

  ‘I know, so I hear, don’t hang up. I’m thinking of going with: Second death in two years on Platform Seven. Is it time for railway chiefs to act? What do you reckon? Eighteen months is more accurate but two years scans better.’

  ‘Am I a railway chief?’ Melissa asks.

  ‘If the cap fits, baby.’

  ‘Simon, go through the proper channels.’ Melissa hangs up.

  What would ‘action’ look like? They do everything they can. They have CCTV, barriers. People used to throw themselves off Crescent Bridge until they put the metal plates up either end but there’s nothing you can do to stop someone who is determined, everybody knows that. The Network is wide open. If you secured the stations and put guards on every platform, people would just walk out into the open countryside, they do already. Melissa tries, and fails, not to feel antagonistic towards the man who did it last night. She knows that other professionals, agencies, other people, would be thinking of the sadness and pain that led the man to do something so terrible, but it’s her job to think of the sadness and pain of her staff and all the others she knows who have to clear up what is left behind.

  Second death in two years. Platform Seven has been unusually unlucky, it’s true, but the clear implication of such a headline is that it’s going to become an annual event. That’s hardly fair. Simon’s website – she can’t even remember the name of it – is supported by local businesses and by getting enough hits to take advertising, and she knows their stories show up on the news feeds occasionally. All the same, it’s unlikely there is any link between the two deaths and two in eighteen months is hardly a statistically significant sample.

  *

  She’s right about there being no link between the two deaths, of course, something I can say for certain, as the first death was mine and I don’t think I’ve seen that man before – at least, nothing tugs at me like when I saw the mother and her child or the schoolboys in their maroon jackets.

  And yet, as I observe Melissa, listen to the click of her heels on Platform One, watch her as she disappears into the DTL office, I feel uneasy and wonder if the man and I are linked by some event or relationship I don’t remember. Why else should his actions be having such an impact on me? Is it just that they are triggering me into something I would rather not think about: my death? I only learned just now, through Melissa’s memory, that my parents sat very still in her office while she explained, gently and tactfully, why they couldn’t leave flowers on the platform. I caught a glimpse of them through her eyes. I would love to remember my parents for myself: they looked like nice people, my mum and dad.

  *

  Melissa goes to the DTL office but the night staff have already left. She’ll call them at home at the end of the afternoon – she won’t do it now in case they are sleeping. She’ll get a proper debrief soon. She climbs the stairs to walk over to Platform Seven and take a look around. Halfway across the bridge, a member of the public, a grey-haired man in a suit, stops her and says, ‘Do you know how slow that lift is? Someone could miss their train waiting for that lift! Can’t you have a word with your boss, get him to do something about it?’

  She replies, ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir, we’re looking into it. We’re hoping to deal with it shortly.’ Having got his irritation off his chest, the man strides on. He is able-bodied and doesn’t even have a suitcase with him. On balance, she feels it unlikely he really needed to use the lift and that his anger was more at his own laziness than the mechanics of elevation at Peterborough Railway Station.

  As Melissa descends the stairs to Platform Seven, she finds her pace is slowing. It’s not as if there will be anything left to see: it’s that she feels reluctant to confront her own imagination. She’s seen enough over the years for her imagination to be able to conjure quite detailed pictures in her head.

  At the end of Platform Seven, PC Akash Lockhart is standing looking down at the tracks. Melissa approaches him. She likes Lockhart; he’s quite good-looking, in a tall skinny kind of way, bit earnest. She’s heard the other cops taking the mickey out of him because he’s doing an online MA in Crime Detection and Police Leadership over at Leicester. She didn’t know you could do postgraduate degrees in different aspects of Being a Cop but apparently you can.

  As she approaches, he nods to her and she nods back. They are close to the bottom of the access ramp, away from most of the members of the public waiting for the 08.24 to Liverpool Lime Street. They stand for a minute or two, looking down. There is a small, respectful silence between them.

  ‘Were you on last night?’ Melissa asks, after a while.

  At that point, there comes the loud, slow screech of a freight train, behind them on
Platform Six, and Lockhart doesn’t answer for a while. It takes a long time for the freight train to pass through and the air to quieten, then he says, ‘Yeah, I was.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be off by now?’ she replies. They are still standing side by side, still staring down, as if the space between the tracks, the four-foot, might contain answers.

  ‘Yeah, probably,’ he replies.

  They stand next to each other a while longer, then Lockhart says, ‘You know that woman that died here, last year?’

  God, not you as well, Melissa thinks.

  ‘Bit before my time but did anyone ever … well, look into it, you know, look into her background a bit, who she was?’

  ‘Of course,’ Melissa said. Is he serious? Of course it was looked into. There was an inquest. What does he mean?

  ‘I mean it’s just, she wasn’t the usual type, was she?’ Lockhart says. His MA has reached the module on Victimology. ‘It’s usually pills with young women, and often less of an impulse thing. Seems a bit of an odd way to go, for someone of her demographic.’

  ‘She had a history of mental health problems, there’d been previous contact with Cambridgeshire Constabulary, and there was a note.’ She’s not quite sure what more PC Lockhart wants.

  He doesn’t seem too sure himself. He removes his hat, scratches the back of his head, replaces it. He wriggles his shoulders a bit, as if his stab-proof vest is itchy. Maybe he’s just very tired. ‘Yeah, I guess,’ he says. ‘That’s all I’m saying, though: it wasn’t very usual, that’s all.’