Platform Seven

by Louise Doughty

  I wonder what he’s called. Caleb, I decide. I don’t know why, something so old-fashioned that it’s really current seems to suit him; something Biblical, with a consonant at the end. As I gaze at him, I name him, as if he is mine to name.

  The cup of coffee cools in front of him – he continues to stare straight ahead – then all at once it is as if his gaze comes into focus and he sees the other people hurrying through the entrance hall. He sits up a little straighter, as though he has made a decision.

  He puts his left hand into his jacket pocket and extracts a phone. He presses a few buttons and holds it up to his ear, pursing his lips while he waits for an answer, then says into the phone, ‘Hi, it’s me, did you get my email?’ He speaks quite softly. I have to go up close to hear.

  After a short pause, he gives a melodramatic sniff.

  ‘Yeah, right stinker, yeah …’ He makes a small huffing sound to indicate amusement, less than a laugh. ‘Yeah … yeah … thought so, better than giving it to the whole building, right.’

  Oh, I think, he’s lying. That’s interesting.

  ‘Yeah, just come out to get some more paracetamol … No, no, hate those things … Look, just occurred to me, I should’ve said, Jonathan is going to need the assessment criteria … Yes … yes … that’s what I thought. I can email it when I get back home but if the meeting starts at half past does he need it before then?’

  He listens to the reply for a while.

  ‘Okay, that’s great, brilliant … Yeah, straight back to bed. Orange juice and paracetamol … Dunno … not sure … not at the mo, it’s feeling pretty … I can do the update from home, could do that on Monday if I’m still not up to coming in, won’t take that long, will that be okay? Okay … Okay … Will you check with Anil for me?’

  He moves the phone slightly and I can hear a female voice coming from it, a little laugh, although I can’t make out the words.

  ‘Gregory, you’re kidding!’ he says, responding to the laugh with another huff of amusement. ‘Listen, let me know if it’s going to, you know, cause problems for Anil, will you? Because I just …’ Another pause. ‘No, not my dressing gown, I’m not that much of a weirdo. I put my parka on over my pyjamas.’

  More tinkling laughter, speech.

  ‘Yeah, straight back to bed. Promise. See you, yeah, bye … bye …’ He hangs up, slips the phone back in his pocket.

  He’s ended the phone call just in time. An announcement blares, the robotic woman’s voice, slightly off-kilter where the variable details are dropped into a pre-existing sequence of words: The TEN, EIGHTEEN to EDINBURGH is delayed by approximately SIX minutes. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. He was very nearly busted there.

  So, I think, our man is a liar: a bare-faced liar, in fact, bold or careless with it. He risked a phone call to the office claiming he was nipping to his local shops when the audible background of a train station concourse could have betrayed him at any moment. I presume he was intending to go to work when he arrived at the station this morning but for some reason changed his mind, bought himself a cup of coffee and has been sitting here thinking and staring – how long for? And he’s setting things up to be off on Monday as well, as if he already knows he won’t make it through the barriers then either. How very intriguing.

  Something is going on here. He doesn’t look like a man who has just ducked out of his working day because he’s a bit lazy. He wouldn’t have put the suit on when he got up and come all the way to the station this morning if he was like that. Something impeded him when he got here, some invisible force field preventing him from entering the station, similar to the one that is preventing me from leaving it. He arrived, got as far as the cafe and concourse, the no-man’s-land between the station and the rest of the world, then he baulked.

  Caleb bursts into tears.

  They are male tears, it goes without saying – and the bursting is very male too. It is only because I am looking right at him that I observe it happening – the man sitting on the table behind him probably thinks he has just sneezed. It happens as an exhalation, a huffing out of air, quite loud, and he drops his face into his hands as if they are a paper bag he can hide inside. I only know he is crying because his shoulders go up and down in tiny movements and I see a tear – an actual tear – flow down to his chin.

  What has produced this? It is so sudden and uncontrolled it can only be a sorrow he has been holding tight inside – such an exhalation has a pent-up force, like the bursting of a taut balloon. So, the attempt to go to work was genuine and he just couldn’t face it.

  Grown men crying: why is that so affecting? I think of Dalmar’s grief earlier in the week, how it filled me with a desire to comfort him – it is a desire you could mistake for love, if you weren’t careful, such is the yearning it creates, and I’m feeling something similar towards this young man. His shoulders stop moving almost straight away. He removes his hands and snatches up the paper napkin on the table – the plastic stirrer gives a tiny clatter as it lands – and he wipes at his face furiously, the whole of it, the nose, the suddenly reddened cheeks. He turns his gaze sideways, looking out through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the pavement where people loaf around waiting to be picked up or having a sneaky fag. The three men and the woman outside all have their backs to him, so he can gaze out without his expression being seen. I can see it though. This is a young man in deep trouble, so unhappy he is unable to go to work, and for all his fakery on the phone just now, he knows himself well enough to understand it might last into next week.

  He gives a small, inward groan then, so soft that only I can hear, but so deep it seems to come from the very inside of him, as though he sat down here because he can’t bear to be anywhere else and has just realised he can’t bear to be here either. He rises from the chair – its metal legs make a harsh scraping sound, a teeth-annoying screech – and he picks up the disposable cup and the napkin and the stirrer and takes them over to the bin by the cafe entrance. How touching: even in his sadness, his despair, he is polite enough to clear up after himself. He turns towards the station exit. My heart goes with him.

  I see you, I want to say. I understand. How rare is it, to feel such an affinity with someone straight away? It happens maybe once, twice if you’re lucky – twice in an entire life that you see someone and something clicks into place and you think: yes, yes, you. It’s all about timing, as I remember. Falling in love is musical bumps – when the music stops, you plump yourself down on whichever cushion is nearest as quickly as you can in the hope the landing won’t hurt. I can recall the heartbreak, from my twenties, the yearning for men my own age who just weren’t ready, and the pain when a few years or even a few months later, you hear they have plumped for someone else and you think, why her and why not me? She’s no better-looking or nicer than me. Well, that was the way I liked to think of it at the time: surely it’s not me that’s the problem, surely it was just that my timing was off. It happened to me a few times in a row, perhaps that explains …

  Caleb leaves through the automatic doors that are always automatically open. I watch as he turns right, passes the taxi rank and crosses the road by the mini roundabout. He keeps going past the BTP offices, past the young man who sits cross-legged begging on the far side of the road because he knows he is the other side of the boundary line between the BTP zone of responsibility and the area looked after by Cambridgeshire Constabulary and so it’s not up to the BTP to move him on. I wait to see if Caleb is going to go up the stairs to the bridge that leads to the shopping centre but instead he turns right and heads for the underpass. Maybe he’s going to walk over Crescent Bridge and along Thorpe Road; isn’t that where I—

  A taxi swings round the roundabout, heading towards me, obscuring my last glimpse of him.

  A small red cardboard box, of the sort they use for chicken nuggets at the really cheap places, cartwheels across the road in the taxi’s wake, making a tiny clatter as it bounces over itself from corner to corner.
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br />   A woman in an orange trouser suit, a really orange one, is strolling down the road towards the station and pauses to let the box tumble in front of her feet before smiling at it and strolling on. She is wearing a green T-shirt beneath the orange suit and walks with her feet splayed, confidently, the edges of her jacket flapping, her white hair in a swinging bob, a cigarette between her fingers, hanging down, half smoked and half forgotten, in a gesture that suggests she could take a puff from it any time she wanted and because of that, no longer feels the need.

  By the time the taxi and the woman have gone, Caleb has disappeared from view. A nearly-memory has disappeared along with him. What is left uppermost in my thoughts is his pain, and beneath that, another note, a feeling of my own that I can only describe as a kind of exhilaration. I know this feeling is darker, less empathetic. Caleb, don’t leave me here. Something has drawn you here to the station and you can’t go in but I can’t leave. We met at the barrier. Don’t you know how romantic love at a barricade can be? Don’t leave me. Don’t.

  *

  My Lisa of the lamplight, my only Marlene. He sang that to me on my birthday, in front of everyone, standing on the low table. My own face in the mirror, later that night, eye make-up smeared down my cheek and my gaze thick with self-knowledge – I think that was the moment I knew.

  *

  After he has gone, my thoughts dance. ‘Caleb …’ I say it to myself, practising doing it low and solemn, as I hover round the front of the station, wondering if there is any chance he will come back. ‘Caleb …’ I deepen my voice as much as I can.

  Suddenly, I am so happy. It is all coming back to me, human feeling – oh, that feeling, wanting someone, as pleasing and ambiguous as scratching an itch on a part of your body that is difficult to reach. The sweet pain, the painful sweetness: yearning for someone, missing them. I remember it all now, the piquancy of it. I turn back into the station and into the ticket office. I sneak up behind a woman who is at the end of the short queue in front of the middle window. ‘Caaaay …leb …’ I whisper into her ear and she frowns and moves her head – she heard something, just a flutter of a noise, as fleeting as a fly passing her ear but, weird, it sounded like a human voice. I twirl again. Success!

  Back out in the Pumpkin Cafe, I rest on the counter top while the two women behind it clear up a bit and chat. There are no customers waiting and only two people sitting at the tables. Post rush hour is the chance the staff get to wipe the machines and the surfaces before it gets busy again.

  They are wearing their name badges: one is Stacey, the Toonappaneenee Lady; the other is called Milada. I know Stacey quite well, an older blonde with grey roots and a habit of burning the toasties. Milada is young, new, I’ve only seen her a couple of times before. She has fine pale skin and very thin lips, so colourless they almost blend with the rest of her face. I’d love to talk to them about Caleb. Men are Stacey’s favourite topic of conversation – I’ve heard her many times. She’s doing it right now, in fact. She talks about men in the same amiable, unsurprised way that people talk about the weather – men are a kind of constant, a background note. They are useful objects for meaningless chatter when there is nothing else more important to talk about.

  ‘Now, he’s easy on the eye …’ she is saying to Milada. ‘Doesn’t smile much, not sure why. Mind you, there’s something about him, you’d want him if there was any bother, don’t you think? Like, the blokes round here who act tough but you know they aren’t tough at all when push comes to shove. He’s the opposite, I reckon, really quiet, like, but I reckon he could handle himself.’ She gives a small snort. ‘He could handle me any time.’ She lifts the lid of the sandwich toaster and frowns into it, as if she is expecting something to be in there – a toastie or panini that has served its time. It’s empty, though, and she puts the lid back down with a shake of her head. ‘I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crisps.’

  Milada is rubbing a cloth hard up and down the metal tube that protrudes from the coffee machine. She stops and looks at Stacey.

  Stacey gives a little laugh, a rather unkind laugh, I think. ‘It’s a phrase, Milada, it means, you know, you wouldn’t say no to sex with them just because they did something small like, you know, eating crisps in bed and getting crumbs everywhere.’

  Milada purses her thin lips, wobbles her head from side to side, eyebrows raised, resumes her task. ‘This is something English men do? Eat crisps in bed?’

  ‘And toast. They like to watch television too, same time as they’re eating. Never met a man who didn’t want a television in the bedroom.’

  ‘I miss Moravia,’ Milada says with a sigh. ‘The hills and the forests near my village. Sometimes. I don’t miss the snow.’

  ‘You miss the men,’ Stacey says, sympathetically. ‘Nice boys from your part of the world, I’ve always said that. Good with their hands, practical. Anyway he isn’t English, although he’s English now, I think.’ I guess Stacey is referring to Dalmar and I think about the yearning I felt for him. He’s bulky in a comforting kind of way, a bit of fat as well as muscle, polite and unthreatening, and a certain sort of reserve to him. She has a point.

  Dalmar never talks about his private life to the other staff members – he never talks to the women on the station at all. Even to Tom, who will chat for hours on a night shift about his wife’s mother and how much he hates her two whippets, Dalmar never says a thing about his own situation. I hope Dalmar has love in his life, somewhere.

  I wish I could talk to Stacey and Milada. I would love nothing better than to perch on the counter top and say to them, ‘Hey, did you see the young guy in the grey suit, the fair-haired one? Something about him, I reckon, something a bit wounded. You feel you could make things right for him, and he would be a completely different person.’ They would tease me about my Florence Nightingale complex and we would all have a bit of a laugh.

  Instead, I listen to Stacey’s voice rattling on, as, unable to communicate, I drift backwards away from them. Her voice is much louder than Milada’s. I hear how she pronounces her co-worker’s name, Mi-lar-da. It’s actually Mi-lada – I’ve heard Milada correcting Stacey twice before, to no effect, but this time she stops herself, turns her head and says, ‘Oh sorry, love, Mi-lada … I’ll try and remember.’

  Milada replies, ‘It is okay, it is quite nice to hear. Italians say Milarda too.’ She gives a small, secret smile as she says this and I am guessing she is thinking of one Italian in particular, rather than Italians in general, but she isn’t going to share this Italian with Stacey because he means something to her. He is not to be talked about like the weather.

  *

  On the concourse, there are three people, two women and a man, all staring upwards at the electronic display, all of them waiting for answers, but whether they are each waiting for their own answer or all there for the same one, it’s impossible to tell.

  5

  It breaks me, a little, that I can’t gossip about men with Stacey and Milada. Listening to them talk has made me remember how I felt – about men, I mean, how sweet and baffling they were, how it was fine as long as you remembered that some of them had a limited range of emotions. It was all about managing your own expectations, as I recall, not asking too much of them or expecting one of them to be everything.

  Caleb and Dalmar: I know I am yearning for them both in different ways. Caleb is the romantic object, the boy from school who had you walking two miles out of your way on your journey home because then you’d go past a park where you once saw him a month ago. He is the one that fills you with a feeling that can only be described as fixation. When you’re young, you don’t understand yourself well enough to recognise this as lust. You just know you ache to set eyes on him. My feelings for Dalmar are different – the yearning is kinder. I want to save him because I know that then he will save me back. With Caleb, I feel I’m up close but can’t make myself heard. When it comes to Dalmar, it’s as if I am seeing him from a distance and trying to run towards h
im but he’s walking away.

  Things are coming back to me in bits and pieces, pictures and emotions – images like the elderly woman sitting on the edge of her bed. Seeing Stacey and Milada chat together sparks something in me: Rosaria is lying on her back on a sofa and balancing a glass of wine on her stomach. She is holding the stem very loosely with one hand and the wine sways as she speaks. She’s gazing at the ceiling and has her other hand over her eyes and is saying, breathily, ‘Oh my chest, my chest …’ She might be crying but she’s laughing. Then she sits up quickly and says, ‘You didn’t actually say that to him? Say you didn’t,’ and as she rises, she forgets the glass of wine and it flips off her stomach and onto the rug and luckily it’s white wine but we both shriek and jump and then laugh as though dropping a glass of wine is the funniest thing a person can do and we crawl around the carpet on all fours, laughing and swearing, around and around each other, like cats.

  I had a friend called Rosaria? Really?

  I know it then. I was thirty-six when I died. My name was Lisa. I knew how to look back at men, that combination of reserve with a hint of interest. Then came Matty – and I looked back once too often.

  *

  Matty – the slap of the sudden. It happened on a wet path. Sometimes, just before you trip and fall, you can feel it about to happen and there is a moment to brace as you lose balance. In this case, there was none. One second, I was striding home after work, hurrying and hungry, my mind on the girl in my new Year Nine class who, I had just been informed, was dyslexic – Suranne, she was called. It was only the second week of the academic year. I was still adjusting to the new class, and they to me, but I had found Suranne rude and sullen from the off and was now struggling to adjust my dislike of her in the wake of what I had been told about her learning difficulties. This is the way it goes in teaching: they are difficult and you don’t like them, you find out there’s a good reason for them being difficult and then you struggle not only with their difficulties but with your own dislike. I was thinking how it was obvious that other, as yet undiagnosed, issues accompanied her dyslexia, but I was also thinking that explained only some of her rudeness and sullenness. It is, after all, perfectly possible to have learning difficulties and be a right little cow.