Platform Seven

by Louise Doughty

  Love has set me free.

  8

  My first act as a ghost newly released from imprisonment on Peterborough Railway Station is to become a stalker.

  Caleb walks down Priestgate, past the museum, past the amusement arcade that promises Rainbow Riches – win £500 here! On the opposite side of the road, a homeless man sits on the kerb, leaning forward with his arms on his knees and his head resting on his arms, as if he is asleep. The hood of his huge, dirty padded jacket is pulled up and over so that it covers his head entirely. He is completely still, but something about his posture strikes me as watchful. Caleb walks past him as if he isn’t there. I glance at him and wonder if he is one of us – I know I am not alone, after all.

  Caleb turns onto Bridge Street, passes the Town Hall with its imposing columns and walks past the shops, all closed for the night now. The few hardy souls also out and about are striding purposefully in the freezing cold. He passes TK Maxx and presses the button to cross Bourges Boulevard, picks up pace a bit as he walks past the Magistrates’ Court and turns down another double subway. I am recalling what it’s like to be a pedestrian in central Peterborough: wherever you are, you’re always on the wrong side of a dual carriageway. He skirts the Lido and walks more slowly now, loosely, as if he’s recovering and eager to be home. He goes down Bishop’s Road, past the long-stay car park and the children’s playground that is only accessible to the small inhabitants of the houses opposite by crossing a busy main road, then takes a left down Star Road. The name Star Road rings a bell with me for some reason – something that makes me feel uncomfortable – but I brush the feeling away and concentrate on Caleb. Just past the Panj Tani Store, he turns a couple more corners and ends up on a street that forms a long row of new builds, tiny little semis built to resemble the run-down Victorian workers’ houses of the neighbouring streets but with none of the residual charm. The houses are clean and smart, though, and unlike the older, crumbling houses nearby, none of them is boarded up.

  As he turns into this street, his posture relaxes and gait lightens, almost imperceptibly. Home: whatever that word means – even in our darkest moments, like the one Caleb has experienced this evening, it means something, a reflexive feeling of comfort; this is where my belongings are, the things I have gathered around me that reflect who I am. This is where I reside.

  So, this is where Caleb lives? I may not be able to read his thoughts but I am going to find out about him in other ways. Only now am I realising how lonely I have been, how desperate I am for a connection with somebody.

  The first thing I find out about Caleb is that his name isn’t Caleb.

  As he turns the corner into his street, a woman’s voice calls out, ‘Andrew!’ The voice is high-pitched, with a twanging, musical quality. ‘Andrew!’ That’s my first clue.

  The voice has come from the same junction but on the other side of the road. ‘Andrew!’ He turns to acknowledge it. That’s my second clue.

  He turns back immediately and keeps walking, lowering his head as if he is hoping the woman might think herself mistaken.

  ‘Andrew!’ He stops. His shoulders drop. He turns slowly. There’s no doubt about it. He definitely isn’t called Caleb.

  In the winter gloom, a young woman of around his age crosses the street, heading towards him on a diagonal. I see her properly as she passes beneath the parallelogram of light made by a high lamppost in the middle of the scrubby grass verge. She is average height but very thin, all angles, cheekbones high, sharp knees and elbows. Even though she is wearing trousers and a coat, I can tell she has the kind of body that my mother used to call a bag of spanners. Her skin is very pale, translucent almost, flawless, but stretched over the bones of her face: perhaps she has a serious illness of some sort, anorexia or maybe even cancer, or perhaps she’s always been like that, a young woman whose inner tensions have manifested themselves in the tautness of her skin. She has a high forehead and very fine brown hair pulled back in a long ponytail that swings as she walks. Her face looks so exposed and her expression so raw, it makes me wince.

  Andrew has turned, as if finally realising there is no escape, and as she approaches, he raises both hands and pats the air with his palms as though attempting to repel the force of her anger. She has a large soft bag over one shoulder, drooping from a long strap. I wonder if she is about to swing it at him.

  Instead, she stops, breathing with exertion, the huge eyes blaring a stare his way. ‘Were you just going to keep on walking?’ she says, her voice squeaking with disbelief. ‘Seriously? Just ignoring me? Where the hell have you been, why haven’t you answered my calls?’ she says, her voice whiny and childlike. ‘I left messages. Where have you been?’

  I know where he has been: Peterborough Railway Station. I just don’t know why.

  They are facing each other now, around three metres apart. Andrew is further away from the light and his expression is lost in the gloom. He looks at the ground, then back at her.

  Her breath is still fast and shallow, her thin shoulders heaving. ‘Why? I left messages as well, even if you didn’t want, want to …’ she gasps in the way people do as if they are about to cry, ‘speak to me, even if you couldn’t face it … you could have messaged, acknowledged me at least. I can’t believe you’re behaving this way …’

  He raises his head then and a little light falls on it but I still can’t read his expression. Nonetheless I feel, instinctively, that he wants to be kindly.

  I should also feel a certain sympathy, I suppose. I, of all people, know how Andrew is the kind of man a young woman could become obsessed with. It’s his unknowability: the hints of goodness and kindness behind the impression that he is wrestling with something difficult. Wrestling, perhaps, but I have a sure and certain instinct that however much difficulty he is enduring, he will never become difficult himself. Unlike so many men, he will never turn his anger outwards. He is the kind of young man who makes a woman want to say to him, I know what you are going through. Let’s go through it together.

  ‘Ruth, look,’ he says then, his expression still blank, ‘I think we might just have to accept that we’re handling this differently. We’re different people, I’m not saying one way is good and one bad, we’re just different, that’s all.’

  ‘And that’s it?’ Her voice screeches up a notch. ‘Seriously, is that all you’ve got to say?’ She’s close to hysteria.

  He cuts across her. ‘No, that’s not it. I care for you, Ruth, you know that. We’re both finding this really hard.’

  This takes the wind out of her sails. Her shoulders go down. She seems to deflate a little, if it’s possible for someone as skinny as her to deflate.

  ‘I know you do,’ she says, her voice an octave lower. ‘Just don’t ignore me, okay? Isn’t this hard enough as it is? I need some contact with you …’

  They are standing outside his house or flat – I presume – unless he is on his way to a friend’s place, but then how would she have known to be waiting for him?

  Her arms are hanging loosely at her side but she makes a gesture with one of them towards the row of neat small semis. ‘Want to, I don’t know, get a takeaway or something?’ She is trying to invite herself in.

  He shakes his head vehemently then, with more firmness than I would have expected from him. ‘I’m not ready, just, okay? Just cos I … What you did still wasn’t right and I didn’t want to – and now look, now. Sorry but you just have to accept we’re different people and you keep pressing for something I don’t want and I just wish you’d accept that, okay?’

  Her face contorts with disappointment. ‘Oh fuck off then!’ she spits, and turns, one heel making an emphatic scraping noise on the pavement. A few steps away, she turns again, and although now she is beyond the pool of light, I can still see her harsh expression, the hollows in her cheeks, the disappointed look in her wide eyes. ‘You’re not the only one who is suffering, Andrew. It isn’t just about what you need,’ she says. ‘You could be making this easier, for b
oth of us, and instead you’re making it worse.’

  ‘It’s never going to be easy,’ he says, without anger, ‘that’s the point, and I can’t pretend that having a takeaway and a chat is going to make it any better.’

  ‘I didn’t say easy, I said easier!’ she says over her shoulder as she turns into the night, the scrape-scrape of her heels heading off into the dark.

  There is something about this exchange that makes me think they were involved with each other for a long time – something about the pettiness of it, the way in which a complex and presumably important argument boiled down so rapidly to the difference between an adjective and its own comparative. This relationship is far from over, in my opinion – the storming off mid-argument, the assumption, mutual from his weary sigh, that there is plenty more to be said. Maybe they haven’t split up after all. Maybe he has just gone a bit cold on her, tried pulling back a bit because of whatever else is bothering him. What you did? Either way, she is responding in precisely the wrong manner, clinging and calling; why doesn’t she just give him a bit of space? It’s not the way to make someone miss you, after all, going on like this. Get me, the relationship expert, all of a sudden.

  Andrew stands for no more than a moment before reaching into his left jacket pocket for his keys. Although I have had the luxury of observing living human beings continuously for some time now, I am no nearer to solving the mystery of how men manage without handbags. He turns and walks up a short path to one of the houses, a neat brick box, the left-hand side of a semi in a row that was cheaply built, I’m guessing, one of those housing projects whose purchase price was low because the walls are made of cardboard and you can hear the man next door clearing his throat each morning. Oh, and the electricity meter will eat coins like a hungry toddler with a packet of Hula Hoops.

  Instead of letting himself in the front, Andrew walks down the side of the house to a small gate and into a square back garden. A security light pings on to reveal a tiny patio and a blank of grass surrounded by a high wooden fence. Andrew walks to the patio and bends to look directly beneath the security light where there is an empty plastic bowl, then he turns and crosses the garden – it’s a tiny garden and the security light bathes it in white. He opens the door to a very small, neat shed.

  He emerges after a second with a plastic bag in his hand. He goes back to the bowl, turns the bag inside out over it, and something small and dark drops down. He screws the bag up in one hand and returns to the path, to enter the front of the house. Within a minute, he appears in the kitchen and turns on the light but doesn’t draw the curtains over the patio doors, so I can watch him moving around and making himself supper. His kitchen is as plain and sparse as the garden: cupboard doors in that brown, fake-country-kitchen style, cheap wooden laminate on the floor. As far as I can tell, it is devoid of ornament apart from a few fridge magnets that hold up photos of him and Ruth. Despite that, there is no sign of cohabitation; no hairbrush discarded on a kitchen counter, no female-sized wellies or garden shoes next to a pair of battered men’s trainers by the patio door.

  Andrew moves around, opening and closing cupboards, puts a pan of water on to boil – I’d bet my life, if I had one, that he’s having noodles or pasta. While the water boils, he gets a bowl and fills it with cornflakes, slopping a bit of milk over them before standing by the patio doors and looking out at the garden while he eats them. Cornflakes as a starter: we’ve all done it.

  Even when he has finished, he still stands there holding the spoon and bowl. It begins to unnerve me a bit. It’s almost like he’s staring at me – but he is gazing vacantly down his own garden, looking right through me, of course. My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears … I think of all the times people stare at their own reflections in the windows of trains and buses and I think, what if there was someone on the other side of the glass, mirroring your own face with theirs? What if, as you gazed at yourself, someone else was gazing at you? For the whole while you thought you were just staring at yourself and letting your face be so open and honest, all that time, someone else was looking into your thoughts? Close up, Andrew’s gaze is vacant-seeming. I wonder if he is thinking about his conversation with Ruth but his expression betrays no hint of distress. He is drifting – and all the while, I am close enough to see the tiny tributaries of veins on his eyeballs.

  It’s peaceful, hallucinatory, watching someone who looks as if he is watching back but isn’t. It makes me feel less lonely. I don’t want him to turn away and he doesn’t seem to want to either. Andrew … I try his real name. Yes, it will do. Andrew. I begin to think of how much we could have in common. I would take things slowly, with this one. We would have long conversations in the pub where he would tell me all about his relationship with the bag of spanners and I would nod and listen sympathetically, and even demonstrate a little faux female solidarity, putting things from her point of view for his consideration. He would think what a nice person I was, how balanced and reasonable. We would meet like that over a period of several weeks and all this time, I would not make a move on him, not so much as a lingering look or a hand on the knee. I would bide my time. Eventually, it would be him who would make the first clumsy pass, when we were back at his place having a cup of tea, and as we tumbled towards his blank, plain bedroom, he would be at first surprised, then excited, by my hunger. He would only realise the full power of it as I was on top of him, unbuttoning his shirt to see his flat white chest, pausing halfway to bend and lick the salt from his collarbone.

  The kitchen behind him has filled with steam from the boiling pan of water and still he doesn’t turn. It’s like he is waiting for something or afraid to move and break some kind of spell. Good Lord, I think, can he sense me …? All at once, I dare not move either. I begin to wonder if he is actually looking at me. Could it be true, with the mist of steam behind him and the dark night outside, that he is seeing the wavery image of a woman in his glass patio door and is transfixed by it, as I am transfixed by him? I stare and stare and hope and hope … but his gaze goes right through me, towards the back of the garden, and after a long while, I turn.

  Eventually, it happens. It begins to appear.

  It creeps. It snuffles. It edges its way across the patio from a far corner with a tiny rocking motion. And Andrew stands dead still as if he’s scared of frightening it, watching as a small hedgehog with wrinkled, dark-grey paws and a mobile snout wobbles its way across the speckled concrete slabs, towards whatever combination of dead slug and insect Andrew has put in the bowl, and my heart melts because he fed the hedgehog before he put the water for his own supper on to boil even though he was hungry enough to eat cornflakes. It’s a freezing night, and Andrew fed the hedgehog before he even let himself into the house.

  It is then I tumble. Everything about this man – I know it, just from watching him. He is for me and I for him and I feel like I will die if I don’t have him but he will die if I do.

  9

  The next day, Andrew – as I feel I must call him now, although I still think Caleb suits him better – returns to commuting. He joins the herd. He arrives at the station just after half past seven, walking swiftly in his loose suit up the stairs to Platform Six, where he waits for the Stowmarket train. I wonder where he gets off: Whittlesea, March … Bury St Edmunds? That would be quite a commute. I’m guessing he’s something in accountancy or computing – he strikes me as efficient rather than creative. He’s a polite commuter. He steps back to allow people off the train, gestures to the woman waiting next to him to get on first. Even though there are seats available, he stands in the vestibule between carriages and gets his phone out of his suit pocket and plays something on it, unbothered, which gives me a clue that his commute must be relatively short. The guard slams the doors and Andrew still stands there, for all the world like an ordinary young man on his way to work.

  I watch him through the door’s window as the train waits to pull out. He looks like someone who allows the daily irritations of life to simply l
and and roll off him, like raindrops unabsorbed by a wax-coated jacket. You would imagine that his biggest worry was which craft ale to choose in the pub or whether he’ll be able to get that squash court at the most convenient time on Saturday. Only I know that an unhappy love affair has brought him to the brink of throwing himself in front of a train.

  The end of Andrew’s train shrinks to a small black square, then a dot, then is gone … The more I think about bony, screechy Ruth, the more I dislike her, her clinginess and emotional incontinence. She is offloading her own suffering without a thought, it would seem – she is killing him.

  *

  All that week, I observe Andrew’s ritual. His home time at the end of the day seems to be variable but he passes through the barriers swiftly every evening, looking exactly the same as he does in the morning. He shows no outward sign of tiredness – if anything, there is a new determination in his demeanour, as though he is allowing himself a small sense of triumph at the fact that he has made it through another day. The station seems to hold no terrors for him now, as far as I can tell. He has either squashed his demons or decided to let matters lie.

  I see it in his face, though, what his bravery costs him. I still believe that I can help, if only I can think of a way to communicate with him.