Platform Seven

by Louise Doughty

  Poor Andrew. I can picture the whole scene. Him in his small square kitchen, about to make a sandwich or some pasta, perhaps; the knock at the door; his surprise when it was two police officers there. Maybe he thought they were coming to ask about the recent spate of burglaries.

  He’s very polite. He would have made them a coffee, and I’m guessing that as they had a difficult subject to raise, they would have accepted it, maybe even made a remark or two about what a nice house it was, asked him how long he’d lived there, clocked the pictures of him and Ruth on the fridge, along with the tidiness and absence of personality. I wonder whether they would have been in uniform or whether they send detectives for that sort of thing – the latter, I’m guessing, a man and a woman, probably, gentle of manner, trained in how to broach such a matter with sensitivity. They would have asked him some general questions about his childhood first and he would have told them what he has always told himself, that it was basically happy, despite his parents’ divorce, that his life has always been pretty ordinary.

  Only then, after they had asked him a few general questions, would they have enquired when he had last spoken to his sister, Ruth. Only then would they have said, ‘We’re here because an allegation has been made …’

  Poor Andrew, caught unawares, trapped by his lifetime habit of denial: he’d just told them his childhood was perfectly happy. Don’t I, as much as anybody else, understand how you can ignore the truth and carry on ignoring it even when it stands before you as large and obvious as a woolly mammoth? Sometimes the price of acknowledging it is just too painfully high.

  I wonder what he said to the officers. Perhaps he was uncharacteristically brusque, in his shock. Perhaps he said, ‘Look, sorry, but I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

  *

  ‘It must have been deeply shocking for you …’ Isobel prompts, raising and lifting her head in very small movements, as regular as a metronome. She reminds me a little of one of those nodding dogs you used to get on the back seats of cars, the ones they put in TV series along with men in flared trousers and leather jackets to tell you it’s the sixties or seventies.

  ‘Do you feel able to tell me a bit more about your childhood from your point of view …’ If I were Andrew, the gentleness in her voice at this point would make me want to punch her but, without going into any detail, keeping it factual and practical, he does his best.

  *

  Andrew and Ruth Warren are twins, thirty-two years of age. Their father, Thomas Warren, only started abusing Andrew after the divorce, when they would come for weekend custody visits. The first occasion was when Ruth had stayed at home with their mother because she was sick – or claiming to be sick, who knows. Andrew says he wouldn’t blame her for coming up with excuses but of course that meant that it was just him who went, with no idea what was coming.

  Nobody in the family ever spoke of it. Not one word. He only found out from the police that Ruth had tried to tell their mother. Ruth was eleven at that point, and already in trouble at school. He remembered she ran away from home once and got brought back by the police – their mum went crazy about what the neighbours would think when they saw a panda car parked outside the house. It wasn’t really a coherent attempt at flight; she’d headed off with a backpack containing a change of clothes, a fluffy penguin and a Sony Walkman it turned out she’d lifted from a classmate. Back in those days, if you ran away, you got in trouble for it but nobody really asked you why you’d done it. The weekend visits continued until she was thirteen, when she just refused to go. Andrew stopped going not long after.

  Ruth never spoke to her father again. When their mother died of bowel cancer, the twins were twenty-six years old. Ruth showed up at the church stick-thin and wraithlike and everyone said what a shame it was she had gone off the rails – she sat at the back, away from everyone else, and left straight after the service, because their father was there. Andrew stayed in contact with his dad after their mother died, took him out for a pint on his birthday, called him once in a while, with both of them pretending that nothing had ever happened – and that would have continued until Thomas Warren had died as an old man if Ruth had not gone to the police.

  It was their mother dying that had been the catalyst. It was that put Ruth into therapy, although she was in it on and off for five years before she found the courage to make the complaint. Poor Mrs Warren had failed to protect her children when she was alive but in dying, she had given her daughter the courage to confront what had happened.

  Andrew managed his life much better, on the outside, but at a cost – the years of silence that had built up gradually like walls around him and had kept him safe and helped him build his own quiet life, it had all been torn down when the police knocked at his door without warning.

  ‘After they left that day,’ he says, hesitantly, to Isobel, then stops.

  She leaves a long silence, then prompts him. ‘Yes …’

  ‘After they left …’ He stops again and stays stopped. Whatever he did when the police officers had gone – cried and curled up into a ball, went for a run, screamed abuse at the ceiling – whatever it was, he cannot articulate it. He cannot bring himself to go back to that moment.

  Even once he had admitted it all to himself, it took another year for him to call his sister and say that he would go with her to the police. He and Ruth had walked into the police station in October. And three weeks later their father, in a final act of punitive malice, had killed himself on Peterborough Railway Station.

  ‘I went there,’ Andrew says, towards the end of their session with Isobel, ‘a week after he did it, I went and I stood on the same platform. I’d asked, I knew the exact spot, and I leaned forward as a train came in and, I don’t know, I was trying to imagine what was going through his head, if he was sorry, but I think he was just sorry for himself. He didn’t want to go to prison, that was all.’

  ‘I haven’t been there yet,’ says Ruth, looking at Andrew. ‘I really want to. I didn’t have the nerve.’

  ‘It helped, I think, helped me realise, it’s the most selfish thing you can do. Everyone can contribute to the world in some way or another, and to take yourself out of the world – that’s why I say he wasn’t sorry. He wasn’t, was he? If he was, he’d have pleaded guilty and taken what was coming.’

  Isobel presses her lips together. ‘Well,’ she says very softly, ‘I suppose we’ll never really know that, will we?’

  There is a long silence between all three of them.

  Isobel leans forward and says gently, ‘It’s time.’

  *

  Outside the Branfield Centre, Andrew and Ruth stand for a minute on the doorstep. Another woman comes towards them and presses the buzzer and they wait until she is admitted inside before they turn to each other and I can sense that Ruth would like to hug Andrew or suggest a bite to eat but doesn’t dare.

  ‘How’s the job?’ he says quickly, as if to head her off at the pass.

  She nods. ‘It’s good. The other staff are great, there’s a real, I don’t know, everyone’s very friendly, and the customers, the pet owners … You should come by some time. Come on a Saturday, see what I do, it can get pretty busy on a Saturday.’

  ‘Is it mostly cats and dogs?’ he says, shoving his hands in his pockets and looking at her.

  ‘And gerbils. Quite a lot of gerbils, actually. What you going to do for Christmas?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  They turn and set off down the street together, brother and sister, walking slightly apart like two people who have only just met and are not sure how close they should be. If you glanced at them and didn’t know them, you might think they were boyfriend and girlfriend but only if you were the kind of idiot who made assumptions.

  I trail them for a while, then turn and leave them to it. I am thinking about love, about all the different kinds of love that exist and how some are easy to articulate and some aren’t – the quiet kinds get so little credit. Now that my memory is back, I fee
l I was a fool for the whole of my short life.

  As I go back along Cowgate, a mouse crosses my path, stops dead in the middle of the road and turns its head to look at me. It isn’t a real mouse, though. As if to prove my point it twitches its nose, then vanishes into the air. At least I recognise a mirage when I see it, I think – at last. I am wiser now than I ever was when I was alive.

  20

  I have no memory of my funeral. I’m glad I don’t. It would be unbearable, surely, to watch the pain of those who loved you, to see their stricken faces, hear them weep, and yet be unable to communicate with them. It would make you want to scream – although there would be no point as you couldn’t be heard – to yell that you are not gone from the world but merely lurking invisibly in the air around them. I am beginning to understand that being trapped on the station served its purpose: that it was so much easier to reside amongst people who hadn’t known me when I was alive. Perhaps it wasn’t love that set me free, or even if it was, perhaps I was trapped there by my own inability to confront my past, by simple cowardice.

  Would Matty have been at my funeral? I presume so. He might have sat in the front pew with my parents. Halfway back, on the other side of the room, Rosaria would have been sitting with her cousin Elena, looking straight ahead, tears on her cheeks and furious incomprehension in her heart.

  I presume I was cremated. I was too young to have a will or leave a letter of wishes – but my parents used to say that was what they wanted for themselves and when my father’s younger brother died, my Uncle Ted, that’s what they did for him. Uncle Ted had never married or had children – I think nowadays he would have been diagnosed with learning difficulties or Asperger’s but back then he was just thought a bit of a loner. There were only half a dozen of us at his funeral. My father bought a plot for his ashes in Eastfield Cemetery. It’s not far from where we all lived, so I’m presuming that’s where I went too.

  Given what happened to me, I can’t imagine my parents would have buried my remains. Burial is for whole bodies – they would not have wanted to preserve the state I was in. Rendered to ash, I would be able to mingle with myself. Cremated, I would become whole again.

  *

  The day after I have sat in on Ruth and Andrew’s therapy session, I head out of the centre of Peterborough on the Eastfield Road, to the cemetery. I used to walk up this way sometimes on my way to see my parents, then take a left down Newark Avenue.

  The gates stand open – the cemetery is long and thin and people often drive down to the far end. The speed limit is 10 mph and there are signs everywhere warning you not to leave valuables in your car because there have been so many breakins. They lock the gates at 4 p.m. in winter and it’s only an hour off that. The light is still full, the sky white, but not for long. On my left, there are the older graves beneath the trees, mottled grey stones, some green with moss, all on a slant, the lettering indecipherable from here. The newer graves are to my right, black granite and bright gold lettering and coloured plastic flowers, sometimes toys and balloons. On this side, there is a stretch of empty grass about a hundred metres long before you get to the rows of new interments but the cemetery is almost full now, as though the graves are creeping closer and closer to the iron railings. I have an image of them flowing over, out onto the road, into the living world.

  My father grew up in Wisbech but his family moved to Peterborough when he was in his teens. My grandparents on his side are buried here somewhere, Resting, Reunited. I remember helping Dad pick out a new headstone for them, only a year or so before I died myself. The old one had become cracked and discoloured and Dad wanted to replace it. I couldn’t find that grave now if I wanted to, or Uncle Ted’s, not without my dad here or a map – I am remembering how big the cemetery is, the extent of it as it stretches up alongside Eastern Avenue. You could walk around for hours.

  Looking out across the graves I feel a certain desolation but not in the way that living people do – it isn’t this array of tombstones spread out before me, this demonstration of the power of death. It’s the pointlessness of it all: worshipping a lump of stone, a place in the earth. What does it matter?

  I had been contemplating trying to find my own grave, to pay a sort of homage to myself. If I was cremated then I suppose I would be looking for one of those walls of stone plaques that they put the containers behind – or rows of small stones set in the earth. But I don’t know for certain that was what Mum and Dad did with me – maybe they had my ashes scattered somewhere else: that field, perhaps, where the photograph of the three of us was taken when I was a baby. They might have thought of another place where we had all been on holiday when I was young, somewhere I can’t even remember but where our little triangular family was happy. As far as I’m concerned, they had the right to scatter me wherever might have brought them comfort – I don’t care if it was in their local Sainsbury’s or around the daffodil bulbs in the garden.

  An elderly man enters through the gates and passes clean through me as he makes his way down the path. He is tall and stooped, wearing a white baseball cap and clutching a small bouquet. He takes a right turn down the first path he comes to. He may be stooped but he walks briskly, with a slight stiffness in his gait – he knows where he is heading. He felt not so much as a shiver as he went through me. People avoid cemeteries because they think they are full of ghosts but I’m right here in the middle of the path and they can’t even tell.

  What is here? I contemplate it briefly. Even if this is where my ashes are to be found, they aren’t me. The skeletons in the ground around me aren’t anybody either. Our bodies are just the husks we live in – they mean nothing once we have left them, I know that for certain now. The reverence the living accord dead bodies is nothing more than sentiment – respectful and proper sentiment, yes, and I understand why it is necessary, but sentiment nonetheless.

  Above me, in a tree, a bird flutters its wings. I look up and see the smaller branches at the top of the tree moving against the white sky but the bird has flown away. There are no spirits here, I’m sure of it; I would be able to sense them. The dead don’t bother haunting graveyards – they are the last places on earth they need to haunt. The living do that job for them with their messy combination of grief, desire, imagination. There is nothing in this cemetery. It’s just an empty field.

  *

  Outside the gates, I pause. I wasn’t really coming to the cemetery, this freezing winter afternoon. I was tricking myself into making the one journey I do not want to make now that I’m free from the station. I am less than fifteen minutes’ walk from the house I grew up in, where my parents still live. I turn right.

  The great low-rise sprawl of Dogsthorpe – it’s like so many areas of Peterborough. You wouldn’t really call them suburbs: too far out to be convenient, not far enough to be nice. They go on and on, these residential areas, great networks of streets, semis, bungalows, the odd detached place, all in slightly mismatched styles. All the houses are different but they feel the same: some with bay windows and latticed glass, some squat little Victorian terraces – some pristine, with those bits of coloured glass in the front doors in the shape of tulip petals. They all have driveways full of cars or delivery vans so there are very few cars parked on the street – it all has an open, empty feel at this time of the day, before the school run and rush hour. My parents’ house is a smart semi in a cul-de-sac at the far end of Sycamore Avenue, a neat little semicircle of a street that you wouldn’t know was there unless you had to visit it.

  Mum. Dad. Home.

  My mother would trim my fringe with scissors. ‘Close your eyes,’ she would whisper. And then, when my eyes were still closed, she would blow on my face, to blow away the tiny hairs.

  As I turn the corner into the Close, I feel – what? A reflexive feeling of … comfort, is that too strong a word? I often felt awkward rather than comfortable, when I went home. And yet I called it that: home. It was the house where I grew up. The paint was always peeling in the porch �
�� there were wellies lying on their side there that were older than I was; the leaking kettle that my parents never replaced because they couldn’t agree on whether they wanted a jug-style one or something more traditional. They kept a kitchen roll by the kettle at all times, to have something to hand to mop up the leaks. I swear that in the period of leakiness – at least two or three years – they spent more on kitchen roll than they would have done in buying two new kettles, one in each style.

  What is it about being a grown-up child, this irritation? It is, after all, not our parents’ fault that we have yet to graduate to having children of our own. It isn’t them keeping us infantilised. I knew all this, and yet, just as at that Sunday lunch, I couldn’t help chafing against still being someone’s child. I am thirty-six years old – no, I’m not thirty-six years old, I am dead. Time to get over being annoyed by my parents.

  So no, not comfort, that isn’t the word – something else, familiarity, perhaps, something as simple as that, the slight but perceptible relaxing of the muscles and the bones and the brain that occurs when you are approaching a physical space knowing every inch of it, and every tic and habit of the two people who occupy that space.

  I turn the corner into the cul-de-sac and come to a stop.

  Outside my old home, number forty-eight, is a FOR SALE sign belonging to a local estate agent called Wheetons. It is nailed to a post that is leaning at a one o’clock angle, as if it has been there for some time.

  I stop in front of the sign, with a strong feeling that I don’t want to know any more, that this whole expedition has been a mistake. What am I doing, excavating a past I can’t even touch, trying to reach people I can’t even speak to? What is the point?

  My parents are moving? They never said anything about downsizing when I was alive, despite the fact that I hadn’t lived at home for a decade. The house is a compact three-bedroom semi, ex-council home. In their bedroom, the end of the bed is a metre from the sliding doors of the built-in wardrobe; my room is only big enough for a single bed and the third bedroom no more than a storeroom, home to a box of my university textbooks, the hoover, a sewing machine that my father was always threatening to fix.