Platform Seven

by Louise Doughty

  ‘You know, it is not necessary,’ she said. ‘It is not.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was in a hurry, I shouldn’t have.’

  She came up to me then. There was a faint smell of something medicinal about her, camphor or eucalyptus. She placed a hand on my arm and looked up into my face – I’m short but she was tiny. ‘You do not have to put up. I know, now. They told me.’ She gazed into my eyes.

  The cat had followed her. Not knowing what to say, I bent towards it with my hand extended, miming piano playing with my fingers. Mrs Abaza looked down at it and made a fierce hissing sound between her teeth. The cat shot back into her flat.

  She looked up at me and took her hand off my arm. ‘My name is Leyla,’ she snapped, then went back into her flat, closing the door behind her.

  *

  It was three weeks before I died that it happened, the premonition – no, premonition is too strong a word. Premonition suggests I knew what was going to happen and of course if I had known that I was going to die, I would have done something about it. Nobody would willingly hurtle towards a fate like mine if they had the power to avert it. Foreknowledge of what awaited me on Peterborough Railway Station would have had me packing a bag and going straight to the bus depot – hitchhiking even, or getting a taxi to another town. I could have gone to East Midlands or Norwich Airport or even down south, to Stansted or Luton. I could have got an Easyjet flight – hell, if I had known I was fleeing for my life, I might have even risked Ryanair. I would have sat on the runway, waiting for the plane to take off, as nervous as any gangland drug dealer fleeing justice, waiting for the wheels to lift me up from the cold hard earth knowing I would never set foot on it again. Lisbon. Istanbul. Magaluf. It wouldn’t have mattered – wherever I was in the world, once I knew that Platform Seven was the place of my doom, then all I would have had to do was stay well away from it. My parents would have missed me but there’s always Skype.

  So, no, there was no premonition as such. On that mild March night, three weeks before I met my fate, I didn’t know what was going to happen as such. There was something, though, a moment in which I saw the reality of my situation. I felt what was to come skim past me – as if I were standing on the edge of a cliff and a huge gull swooped low over my head, not touching me but communicating the brush of its wings through a disturbance in the air.

  *

  It was the end of March. Matty and I had met seven months ago and been living together for five. I was thirty-six years old. I was an English Language and Literature teacher in a large girls’ comprehensive twenty minutes’ walk from where I lived. I was popular with my pupils, good at my job. I was eyeing up the post of Head of Department, which was due to become available in a year when the current Head, Adrian, retired. I was in good health other than the fact that I suffered from Non-Epileptic Seizures, or NES, a condition diagnosed as epilepsy when I was a child, controlled by drugs, and now officially unexplained. It was why I didn’t want a driving licence, why I considered myself physically maladroit. But other than that, and the occasional bout of insomnia and mild depression, if you had asked me, before Matty, I would have said I had a good life – not exciting, but comfortable. I had a great group of friends, my own flat. I was the only child of retired parents who were longing for me to settle down with a nice young man but apart from a vague sense of anxiety about the future, my single status hadn’t bothered me all that much. It bothered me less than it seemed to bother other people. I wanted to know the shape of my future, granted, and I thought maybe I wanted children, but secretly I was also envisaging a life in which I was really, really good at my job, a life in which I made my contribution that way and would become irritated, as I aged, with the way that other people viewed me as brave but a little sad. I was thinking of learning French, and going on one of those vineyard holidays where you learned about wine and dressed in crisp white shirts and beautiful silver earrings and looked cultured and elegant, although I also loved pasta and had never been to Italy.

  In other words, before Matty came on the scene, I had a life.

  *

  It was a Wednesday night. I woke suddenly, eyes snapping open, going from deep sleep to clarity in an instant. It never happened that way in the mornings, however loud or shrill the alarm. Coming to consciousness in the mornings was always a process.

  I lay on my back in the dark, eyes wide open, and knew straight away that Matty was not beside me. Was that what had woken me, that knowledge? The duvet on his side was flung back. The display on the electronic clock read 4.22 a.m. Above me there were three stripes of light that fanned across the ceiling from the streetlight outside, a kind of nighttime rainbow but in monochrome. I recalled how I had lain awake and stared at it the first night I had spent in my own flat. I had been a child growing up with her parents, then in university rental, shared housing, then back with my parents for a bit, then another flat share – and eventually I had saved enough to buy myself this small place in a modern block near the centre of town and not far from school. The kitchen was just a kitchenette in the living room. The carpet the developer had put in had a slightly shiny, synthetic feel and the common areas of the block were shabby, but for months I could not get over the novelty of putting my own key in my own door. And the very first night I spent here, surrounded by boxes and bin liners of clothing – that very first night, the only thing set up was the bed, and I lay awake staring at the ceiling and looking at the rainbow in different shades of white and grey. On my rare moments of loneliness in the years I had lived in that flat, it had kept me company, reminded me that I was not alone: that outside, there was a world. I would stare at it as if it was a secret nobody knew but me.

  I lay on my back for a while, watching the rainbow of grey and white light and listening, interrogating the silence. A car drove past in the street below, the small hum of it flaring and fading, leaving an echo of itself. The only other sound was my own breathing. I had the illusion, as I sometimes do, that I was the only person awake in the whole world, and that that was a fine and secret thing.

  Where was Matthew?

  The thought came to me that perhaps Matty did not exist, and everything that had happened over the last few months was some kind of dream that I had just woken from, that I was in fact single, living alone, just as I had been before I met him at the City Care Centre when I had injured my ankle, and that the intensity of my feelings, my love, my uncertainty, the sex, all the drama and shouting and weeping too, the broken thing I had become, that all of it had vanished and I was lying there breathing and thinking, what an odd dream, what was that about?

  The moment passed. I raised my head, propped myself up on both elbows and listened again. Nothing. No sound of him anywhere in the flat. I rose and picked up a hoodie of his that was on the floor, pulling my arms into the sleeves and zipping it up. I opened the bedroom door quietly and stood for a moment. Still no sound. He might have left – but I would have heard him do that, surely, it would have disturbed me. And anyway, there was a sense of him there, a feel of his presence, somewhere. I knew it because I was being careful.

  I walked through to the sitting room, where the darkness was lit by odd shapes of light from various electrical appliances and the kitchen counter jutted out at a hard angle. Only when I had walked past the kitchenette and into the sitting area proper did I work out why the air was cold. On the far side of the sitting room, the double doors that led onto the tiny balcony were open. The balcony was so shallow that if you stood on it, your toes would reach the edge while your heels would still be touching the doorframe behind you. It looked out over the communal gardens to the block, although gardens was a generous word for what was a square of grass bordered by a wooden fence, a couple of benches.

  Sitting on the floor, looking out over the garden with his legs over the doorframe and his bare feet on the balcony, was Matty. His knees were raised, his forearms resting loosely on them, a thoughtful pose. He was completely still. He must have heard me emerge from the bedro
om but he did not speak or turn around.

  I walked closer to him, my bare feet soundless on the carpet. I stood behind him, no more than a metre away, and looked down. I couldn’t see the badger-streak of white at his temple from where I was standing but I noticed, for the first time, that there were the faintest signs of his hair thinning at the crown. It was as if his much older self was layered over his present self, in that moment, in that pose. Still motionless, he seemed at once an old man and a young boy, sitting on the floor, thinking and waiting for something. In the Matthew of now, I could see Matthew as a child and Matthew as an elderly person, the whole of him encapsulated in that one translatable posture.

  I took another step towards him. Still he did not turn, although I was close enough for him to hear my breathing now. What is it about us – women I mean – that we are so tender when men drop their guard just for a moment and let their capacity for weakness show? Is it some deeply imprinted desire to mother? Or is it simply that it feels like such a relief, to get a glimpse of their susceptibility and to know that in that moment the tables are turned? Looking down at Matthew and seeing the young him and the old him together at once, I was filled with the desire to kneel down behind him and take him in my arms, to wrap my arms around his chest from behind and rest the side of my head against the side of his and rock him, comfort him. Perhaps he would cry a little, then, and turn to me. Perhaps it was all going to be okay.

  This might have happened. But before it could happen, he spoke. He stayed motionless but his voice was clear in the darkness. It was plain, and cold.

  ‘I’m not good for you.’

  There was something about the simplicity with which he spoke: no games, no provocations, just a simple fact. The truth of it made me feel gripped by fear, a sensation as real and as physical as if someone was squeezing my heart in their fist. I did not know what to say. If I agreed with him it meant the end of our relationship, there and then, yet any contradiction of what he said would be a lie and we both knew it. As I stood there, trapped in that moment, I could not even explain my own fear to myself, the heat that rose to my face – for it was more than fear, of course, it was foresight. I knew that whatever happened between Matthew Goodison and me from now on, it was going to end and end badly. There was no way out of this that would not entail unpleasantness – it was just a question of what form it would take and how bad it would be.

  I stood there for a long time. He sat in silence, his back to me, looking out over the garden. Outside, there was nothing, no sound and no movement, only darkness – the plain square of grass, the empty benches, the austere and unforgiving night.

  PART SIX

  18

  A woman is asleep in bed. She wakes. Her eyes open but she remains motionless, curled on her side. She is taking a moment or two to absorb the fact that she is conscious, as if acknowledgement of that fact requires so much energy that adding motion would be too monumental an effort.

  The red numbers on the digital bedside clock – directly in her line of vision – read 9.36. She was awake in the night, again, and so has slept in. Half past nine on a grey, midweek morning. She is alone. She is always alone. The light in the room is milky. It is daylight and the curtains are thin and pale grey, so whether it is gloomy or sunny outside, the light is always grey.

  This is always the hardest moment, the moment of knowing. It comes within a second or two: she wakes, she opens her eyes, she acknowledges the grey light – and then she knows.

  It is about getting through the day, that’s all it is, as if the day is a marathon she has to run, time and time again, that’s how effortful it feels and why she always needs to take a moment or two. It is about waking up in bed each morning and lying there while she comes to terms with the fact that she is conscious again. She reaches out a hand and turns on the small box radio next to the clock, to let a little talk or simple tune distract her from the hard fact of consciousness. After a few minutes, that distraction is what allows her to push herself upright and swing her legs over the side of the bed. She looks down at them for a moment, her cotton nightie rucked up around her hips. She acknowledges the mottled skin of her knees, the tributaries of thread veins that run down her thighs, the clenched and knobbled toes that grip the carpet – the many aspects of physical existence for a woman who is pushing seventy: primarily, in this moment, the need to rise because she has to use the toilet.

  She has never quite trusted her legs first thing in the morning. She pushes herself upright, wobbling as she reaches a standing position. She straightens carefully – at her age the blood seems to take a while to travel up to the brain, as if gravity has become more burdensome overnight. She hasn’t had an absence seizure for decades now – they can return with the menopause or old age, apparently, but there’s no sign of them yet. Sometimes she wonders, as a philosophical question, whether she misses them. Absence: it seems alluring now but however alluring absence may be, she knows that unexpected absence is a different matter.

  She stands for a minute, to make sure she is steady, then reaches out for the dressing gown that is lying on the floor beside the bed. She leaves it there before she goes to sleep because the timer on her thermostat doesn’t work and so her flat is always cold in the mornings. She needs her dressing gown as soon as she levers herself from under the soft bulk of the duvet. Even after she has put the heating on, the bedroom stays the coldest room in the flat as it has only one small radiator beneath a single-glazed window.

  She moves one foot in front of the other with care, making her way slowly across the landing. She locks the bathroom door behind her – even though there is no one else in the flat, it is a habit she can’t shake. While she washes her hands – very thoroughly, as she always does – she will avoid her reflection in the mirror above the sink. Her reflection is something she is not yet strong enough to encounter.

  *

  Why do I continue to dream of my future self, even now I know what happened to me? It is a self that will never exist. I don’t understand. Perhaps it is a message from the future – this is what was waiting for you. No family, no children – you end up in a flat on your own, a retired teacher, bony and exhausted. It is a meagre flat, with a poor heating system. You still have insomnia, still get that drugged feeling you always get after you have slept in to compensate. You rise slowly each morning, forcing yourself to face the day. Be careful what you wish for when you wish for life, Lisa, for who knows what life has in store?

  If this is the message from my own future, it seems a little harsh.

  *

  So instead of being an elderly woman with purple veins, alone and lonely in a flat somewhere, God knows where, I reside on Peterborough Railway Station with several thousand people for company, although the majority of them are just passing through and I can’t communicate with any of them.

  As well as the staff and passengers, there are the others – I know that for certain now. They are on the station and in its immediate environs but they are all over Peterborough as well. Some of them have visible form – the homeless man with his hood pulled right over his head, for instance; perhaps quite a few of the people I have seen walking around Queensgate Shopping Centre. Others feel like flickers, images replaying again and again – the woman in the orange trouser suit, the picture of her walking the same few steps, her cigarette hanging loosely from her fingers, the smile on her face. I’ve seen her several times outside the station. I don’t think she has any kind of consciousness – she’s just a random image that has got stuck. She flickers into life, flickers back to nothing, the same few seconds trapped for eternity at the point in time in which that woman walked those steps through that particular slice of time and space. Perhaps that image got stuck because she was so vivid; maybe it’s entirely random. The only thing we have in common is that we are not alive.

  There is only one of the others that scares me. It is the grey blur I saw on the top level of the multi-storey car park – the one that doesn’t feel quite dead. T
hat one has consciousness, I’m sure: it may be blurry, like a long-lost memory or a premonition, imprecise, but it is frightening and unkind. It is like me but not like me. We are different but the same.

  *

  The days and nights come and go, slipping and sliding from one to the other, earth’s diurnal course. The sky grows slowly darker as the bruise of night spreads and deepens. Dawn breaks, the sky lightens as if the bruise is fading and blending into skin; again, again it happens. Dawn, I used to think: bloody dawn. There it goes again, breaking all over the place. Solipsistic dawn – who does it think it is?

  But I am different now. I know what happened to me. I was not responsible for my own death – not like that man.

  Ah yes, there is the man.

  I have seen him around the station on several occasions since his death. Sometimes he is at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to the covered walkway, beginning his slow trudge up, like the day he spoke to me and told me that my name was Lisa. The next time I saw him, he was beginning again, then ten minutes later, beginning again, always determined, always alone.

  I’ve also seen him on the walkway itself, head slightly down, the slow but purposeful trudge. I was on Platform One, near Melissa’s office, and looked up and to the right and there he was, crossing the walkway in the same steady manner, passing right through any passengers rushing the other way. I looked away, then back, and he was at the beginning of the walkway again, still crossing it. No matter where he is on the station, he is always heading towards Platform Seven.

  *

  The day after I visit Dalmar in his sparse bedsit, I see the man again, at the beginning of the walkway, about to commence his trudge across, and I decide to follow him. At the top of the steps that lead down to Platform Seven, I hesitate: so many bad associations there.