This was an entirely inappropriate thought for an experienced secondary school teacher to be having, particularly in September. The following July was an awfully long way away, after all. I was just noting my own wrongness to myself when all at once, as if to confirm it, I was flying sideways, as swiftly as if a hand had reached out from the grass verge as I strode down Thorpe Road and grabbed me by the ankle and yanked my feet from under me. Some thin layer of mulch, that was all it was, some slime made of the leaves that had fallen recently, flattened to invisibility by the many feet that had walked along the path that autumn day. I landed soundly on one side, my right arm, shoulder and hip sharing the impact. It was the left ankle that landed most heavily, though, on the inside, slamming down and bouncing off a raised piece of pavement with such force that the pain caused a moment of blackness in my head, followed immediately by a wave of nausea.
Two passers-by, a middle-aged man and woman, rushed over and helped me up, one at each elbow, talking over each other and saying, ‘Are you alright?’ and ‘That was a right tumble, that was.’
‘Yes, yes, of course, I’m fine, thank you, really I’m fine …’ My primary concern in that moment was the humiliation.
My bag had remained closed and intact, which was lucky as it was bulging with a vocabulary test I had to mark for the next day – it’s part of what we do to children these days, test them at the beginning of the year to make the ones who are having a hard time feel really rubbish about themselves right from the start. Sometimes, as I walked home, I clutched folders of students’ work in my arms, to save overloading my bag – if I’d been doing that, the spelling attempts of 9R would have been on their way to Longthorpe wrapped round the wheels of a passing articulated lorry.
I limped home. I felt sorry for myself. I put my foot up on the sofa with a bag of frozen sweetcorn wrapped in a tea towel as I ate dinner in front of the television. I felt a bit sick again. I went to bed early.
The next morning, I pushed back the duvet and sat up and stared at my ankle. There were combinations of green and purple on my foot that I had never seen before and it was twice its natural size.
I rang Adrian, my Head of Department. ‘Sounds like it’s broken,’ he said, glumly. ‘Have you tried putting any weight on it?’
‘I had to hop to the bathroom,’ I said.
‘Oh God,’ he sighed. ‘If you’re going to be on crutches I’ll to have to look into moving your classroom.’ He wasn’t an unsympathetic man, he was actually a very good Head of Department, but we were only two weeks into the new school year. My timing couldn’t have been worse. ‘Get it checked out and call me back as soon as you can.’
I got a minicab to the City Care Centre – £6.50 for a journey I could have walked in less than ten minutes if I could have walked at all. I felt mightily sorry for myself sitting in the waiting room of the Minor Injuries Unit. I was even sorrier when an X-ray revealed the ankle wasn’t broken, just sprained and ‘very badly bruised’ and I wasn’t going to have a cast to show for it. They told me to go home and rest for a few days with the ankle in the air.
Outside, in the warm September light that held a hint of orange, I waited for the same minicab firm to send another car to take me home. I should have been thinking about the reading and marking I would be able to get done but instead I was thinking about how unimpressive the bandage looked. I could have squeezed my trainer over it if I’d pulled the laces out, but had hopped out to the entrance holding the trainer in my hand because I wanted passers-by to see I was actually injured. A kind of delayed exhaustion had set in and I felt upset I had not got a badge of some kind for all this. I couldn’t work out whether I felt still nauseous or just a bit lonely – it’s easy to confuse the two sometimes. A ‘few days’ rest’ was going to cause Adrian all sorts of problems – the last Supply they got in to replace me, when I was on INSET in the summer term, left my classroom in tears. The girls did the humming thing on her – one of them starts to hum, very soft and low, and the others join in one by one. The teacher goes crazy trying to work out who to tell off. That Suranne was going to take any substitute to pieces in five minutes.
When I get home I’ll call Mum, I thought. She’ll panic a bit, and want to come over with soup, and then I can get irritated and insist I don’t need any help. There are times when what you need in order to feel better is for your mum to annoy you with a bit of fussing.
I stood waiting outside the door, leaning awkwardly against the rough breezeblock wall and thinking that my toes were cold-looking and ugly where they protruded from the bandage – I hadn’t even put my sock back on. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man pass me, going into the building. I had a vague impression of height, a slender body beneath a dark grey coat, black hair with a single streak of silver, pale features. As he passed, I noticed that he gave me a look. I clocked a grey-eyed gaze, directness in his stare. I looked back, then looked away.
‘Hello,’ he said.
I’m not sure what you would call the motionless equivalent of a double take – a no-take, an internal take – whatever you’d call it, I took it. He had been passing, going into the building, but then he was standing in front of me. I had noticed him from the corner of my eye but then he had presented himself in front of me.
My damaged ankle gave me courage. It legitimised me.
‘Hello,’ I said back. ‘You look familiar.’ This wasn’t true and we both knew it.
He gestured down towards the ankle with his chin.
‘Bruised?’
I glanced down. ‘Badly bruised. I was sure it was broken.’
‘You’ve been to X-ray?’ He was looking down at the ankle with a gaze of professional assessment.
‘You’re a doctor?’
‘Yes.’ He bent down and, without asking my permission, lifted the edge of my grey jogging pants to look at the bandaged ankle. ‘You won’t be running any marathons for a while.’
My response was lame. ‘I’ll need a lot of help.’
He stood upright and looked at me. ‘Have you got help at home?’ He was gazing right at me as he asked this – yes, grey eyes with a greenish tinge.
I responded in a tone of voice that suggested I was shy. ‘No, I live alone.’ God, Lisa, you’re shameless, I thought.
As I was handing over this important piece of information, my minicab slewed to a halt behind him, the driver at the wheel the same one who had brought me to the City Care Centre two and a half hours earlier.
‘Matthew,’ the young man said. ‘People call me Matty. He’s not supposed to pull in there, we’d better get you in. Give me your phone number.’ None of this was a question.
A security guard stepped forward from the centre’s entrance and said to the driver, ‘You can’t pull in there, I’ve told you, ambulances only.’
The driver had wound down the window. He and the security guard clearly had previous. ‘I transport injured people too, you know, mate. All you do is stand there all day long.’
‘Shift your arse,’ the security guard replied.
The driver wound up his window, glared in my direction, then stabbed the air viciously with his finger towards a pick-up point some fifty metres away, before gunning his engine and taking off.
‘I’ll help you,’ said Matthew/Matty, and took my elbow.
As he did, I felt a soft brush against my injured ankle. I looked down and saw a black-and-white cat that had chosen that particular moment to perform a figure of eight around my feet: a hospital cat, possibly, or one from the new housing development opposite. It looked too well fed to be a stray: maybe it was a ghost cat, an unreal cat, the cat that shows up in fairy tales with a message or a warning and then disappears into thin air.
I bent to stroke the cat – it lifted its body to push the top of its head against the palm of my hand, its front paws rising from the pavement. The young man with the single streak of silver in his dark hair still had hold of my elbow. He was standing quite close to me. I felt my hair tumble forward and
I knew that he was looking at my hair tumbling forward and paused for a moment to acknowledge to myself the pleasure of being looked at. In my head, I watched myself being watched.
I did that a lot – perhaps all women do. We know we are being watched by others all the time and so we learn to watch ourselves through the eyes of others. We watch ourselves in mirrors, in the windows of buses and trains; we glance at ourselves in shop fronts as we walk along a street. We are rarely unaware of what we look like. Sometimes – often, in fact – during my twenty-something sex with boyfriends, all I needed to do to become aroused by an inexperienced touch was to look at his hand on my naked breast, or to close my eyes and imagine myself through his eyes. It was always the picture I created in my head of my own body that turned me on.
I bent to stroke a cat, and I knew that this man who was clutching my elbow was watching my hair tumble forward over my head as I bent down, and imagining him looking down at my head turned me on.
‘You know when they do that, they aren’t showing affection …’ he said. His voice was low.
The cat pushed the top of its head insistently against the palm of my hand. Beneath the soft sheen of its fur, I could feel the bone of its skull. It opened its mouth in a pink triangle and let out a single note of disagreement.
His tone was that of someone giving a light but knowledgeable warning. ‘They are leaving their scent on you to let other cats know they’ve been there, that you’re their territory.’
I straightened, looked at him. His hand still had a firm grip on my elbow, his face close to mine.
‘It isn’t love,’ he said, ‘it’s possession.’
*
If I could reverse that moment, not have looked back at him outside the City Care Centre that day, or not bent to stroke the cat; if the minicab driver had been a few minutes earlier, or later; if the ankle had been broken and I had been delayed in the Minor Injuries Unit while they applied a cast; if my Head of Department had not asked me to get it checked out as soon as possible; if I had not stepped on that slimy bit of pavement as I made my way home from work on a damp autumn afternoon … If any one of those small events had not happened and the non-happening of one of them had broken the chain that led to me standing there on that particular Thursday when Matthew walked past, then I would be alive now.
I had it all in front of me. Who knows how many men I would have slept with, loved. Perhaps Caleb and I would have bumped into each other in real life, been a thing – maybe that’s why he is so attractive to me, that would explain it: maybe he was the man I was to meet? Perhaps I would have had a child with him: a little girl with fair hair in a fringe, and I would have trimmed it at home with sharp narrow scissors, whispering to her, ‘Close your eyes,’ and she would have kept her eyes tight shut after I had finished so that I could bend towards her and blow on her face, gently, to breathe away the tiny fine hairs.
*
Instead, I was killed on Peterborough Railway Station and now I’m trapped here. The people who work here, Dalmar, Tom, PC Lockhart and Inspector Barker, Stacey and Milada and Melissa, and all the people who pass through like Caleb, none of them will ever know me, not as anything more than an anecdote they have heard, that woman who died – or as a cool wind whisking past their ears, the kind of unexpected breeze that whooshes past unexpectedly and makes you turn your head and look at the emptiness around you, a little surprised, because you could have sworn that just then, someone whispered something. But when you turn there is nothing, no one, just the cold air.
6
Girl meets boy; she falls for him; only one problem: girl is dead.
All weekend, I hover around, waiting for Monday, thinking about Caleb and trying to work out what is wrong with him – thinking about what sort of person he would be when he was happy. I caught a glimpse of it in that phone call, his ability to joke around, his concern for others. Perhaps I’m over-interpreting – after all, I have very little information to go on – but he strikes me as someone who is fundamentally … nice. What a meagre compliment that sounds – until, that is, you have intimate experience of not-nice.
The demographic of the station changes on Saturdays: more children during the day, more revellers in the evenings. In the morning, there are the visitors who arrive from the Midland and East Anglian towns around Peterborough to go to Queensgate Shopping Centre, which is quite big and exciting if you live in a small town. Flowing the other way through the station are the Peterborough residents going down to London because Queensgate Shopping Centre is so small and boring. It’s all about perspective.
Somehow, I have to work out how Caleb and I can cross the gulf between us, how we can communicate. I know that I am trapped on Peterborough Railway Station for a reason, and he is drawn here but unable to enter for a reason. I can see him and hear him but he can’t see or hear me, doesn’t even know I exist. It’s fair enough to say it’s up to me to make the first move.
*
If only I could follow his story, but as soon as I try to go beyond Station Approach it is as though I meet a transparent barrier. I don’t understand why this should be so – I’m a spirit, shouldn’t I be able to go wherever I want? I can go across to the BTP office building, the small brick house that used to be the stationmaster’s house in the Victorian era, and even enter it, hang around watching the cops eating ginger nuts. I could sit cross-legged on Inspector Barker’s desk all day if I wanted. But I can’t pass the beggar who sits on the other side of the road and I can’t access the bridge that leads to the shopping centre or go down into the underpass. To the left of the station, my world is even more proscribed – I can’t go into the Great Northern Hotel or get anywhere near Waitrose. Funny how alluring a supermarket seems when you haven’t been going into one for ages. A bag of carrots strikes me as quite fascinating – I’d really like to see one again. I’m guessing they’re still orange.
On the other side of the station, beyond Platform Seven, my boundaried world includes the freight depot and sidings. This is the part the general public never sees: the slip road off Thorpe Road that takes a sharp plunge down, the iron gate, the pale grey looming sheds, the disused ones from the Victorian era with the old iron tracks still embedded in the earth, and the Portakabins where drivers take their breaks, wrapping their hands round mugs of tea just like the cops in the BTP offices and the Customer Services staff in the DTL office on Platform One and workers everywhere all over the world. It’s a largely male world, still, a world of men in toe-capped boots and hi-vis vests and hard hats, a world I never saw as a young woman and one I might have found a bit intimidating, but my spirit state belies my gender. I’m a match for any of those men now. It’s a pleasing thought.
I have tested the limits of all this. There is an actual border. I am so restless, so bored, that I have taken to doing the occasional patrol, once every few days, like a lonesome cow in a field wandering round and round alongside but never touching the electric fence.
I have also taken it for granted that despite my ability to free-float around Peterborough Station, it just isn’t possible for me to get on the 12.18 to Whittlesea or the 16.46 to Welwyn Garden City. I have never actually attempted to board a train out of here. Somehow, that one seems unthinkably transgressive – it doesn’t follow the rules of what I know I can do. And so I end up back where I started, on the station concourse, watching people coming and going, staring over the road. It is another sunny winter’s day. Crescent Bridge is lit up blue. At the Great Northern Hotel, right opposite the station entrance, the pumpkins have been removed from the steps and the orange gauze unwound from the iron railings. It is only November but just visible through the window of the bar there is a plastic Father Christmas, life-size, that stands next to a plastic tree, tucked into the corner beneath the widescreen television that shows football matches. Father Christmas is grinning, plump-cheeked, and wearing round, steel-framed glasses. He is holding out a plastic present. Some of the habits and rituals of the living seem pretty strange to
me now.
*
My class and I had a discussion about Purgatory once, whether it was a kind of holding pen for people who weren’t good enough to go to Heaven but not bad enough to go to Hell, or whether it was just where you got stuck if you weren’t ready to leave the earth yet, if you had unresolved business amongst the living. I tried to talk to them about medieval ideas of punishment and redemption, how a certain amount of prayer from loved ones left behind could spring you. The discussion got quite animated at one point but when I brought up Dante they got bored and Anna at the back put her forehead on her desk and let both arms drop either side, which was Zohra’s cue to poke her upper arm with a pencil and Anna’s to snarl, ‘Fuck off, that hurt. Miss, that hurt.’
Then I said, ‘Who has read or seen The Tempest?’ and they all groaned. I turned and wrote on the whiteboard, Hell is empty, and all the devils are here. It was one of the few times I managed to get a collective smile out of them. Even Suranne, even Ludmilla smiled.
*
It’s going to be an awfully long weekend. I head over to the BTP offices and, as I do, Inspector Barker pulls into one of the two parking spaces at the front in an unmarked car. There’s a ukulele case on the passenger seat. I’m guessing he’s on his way to his rehearsal and is popping into the office to pick something up.
I’ve heard him and Tom talk about ukuleles, or ukes as they call them. They rehearse with a band every Saturday afternoon, although they add on a couple of evenings during the week leading up to the Beer Festival in July and the Christmas concert. I know that they both started off on Vintage Sopranos, which is what most of the band use, but Inspector Barker has recently splashed out on an Uluru Concert. He’s talked about it quite a lot but hasn’t shown it to Tom or anyone else in the band as yet. He knows that when he does, they will want a go on it – a moment that has to come, but for a little while he wants it to be his and his alone. They’ve all been asking, though, and today is the day he has promised to bring it to rehearsal. He’s bringing in his mahogany Luna Pearl too, just in case his nerve fails him when it comes to taking the Uluru into the pub.
Platform Seven Page 6
