Platform Seven

by Louise Doughty

  I see Dalmar hesitate. Mr Chadha – landlord, I presume – must have his own set of keys to each room. But it will seem insulting to Angela to refuse her offer, and there’s no way he can change shifts at this late stage to make sure he is here on Friday morning. He’s back on days by then.

  ‘Okay, thank you,’ Dalmar says, ‘that’s very kind of you.’

  ‘I won’t touch anything,’ Angela says very quickly.

  ‘No, no, of course, I wasn’t, I wouldn’t think …’ Dalmar replies with an excess of haste that implies that was exactly what he was thinking.

  Angela flushes, as if insulted. ‘Well, then …’ she says, half turning, then turning back. ‘Of course if you’d rather …’

  ‘No, no, that would be great, what time should I?’

  ‘Oh, knock any time after seven a.m.,’ she says, with a sudden laugh. ‘I’ll be dressed by then!’

  Out of sheer embarrassment, Dalmar closes the door in her face.

  He turns from the door and strides over to the table, picks up the television remote, turns it on – a woman brushing her teeth very firmly in close-up – turns it off immediately, goes back to the bed and sits, slumping, his arms triangled to support his upper body, his head resting back against the wall. He lifts his head, just an inch, and lets it thump back, giving it a small knock, as if he is cuffing the back of his own head for his clumsiness, stupidity, for the fact that after twelve years in this freezing cold grey country he still finds the women impossible – the way they behave, even the most brazen woman back home wouldn’t, and then if you take them up on it, how quickly they get affronted. He’s never worked it out.

  He has made casual acquaintances of the men at work quite successfully, learned to mimic their speech patterns and gestures. He goes to the market on Saturday and helps dig the garden at a local old people’s nursing home once a month in order to put something back into the community. But he still can’t talk to the women.

  Actually, that isn’t completely true. He had a girlfriend in London, briefly, a white woman ten years his junior who he met at the dole office. She was called Susan and they went out for a few months – well, went out wasn’t really the right phrase when they never actually went anywhere as they were both penniless. They stayed in, in his hostel room, which was similar to the one he lives in now. They never went back to her place because she was sleeping on a friend’s sofa and the friend had a load of kids, apparently. He was grateful for the sex, and she seemed to be as well, although she often cried afterwards and refused to tell him what was wrong. There wasn’t much talk, though, and he got tired of her, tired of how significant she seemed to think it was that she’d never slept with a black man before and he had never slept with a white woman, as if that was all there was to their relationship, bored of how they couldn’t even watch a TV programme together without her telling him how shocking it was that some people were racist, how she didn’t have a problem with the immigrants herself.

  The first time they slept together, when they were lying next to each other afterwards, she lifted his hand from where it lay on his chest and held it up and he knew she was looking at his palm, at the difference in pigment between the lines and the soft pads of flesh, and he thought maybe he would forgive her that one but then he used to catch her staring at him in bed, sometimes, when they were both pretending to be asleep, and felt annoyed with how she was making such a big deal out of it. He grew to like her less and less, and after a while it made him think badly of himself as a man, to be sleeping with a woman he didn’t really care for just because he needed to feel someone else’s body against his once in a while. It wasn’t honourable. He expected her to cry when he ended their relationship but instead she put on a still face and said quietly that she understood. It was okay for her, she said, to say that the differences between them didn’t matter, but she could see how it wasn’t okay for him and maybe he was never really going to love a woman who wasn’t from his own community. At that point he felt like throwing her against the wall but he didn’t, he thanked her for her understanding, even though she was completely missing the point.

  So that was it. He had nearly gone to a prostitute once, so desperate had he felt at his lowest, but the thought of how much he would hate himself afterwards kept him from it. There was always porn, of course – the young men in the hostel were all obsessed with it – but he would rather close his eyes and think about home, about Aasiya, who he had loved, and Najimo, who he hadn’t but who had been the best sex ever because it was forbidden – it was like crunching shushumow fresh from the pan, crisp and hot and sugary, it was like cramming in a whole mouthful at once, indelicately – and what those women had in common was that the feel of them in his arms was so soft, so fine. Najimo, she was so loud, that braying laugh of hers, but she melted in his arms. Sometimes the past seemed like enough, in comparison with the disappointments of the present.

  Dalmar closes his eyes, then, resting his head back against the wall, and lets the memories play through his head like an old cine film that is wearing out, the movements of the people in it starting to be jerky and the landscape of heat and sun becoming progressively bleached of colour. One day, he thinks, it won’t be there at all. That was the trouble with looking. If you looked too hard, you either saw things for what they were – or made them go away altogether. Dalmar begins to fall asleep where he lies, even though he is still wearing his coat and shoes and hasn’t even closed the curtains.

  It makes me feel sad, to see him drift off so carelessly. I hope that before he is in deep sleep, he will get up and undress and close the curtains, then go to bed properly. I hate the thought of him dozing fitfully for an hour or two fully clothed and waking to find himself alone. If he were with someone like Angela, she would say, ‘Don’t fall asleep there, you nelly, you’ll feel dreadful later. Take your shoes off and get into bed.’

  And here is the thing – when we have someone to say that, we feel annoyed with them. We grumble back. We have no idea how much we would miss having someone who has a bit of a go at us if they weren’t there – irritation is a form of love and love the seedbed in which it flourishes. If we didn’t care, we wouldn’t be irritated.

  I would give the world to be sitting at my parents’ kitchen table listening to them using the same maddening phrases they had used for decades, inwardly rolling my eyes – Lord, they used to get on my nerves – and as I watch Dalmar falling asleep and think about how much my parents used to annoy me, it comes back to me, through him, my life that is, fully formed: my parents, my friends, my job, my flat – everything.

  *

  Where to begin? I will begin where I began.

  PART FOUR

  10

  There is a photograph of me and my parents, the three of us together on some holiday: I don’t know where, and I’m not sure how old I was at the time. I look as if I am in that middle place between baby and toddler, a great slug of a child who will soon learn to walk but for now has cylinders of uncooked dough on her limbs and rolls of it around her neck. I’ve held a few infants like that in my time. They are pillow-soft yet weighty as boulders.

  We are all in a field of some sort: a wild place it looks, scudding clouds above us in a blue, blue sky and long, windswept grass. My parents are standing and my father is holding me in his arms, face out, so we are all looking at a camera that, I am guessing, is perched on a wall or a fence, set on timer, one of those ones that whirr and click – such was technology at the time. It looks like it is a warm day, despite the wind. My mother is wearing a sundress and lace-up shoes with ankle socks. My father is in trousers and shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I am dressed in a strange knitted outfit, knitted trousers and a matching jacket – surely an elderly relative was involved in its purchase or construction. I don’t like to think my mother might have paid good money for it. The photograph is in colour and must have been taken around 1980 but make it black and white and it could be a photograph from the fifties, forties, thirties even. We a
re an eternal trio.

  My father holds me in his arms, one strong forearm supporting my weight and the other around my waist. He is tipping me, to make me laugh for the camera. I am tilted towards my mother and have one fat hand reached out towards her face. She is looking at me, her eyes shining. All three of us have our hair lifted by the breeze. We are frozen yet it is a picture full of movement – our very stillness, caught in that moment, implies motion. If you looked at that picture for a while, studied it, it would tell you everything you needed to know about our small, triangular family.

  *

  I suppose if I had lived to have children I might have understood my parents, and worked out how it was possible for them to seem such hard work on a day-to-day basis and yet for all those days of irritation to add up to years of love.

  My mother and I were in the kitchen one day. I was young enough to be sitting on the kitchen counter, swinging my legs, banging my little heels against the doors of the cupboards underneath.

  ‘Don’t do that, darling,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked. I was sucking on two fingers and had to take them out of my mouth to ask the question. As soon as the question was out, the fingers went back in.

  My mother was at the kitchen sink, her arms truncated by soapsuds, turning a clunking Pyrex dish over and over beneath the water. The water was very hot as steam arose from it. Could I really remember this? I must have been very young.

  ‘Mum’s got a headache. It’s a bit annoying,’ Mum said. (Mum, I remember, not Mummy, so maybe I was older than I think.)

  ‘Am I annoying?’ I asked, thoughtfully, and quite happily. It was a philosophical question.

  ‘No, darling.’ My mother’s gentle smile: she was good at those.

  ‘But I make you tired.’ The previous night, as she had put me to bed and I had begged her to stay in my room, she had answered, ‘Oh, Lisa, it’s time to go to sleep now, Mummy’s tired …’ The insistence that I had to go to sleep because she was tired showed a characteristic lack of logic. Grown-ups. They never made sense.

  ‘Well,’ she said, still turning the Pyrex dish beneath the water, where it crested the suds occasionally like a whale breaking the surface of the ocean. ‘It’s not because you do anything wrong, it’s just tiring being a mum sometimes.’

  ‘It’s a long time.’ What I meant was, she would be a mum forever, my mum, to be precise, and I would always be her child. I couldn’t imagine ever turning into an adult – it was no more conceivable than turning into a fairy or a lizard: actually, either of those seemed a great deal more plausible than the thought of ever becoming a creature like my father or mother.

  My mother smiled again. ‘Well, it’s a funny thing,’ she said, ‘when you’re a mummy. The days go slowly, but the years go really fast.’

  This, I thought, was exactly the kind of nonsense that adults liked to speak.

  She fell to the floor. It was quite undramatic – she just slipped down, without any fuss or preamble – one minute she was standing next to me with her hands in the hot water and soapsuds and the next she was on the floor.

  It wasn’t the first time and I knew what to do. ‘Dad!!!!’ My voice was a small, high shriek, an unmistakable demand for attention. It was a Saturday and my father was in the garden. I could see him. The back door was open.

  ‘Dad!!! Mummy’s fallen down!’

  He paused for a moment, his face open to the information as he absorbed it; then he came running up the path.

  *

  One of my school friends, Assia, she was the first to have a child. ‘God, Lisa,’ she said, when I visited to see her and her newborn baby girl – a tiny scrunched-up thing, red to the point of purple, furious at being born – ‘you have no idea. Seriously, the minute you have a child, you forgive your parents everything.’

  That felt like putting it a little strongly to me, but who was I to judge?

  We were on Assia’s sofa. She was sitting on a round cushion with a hole in it that the hospital had given her. Her face was puffy and coated with the very thin sheen of sweat that people have when their perspiration is due not to heat but to pain. The scrunched-up thing in her arms was making a squeaky, hiccuping noise. Assia was joggling it up and down in her arms, pulling a face. It was exhausting just watching my friend and her baby – the squeaking, the joggling, the wincing. Being alive seemed a monumental effort for both of them.

  I had been there ten minutes and was still wearing my coat. I asked a few polite questions about the birth – how was it? Assia replied at length, with every anatomical detail. Then she said, ‘Anyway, how are you?’

  I launched into an anecdote about some Year Tens setting fire to the science lab but I knew she wasn’t listening. I wondered whether, as she was in pain and exhausted, it was up to me to rise and take my coat off and offer to make a cup of tea or coffee. Probably, I thought. The present and card I had brought with me were still unopened on a coffee table. We had that to do at least.

  Assia looked down at her baby as she spoke. ‘No offence, Lis’, but can you go in about five minutes?’

  For a moment, I didn’t cotton on to what she meant – then I realised she was asking me to leave. ‘Oh, no problem,’ I said, rising, ‘I can go now.’ I was expecting her to say sorry, no, sit down, tell me more about how you are.

  Instead she said, ‘Thanks. You’ll get it when it’s your turn, seriously, sorry, but you will.’

  *

  In the way these things worked, my cohort spent its twenties drifting into two groups: those who had children and those who didn’t. The second group thought the first group self-satisfied; the first group found the second shallow – the truth was less boundaried, more porous. In the second group, there were couples desperate for children. When we got together for barbecues or picnics, they stared at the babies as if they were grenades with the pin pulled out. In the first group, there were dads and occasionally mums who joined the childless gang on clubbing nights and behaved more wildly than they had ever done before becoming parents, waving their arms on the dance floor, semaphoring all the things they had to prove.

  The weddings of friends had begun in my mid-twenties, peaked around the age of twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and then dwindled as the occasional acquaintance played catch-up. Marriage transformed some of my friends, particularly the ones who went early. They had been teenagers five minutes ago, it seemed to me, my fellow compatriots in the country of girls, then I blinked and they were women. I felt no envy for their transformation, only a mildly uncomfortable feeling that maybe I should think about becoming a woman too, one day. Perhaps. No hurry.

  The first was Virginia, who married a city trader, Alex, I think he was called. Virginia and I had been in the school orchestra at King’s for a bit, where I played the flute very badly and she played the oboe rather well. Her parents were no better off than mine, though – she lived around the corner from me in Dogsthorpe, and was like me the offspring of working-class parents with middle-class aspirations for their child. We walked home together after orchestra practice, although in truth we didn’t have all that much to say to each other. She was quiet, mild, with mid-brown hair in indeterminate layers – a style she seemed to have been growing out for all the years I had known her. I liked her well enough but she wasn’t very cool. If I had been asked to guess her likely fate I might have said, librarian, working in a building society – council worker in the housing department, perhaps.

  In economic terms, if nothing else, she married up. The wedding was a grand thing, apparently, at a chapel in the City of London, with a reception on a riverboat on the Thames, all paid for by his family. I was invited but made an excuse. I was twenty-five years old, not that long qualified and reluctantly living with my parents – a situation I had intended to last for the few months after graduation that had turned effortlessly into a few years. I could only justify the way this had infantilised me, the lassitude it had induced, by saving every penny for the deposit on my own flat. A London wed
ding meant a return train fare, a fancy outfit and a night in a hotel – that was before I thought of a suitably lavish present. It was out of the question.

  So I only met the newly wedded Virginia and her husband a year later, at the wedding of another friend, out at Yaxley. I was waiting outside St Peter’s Church in a group when Virginia and Alex arrived in a Jaguar. Heads turned. When she got out of the car, the woman nearest to me said, disbelievingly, ‘Is that Virginia?’

  Virginia walked towards us, glossed and sleek and slim, wearing a loose silk shift of a dress, dark grey, and low-heeled slingbacks, with her short blonde hair tucked behind her ears and two huge drop earrings. The rest of us were wearing hats – and I knew straight away that the others felt what I was feeling, that our hats were cheap and silly, ridiculous even.

  As Virginia approached us, she smiled and held out her long slim arms and I noticed the neat yellow clutch hanging from her wrist by a thin strap – the kind of handbag that will hold your phone, your debit card, perhaps a lip-liner pencil and a tube of gloss, nothing more. I would have chosen a handbag that matched the dress or shoes but that would have been wrong too – I saw at once the wrongness of all my own choices. I saw, in a flash of clarity, that handbags should be either very small or very large, and that the medium-sized one on my shoulder, containing my purse and make-up bag and spare tights and tissues, was as ridiculous as my hat. Virginia stepped up to me, still smiling, saying nothing, and hugged me by way of hello. She smelled light and citrus. Her embrace held genuine warmth and I remembered that I had always liked her, that she had never joined in any of the cliques or the backbiting at school. It was how you would imagine being greeted by a minor member of the royal family and finding yourself surprised at how nice they actually were.