Platform Seven

by Louise Doughty

  I go up to the front windows. The blinds are down, even though it is the middle of the day. I turn to the porch and peer through the wavery glass. It is empty, the tiled floor washed and brushed. The old wellies are gone. I don’t want to go in, but I know I must, just to be sure.

  Inside the hallway, it is cold. The heating hasn’t been on for a while. Junk mail lies on the mat, a handful of official-looking letters, flyers from pizza delivery companies and local builders. The row of pegs to the left of the mat is empty.

  The kitchen is a square room at the back that looks out over an unexpectedly long garden. The blinds are closed here too, which makes me feel claustrophobic – it is daytime, it’s all wrong.

  The counter tops are bare. Even the leaky kettle has finally been thrown away or packed up and taken somewhere else. My parents are gone.

  *

  For the first time since I have been able to leave the station, I go away from myself. I don’t know where I go when I go, any more than I knew where I went when I had absence seizures when I was alive. All I know, in the moments before I go, is that consciousness has become unbearably painful.

  I left it too late to get my memory back. My parents are gone.

  *

  When I come round, I am still in the kitchen. There is a dripping sound from somewhere and I look around hoping it might be the kitchen tap – any sign of activity in my old home would be welcome – but no, it has begun to rain outside in sparse fat drops and water is dripping from an upstairs windowsill onto the ledge outside the kitchen window where my mother would occasionally try to grow herbs in pots – she would buy or be given those kits you get in garden centres. They never seemed to work. I had the feeling they needed a garden in southern Spain, not a windowsill in Peterborough.

  The light feels different – a little brighter, despite the rain. Maybe it is a different day from when I arrived, I think. It feels more like morning, lunchtime at the latest. Perhaps I will live here now, rather than the station. My parents have moved out but you don’t have to be dead to leave a spirit presence behind – despite the fact that most of their possessions are missing, this cold and empty house, stripped of any trace of them, still feels suffused with their presence. As long as it is empty, maybe I can float around here for a while, pretending they are just in another room.

  I am wondering whether I can bear to take a look upstairs when there is a familiar rattle – the sound of a key in the door. For a moment, I glance around, wondering where to hide so I won’t be caught in my own home – such is reflex – then I remember no one can see me, and with a rush of gratitude and neediness I think a single word: Mum. Maybe she’s stopped by to pick up the post. I’ll be able to follow her and find out where they are now.

  I go out to the hallway swiftly – but standing just inside the door, bending to pick up the junk mail from the mat, is not my mother, nor my father, but a young man in a dark suit. His face is all cheekbone and angled nose. He has fine brown hair and a prematurely receding hairline – he’s brushed the hair back, defiantly, as if to show off his expanse of forehead. He has a certain style: he may be dressed in a suit but I can imagine him in leathers in a nightclub. He picks up the mail and sorts through it, separating the letters from the junk. He puts the letters in the outer zip pocket of a soft laptop case that he has over one shoulder and drops the junk into the small wicker bin beneath the empty coat pegs. He rubs the soles of both shoes hard against the mat before he turns left into the lounge.

  I follow him. He walks over to the blinds and raises them – that cheap plastic chain that was always breaking – why did my parents not like curtains? Light floods the room. The settee and easy chairs are still there, bulging brown leather, I remember how they always felt cold to sit on, until your body heat warmed up the leather. It always felt all wrong – that you should be making the settee feel more cosy rather than the other way around.

  The television has gone; the mantelpiece is empty. Like the rest of the house, the lounge has the air of a room where one or two items have been left to avoid the impression of desolation but the few things that are still there only emphasise all that is missing.

  There’s a buzzing noise from his jacket pocket and the young man extracts a phone. When he speaks, his tone of voice suggests that nothing could have delighted him more than to receive this call.

  ‘Yes, Martin! Yes … yes … yes, I’m here at the property now … Yes, of course, no problem, no problem. I’ll come out front and wave! Yes … yes … bye.’

  He goes back out into the hall and I follow. He opens the front door and steps outside, walking a few paces down the path, where he turns and then stands, feet planted firmly apart, looking down the road. After a moment, he lifts both arms in a high, wide motion, crossing them over his head as they reach the top of the arc of his wave, in much the same gesture he might use if he were a mariner sitting on his upturned boat and trying to attract the attention of a passing oil tanker. After a few repetitions of this, he lets his arms drop and a brilliant smile lifts his features.

  A couple in their early sixties come down the path. They are both short and rotund, both wearing heavy coats and glasses. The young man steps towards them and shakes their hands, pumping them up and down with a vigour that slightly destabilises each of them in turn. ‘Hello, hello!’ he says, as he gestures with a wide motion, back down the path to where the front door stands open.

  ‘Well well well …’ says the young man, as they step inside the door. All three of them wipe their feet on the mat with what strikes me as excessive politeness. ‘I’ve not had a chance to open the curtains upstairs yet,’ says the young man, ‘but let’s start downstairs.’

  The woman shudders dramatically in her coat.

  ‘The heating’s fully operational,’ the young man says hastily. ‘It just hasn’t been on for a while.’

  ‘What type of boiler is it?’ asks the man, still wiping his feet.

  ‘Ah, I might have to get back to you on that,’ the young man replies and I think, It’s a combi boiler, you idiot, it was replaced five years ago, it’s really efficient and cheap to run even though you have to wait a bit for the water to run hot and what the hell are you all doing in my parents’ house?

  ‘How long has it been empty?’ the man asks then, an edge of aggression in his voice, which to me implies he is already calculating a lower offer if the house has been unsold for a while, just because he can. Something about him: he looks like the kind of man whose main concern with any purchase, large or small, is that he gets himself a bargain.

  ‘Oh, less than six months,’ the young man says then, as he walks them through to the sitting room.

  ‘Are the owners still local?’ asks the man.

  ‘Yes,’ his wife adds, ‘it’s useful, that.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not,’ says the young man, standing in the sitting room and looking impatient to show it off with a wide-armed gesture rather than answering all these questions. ‘They’ve, um, gone their separate ways I believe. The husband has gone to work in Scotland, I believe the wife is down south, Hertfordshire. I think it’s Hertfordshire.’ My mum grew up in Welwyn Garden City. Her two sisters, my aunts, still live there.

  My parents are gone. They have separated. Their grief was too much. What happened to me destroyed them too and even now, as I stand here watching a young estate agent trying to convince a couple to take on the home my mother and father both loved, they are somewhere in their different places, in parts of the country distant from each other, both of them grieving alone. The retirement they had planned – the trips together, their daughter marrying perhaps, even giving them a grandchild, all the things they had hoped for, they are all gone.

  This is too terrible for words: the wrongness of my dying before my parents overwhelmed them and now it overwhelms me.

  The couple exchange a look and I wonder if they are the sort of people who believe that when you move into a house, something of the spirit of the previous owners remains
, that you can inherit the bad luck of a place in the same way as a missing roof tile or a door that creaks.

  The young man sees the look and adds hastily, ‘But there’s no problem with conveyancing, that’s all been sorted, that’s the benefit of it having been empty for a while. And of course it’s a very good price, very good indeed in fact.’

  The couple are standing in the middle of the sitting room and turning slowly. I can see on their faces that they are trying to imagine themselves there – where their own furniture, their own pictures might go. They are both looking as if creating that image in their heads is proving a bit of a stretch. In the television alcove, there are two laminate shelves where my parents used to keep photographs in silver frames – a slightly odd place to leave them as the light in that corner was poor and you had to reach up and over the television to pick them up, but I knew that my mother would have thought to herself, out of harm’s way. There had been their wedding photo and a rather awful one of me looking bleached in my graduation gown. In between them, in pride of place, had been the holiday snap of all three of us, timeless, caught in that particular moment that just so happened to summarise our lives, the happiness of our trio. The photos are all gone now, of course.

  The man and woman are standing next to each other and still turning slowly, the man clockwise, the woman anticlockwise, surveying the room with twin expressions of scepticism. How dare you? I think it clearly. How dare you stand there, in my parents’ sitting room, and look down on it. They were good people. Whatever the estate agent has told you just now, you aren’t looking at an unhappy home. You should feel privileged, to have the chance of occupying the space they occupied. We were happy here. Don’t you dare sneer at them.

  All this time, I have blamed myself for what happened to me, my own stupidity. What is it with us women, the capacity we have to blame ourselves in any given situation? Do they hand it out like an extra X chromosome? What the hell is wrong with us? But now, it comes home to me, what my death did to my parents, the hell it put them through – and my cold anger rises and rises inside me until I bloat like an unspeakable thing, like Thomas Warren, full of hatred and bitterness and I am … what am I? I am nothing, that’s what killing someone does to them, it makes them nothing. It takes them out of the world and nothing they think or do, good or bad, can help or hurt anyone any more. It is terrible, irreversible – monstrous. I swoop and turn, to leave this house, and as I do anger swells me more and more and I know who I am going to find now.

  PART SEVEN

  21

  It is dark by the time I return from my visit to Eastfield Cemetery and my old home. I go straight past the station, across Crescent Bridge and along Thorpe Road, taking the quiet turnings to the flat, the route embedded so deep in my unconscious I don’t even need to think about it and, before I know it, there it is, the place I used to live: the small square block, the cheap orange brick with the grey-white mortar; the heavy green door with thick glass panels; the entrance hall in the middle and the plain white stairwell; three flats on one side, three on the other.

  My home. The front door banged shut too hard all the time – it really annoyed Mrs Abaza. The recycling and rubbish bins on the concrete slabs out front were inadequate for six residents and always overflowing. The flats themselves were small as well: it was a place for singles, those young enough or old enough or simply solo enough to be outside the norm of coupledom. To be there was to feel a little judged, as I recall, a little – wanting.

  I stay outside, looking at the plain front of the building lit by the single light on the tall post next to the bins. Someone has left several bulging supermarket bags, their handles knotted, in a pile to the left of the front door. There’s a soggy shoebox on top of them. It’s nothing much, a flat in this place, you might think, unless it was all you had. There is no sign of Matty’s car but he could have changed it, or be out. I hover outside for a while, watching the windows. There are some lights on in the first- and second-floor flats on the right but the left-hand side of the building, my side, appears to be in darkness. The bedroom overlooks the front and the curtains are open, suggesting nobody is home.

  The thought of Matty sleeping in my old bed, alone or with company – I’m not sure which prospect is more nauseating.

  My parents would have inherited the flat – I died intestate, they were my next of kin. I wonder if they were too decent to ask Matty to leave. It would have been the last thing on their minds, in their grief, selling it and getting the ten per cent deposit I had put down. Nothing would make me happier than to think they might have benefited in some small way, a new hallway carpet, a decent holiday: I would have been delighted for them to spend their tiny inheritance in whatever way made them happy. Now I know they have separated, I reflect gloomily that they probably had to sell it to pay for solicitors’ letters and removal vans, all the sad costs of dismantling a household and creating two separate ones in different parts of the country. The money I saved up to build a home, a domestic life, ended up helping them demolish theirs. I wonder what they did with my stuff – my clothes, my books. They wouldn’t have wanted to throw them away. It’s all in boxes somewhere, no doubt, taking up space that neither of them have any more.

  It’s more than eighteen months since I died. Surely Matty has gone by now. As I watch, a light comes on, not in the bedroom but in the bathroom. It has a frosted window that doesn’t even open, as useless as the tiny balcony out the back – that’s why the bathroom needed an extractor fan.

  It feels like a gesture of some sort, that small illumination, the yellow square filtered through the glass. I have the strange sensation that whoever is inside the flat is signalling to me.

  As I watch the light, I remember waking up in the flat the first morning after I moved in, lying in bed for a bit before I rose. Boxes and bags were still piled in the alcove while I waited for the wardrobe I had on order – the only furniture that was in one piece was the bed I was lying on. I lay there and stared at the ceiling and bathed in the novelty of that moment, my first morning in my own space, only partially owned but the mortgage all my responsibility, every mug or hand towel chosen by me. Even when I got those choices wrong, they would be all mine.

  I never quite lost my pleasure in that, even when, as I turned thirty, everyone kept telling me that as a single woman I must be a bit lonely, a bit needy. I couldn’t explain to them that there were times when I opened the little balcony doors on a Sunday morning and let the weak sun bathe the room, and I would have my own small cafetiere of coffee and one of those part-baked croissants I had just made myself, with raspberry jam, and I would sit cross-legged and look out over the plain communal gardens and listen to the birdsong and feel, calmly and clearly, that this, this being alone with my thoughts and my breakfast, was surely one of the most romantic things a person could do.

  I stare at that small and blurry square of light and think of the person behind it, a young man or a young woman, almost certainly alone, and I know, without going into the flat, that Matty isn’t there. Someone else bought the flat, not that long ago perhaps: a young person who saved up for their first place, worrying perhaps about what they have taken on, what will happen if they lose their job, or perhaps it is someone who has recently divorced, hoping to make a new start. Whoever it is, I wish him or her sound sleep, happiness with their life. Every time they open a newspaper or turn on the television or talk to family or friends, they will be told that what they have isn’t enough and they should want more: a smarter place to live, a partner, a family. Every signal they get from the world around them will tell them to aspire to bigger and better. I wish them the strength to enjoy what they have. I wish them nothing more dramatic or glamorous than contentment.

  *

  I could go to the hospital during the daytime, I suppose, but I’ve no interest in seeing Matty at work, where he is at his best, his most charming and admired. I know what he’s like there, his public self. I want to know what he is up to in his private l
ife.

  *

  It takes me a while, but eventually I find him where I want to find him, out and about. Friday night in downtown Peterborough: Dr Matthew Goodison is in the warm, low-lit fug of a curry house called the Bengal Tiger. He is having a meal with a woman who I know, as soon as I see them, to be a new girlfriend – a recent girlfriend, I can tell by the frisson between them, the slight but all-pervasive thrill you get in the early days of someone. I am guessing, as I look at them, that they have had a few dates but haven’t slept together. The static between a couple who want sex but haven’t had it yet is unmistakable.

  They are seated in a booth, opposite each other on banquette-style benches covered with deep red velvet. Matty is staring at her while she talks. He reaches out and picks up a piece of naan from the small plate between them, tears off a strip and puts it on the side of her plate. ‘I’m so glad you chose curry,’ he says. He lifts his fork and jabs it in her direction, close enough to her face to make her flinch. ‘You,’ he says firmly, ‘are going to be really good at guessing what I like.’

  She looks to one side and smiles, then looks at the piece of bread on the side of her plate and shakes her head. ‘No, you’re alright, thanks. I’ve got rice.’

  ‘Eat it. You’re too thin,’ he responds.

  With another small shy smile, she picks up the strip of naan, dips it into one of the curries on her plate and eats.

  As she swallows he says, with an encouraging nod, ‘Good girl. You were saying …’