‘No,’ she shakes her head again, ‘go on.’
He stares at her until she becomes uncomfortable and drops her gaze.
‘The thing you haven’t told me yet …’ he murmurs. He continues to stare at her long and hard with that grey-eyed, assessing gaze, the kind of look that suggests he is trying to bore into her soul.
She lifts her gaze and I watch her look back at him and see it happen before my eyes, her melting beneath the intensity of his concentration. She has very small features, a tiny nose, brown eyes, straight dark hair with a neat fringe. She could be a model for a French clothing line, she’s so trim and petite. You could imagine her in a crisp white shirt and navy pinafore. She is around twenty-three, I’m guessing, twenty-five at most.
‘You’re a single mum.’
She gives an embarrassed half-laugh. ‘Oh God, no, is it really that obvious? When did you guess?’
‘Well, it had to be something important or you wouldn’t have said it was something you should have told me straight away. Actually I kind of guessed on our first date but thought I’d wait and let you tell me when you were ready.’
‘Seriously?’
He gives a lopsided grin as he loads another helping of curry onto her plate, lumps of bright white fish in an orange sauce, a grin that says, of course, what do you take me for?
‘My little girl, she’s called Estella, can I show you? Sorry, if you don’t have kids, it’s really boring, I know …’
She has her phone out of her handbag before she’s finished her sentence. Her face is alight with love and as she’s looking down at the phone she doesn’t see the expression on Matty’s face, but I do.
She holds the phone up to him and he breaks into a huge smile. He takes the phone out of her hand and examines the photo. ‘Oh my God, she’s gorgeous! She looks so cheeky!’
‘She certainly is, right little madam, no doubt who the boss is …’ The young woman is smiling from ear to ear as she says this, her shoulders down and relaxed. She reaches out a hand to take her phone back but Matthew holds onto it, still looking at it, and begins swiping.
After four swipes he says, ‘And who’s this?’ He turns the phone to face his new date but does not relinquish it.
‘Oh,’ the young woman’s face becomes less animated, ‘that’s Estella’s dad … We split up a year ago.’
‘But you’ve still got a photo of him on your phone.’
‘She goes to his place every Friday after school, comes back to me Saturday afternoons, sometimes the whole weekend or weeknights too, we don’t really have a proper routine for it. It’s okay, but …’ She shrugs and looks down at her plate, picks up her fork and pushes a tail of spinach around in a circle. ‘You know, it’s never easy.’
‘Why do you still have a picture of him on your phone?’
*
I foresee their whole relationship. The young woman is called Shelley. She owns a small house in Longthorpe – her parents helped her and her ex out when she got pregnant, out of her dad’s redundancy pay and some money from her nan. She works as a personal assistant to the Human Resources Manager at the Cambridgeshire Energy Company, it’s a big employer round here. She’s good at her job but hates leaving little Estella in daycare all day while she’s at work. She would much rather she went to morning nursery now she’s three but she can’t ask her mum to pick her up five days a week and have her all afternoon, she’s not in good health, and what would she do during school holidays?
Matthew is everything her ex wasn’t: kind and attentive, wanting to know all about her, so interested all the time, caring where she is at night and about what she’s wearing. He loves her in short dresses – she’s tiny, sometimes a size eight is a bit baggy on her – and when he tells her to throw out her jeans and leggings because dresses suit her much better, she does. Only six weeks into the new year, Matthew moves in with her and her daughter in the little semi-detached house in Longthorpe.
It begins not long after that, although of course it has begun already, when Matthew places bread she doesn’t want to eat on her plate and she eats it anyway because it’s rather cute he orders her to do it and he’s just being kind, right?
*
The first time Matty tells Shelley about me – well, it’s during a row. It’s a month after Matty has moved into her place. There is a reunion of friends from her old workplace and she still isn’t over the novelty of there being someone else around and not having to ask her mum or book a babysitter every time. She doesn’t take him for granted or anything, she says to him, well in advance, ‘Is there any chance you could be in for Estella on Thursday so I can go to this thing?’
And at the time, the time she asks him, on the Monday, he takes her face in his hands and kisses the top of her head and says, ‘Sure, no problem, I’ll make sure I leave work on time. It’ll be good for me to do bedtime for her, we can bond a bit.’ She’s pleased to hear him say this as she worries that Estella gets on his nerves a bit sometimes – which is fair enough as that’s what three-year-olds do and he hasn’t lived with a child in the house before so, you know, she’s cutting him a bit of slack on that one and explaining to Estella why it’s important to be well-behaved around him.
On the night in question, the Thursday, Matthew is home later than he said but she’s all ready to go as soon as he walks in the door and she’s fed Estella and got her into her pyjamas so all he’ll have to do is get her off the telly and read to her at 7.30 p.m. She’s reminded Estella about being good. As she heads for the door he comes up to her, takes her handbag from her shoulder and opens it and takes out her purse.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks.
He opens the purse and frowns, then takes a twenty-pound note out of his pocket, folds it into a small square and puts it in the purse. ‘You never have any cash on you,’ he says, ‘it’s a bad habit.’
She laughs. ‘Matty, even pubs take contactless now and I’ll get an Uber home if no one gives me a lift.’
‘It’s not good,’ he says firmly, putting her purse back in her handbag and replacing the handbag on her shoulder, then bending to kiss the top of her head. ‘I don’t like you going out without any cash for emergencies. And do not get a lift with anyone if they’ve been drinking, okay? Promise.’
He’s such a worrier, honestly. She’s never been involved with anyone who worries about her safety so much. ‘Promise,’ she says and puts her hand on her cheek, smiling indulgently. Not for the first time, she thinks, she can’t believe her luck.
She is an hour into her evening with her old friends when the first text from Matthew arrives. Estella won’t settle. He wants to know how long she’ll be.
*
When they argue at the weekend, on Saturday morning, about how he kept texting her and she had to cut her evening short, it gets so bad – their first full-on, shouty row – that she goes to the front door and picks up her Vans and sits on the bottom step, pushing her feet into them and bending to lace them. He follows her from the kitchen and says, ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’
‘Out!’ she snaps. Estella is at her dad’s. She’ll do what she damn well likes.
And that is the first time it happens. He bends and pulls the shoes from her feet and throws them, one by one, across the hallway. One of them bounces off a wall and to the floor, the other sails through the open doorway to the sitting room. He lifts a finger and jabs it at her face and shouts, his face distorted, ‘You are going fucking nowhere! You are not leaving this fucking house, Shelley, no fucking way!’
She rears back against the stairs, away from him.
He wheels to where a collection of his and her shoes are ranged neatly on a shoe rack by the door and leans down and grabs the top of the rack and lifts it, hurling it against a wall. Shoes fly everywhere and Shelley lifts an arm across her face. The rack makes a metallic clang against a radiator, then falls to the floor. Matthew turns into the sitting room and sits on the sofa and puts his hands over his face and sob
s in great gulps.
Breathing heavily, she stays on the stairs for a moment or two, then rises unsteadily and goes to the sitting-room doorway, standing there and looking at him, wondering what the hell just happened. She stays there while his sobs subside.
He rubs at his face furiously with both hands. It is red and distorted as he stares at the carpet in front of him. It’s then that he tells her about me.
‘There’s something you don’t know …’ he begins, and she feels nauseous at the thought of what he is about to say. Is he ill? Is something really wrong? Has he met someone else and been wondering how to tell her?
‘Remember that young woman who died on the railway station, about two years ago?’ he says. ‘It was in the papers, I don’t know if you saw, it got quite a lot of coverage, locally.’
She thinks for a bit and says, ‘Yeah, and then a year later someone else did it, didn’t they? Same place. And turned out he was a paedophile or something, he’d been arrested. Nutters.’
‘The young woman was my girlfriend. We were living together at the time.’
She feels about as awful as she’s ever done – the callousness of her remark just now. What a terrible thing to say.
‘Her name was Lisa.’
He tells her about me, then, and about my mental health issues: how unstable I was, how jealous and clingy, how I used to get up in the middle of the night and run off and it was such a nightmare because he never knew where I was or whether I was safe. And then one night, the outcome he had been dreading – the doorbell rang and he ran down the stairs thinking it was me but when he opened the door, it was the police.
‘So it’s just,’ he says, ‘when I can’t get hold of you, when I don’t know where you are or whether you’re safe, it’s horrible. It just brings it all back.’
She feels terrible, then. She kneels before him, and takes him in her arms, and says how sorry she is. She promises never to walk out on him during a row. She tells him she loves him and she means it. No wonder he’s a bit overprotective sometimes – she completely understands. She feels so sorry for him – she just wishes he had explained all this to her before.
Two months later, she is pregnant, and whatever unease she has felt during that incident is overwhelmed by the tidal wave of Matty’s delight – and hers. A proper stepdad for Estella, another baby – it’s the family unit she’s always wanted.
It’s hard when Matthew starts going out more – he says he’s just doing all the things he won’t be able to do when the new baby comes and work is just crazy as well and anyway, it’s easy to get paranoid when you’re pregnant, he tells her, and he’s a doctor, he should know. It’s the hormones, he explains. By then, she knows better than to say she’s had one child already, she knows what hormones are.
When he’s home, he cooks lots of healthy meals, broccoli and spinach, even though she hates the stuff. It becomes a running joke between them, how many different ways he can disguise it. He says if she doesn’t eat it, he’ll hold her nose and force it down. She’s got the welfare of his son to think of, after all, that has to come first now – she mustn’t be selfish, he says, holding the fork up and nudging it against her lips. And shouldn’t she be setting a better example for Estella, eating her greens? What kind of mother is she? ‘We’re going to make Mummy eat it, aren’t we?’ he says to Estella, winking at her, and Estella, who is a miniature version of her mother, with her little fringe, looks from Matty to her mother and back again, trying to work out how she is supposed to react. Shelley tells herself that even though she doesn’t find this very funny, it’s just a joke, and she smiles at her daughter, to reassure her.
The first time Matty loses it when she’s pregnant – she’s nine weeks in – she sees him raise both hands to grab her upper arms and says quickly and instinctively, ‘Sorry, sorry …’ because she knows of course he’d never do anything when she’s carrying his baby, it’s just a reflex. She tells herself that she’ll address it another time – she’s got so much on her plate at the moment, it’s easier just to keep the peace – and, in the back of her mind, she can’t help thinking, she’s had one failed relationship already, does she really want to end up single with two kids by different men in her mid-twenties? Matty is so great so much of the time, she really wants to make this work. The water gets hot very gradually, and as far as the frog is concerned, there is no one point where it gets dramatically different or bad enough to jump out.
*
All that is still to come. For now, Shelley is sitting in a curry house on a Friday night. Her daughter is happy at her dad’s place with him and his new girlfriend, and a man that Shelley really fancies, a doctor no less, is sitting opposite her and being very attentive. Even after she’s put her knife and fork together on the plate and sat back on the banquette, he tells her to finish the sag aloo at least. She spends her whole life looking after a child all on her own: there’s something so sweet about someone noticing how much she has eaten and caring whether it has been enough. When he asks what went wrong with her relationship with Estella’s dad, she’s only too happy to tell him the whole story.
He leans forward, watching her face as she talks. At one point, he reaches out with a napkin and, as she is speaking, wipes a small amount of orange sauce from her lower lip. She stops talking and their gazes meet. His motion is slow but firm, distorting her lip a little, and her eyes are wide and wondering. In her heart of hearts, she knows she’s a little out of her depth here but she’s excited by that too. The water isn’t hot yet, after all, just alluringly warm, and she’s never met anyone like Matthew Goodison in her life.
*
According to most interpretations, people in Purgatory are merely hanging around, purging their sins while they wait to go to Heaven. In this version, no one goes from that waiting room to Hell – if you deserve Hell, you’re there already. The community of souls in Purgatory is made up of people who were basically okay, they’ve just got a few things to atone for before heading up to claim their big reward in the sky. They may be spending a bit of time on Platform Seven but there’s no chance they are going to end up on the tracks. They’re just checking their watches, tapping their feet, whistling to themselves, until their train pulls into the station. It’s not what you actually do in Purgatory that counts, after all – it’s how long you spend there. The 09.16 to Doncaster won’t come a minute earlier, however good you are.
Some people think that this is what ghosts are, souls in Purgatory, but in that version, the platforms and waiting rooms aren’t just populated by people who have something to atone for, but also the ones who went before their time, violently, unfairly, the ones who can’t ascend or descend while they still have business on earth. Some people still believe that if you pray for a dead soul or make an offering of some sort, you can spring them from Purgatory a bit before their time. Their train might come in earlier. By that token, I guess it follows that if someone living makes an effort to find out what really happened to the unfairly dead, to nail the culprit, then they might be releasing that troubled soul to float free.
To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has suggested a comparison between a medieval monk and a constable in the British Transport Police.
*
It is the day after I have seen Matty with his new girlfriend and foreseen what is to come between them. In some ways, it is a relief to know I have no power in the human world – imagine my dilemma if I could alter the future, if I could appear to tiny, pretty Shelley in a dream, the Ghost of Girlfriend Past, and tell her what awaits her. Perhaps I would prevent the birth of her second child, Matthew’s son – and then what if that son was going to grow up to be the scientist who found a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s? Messing with the future is a very silly business, which is why it isn’t possible; foreseeing the future and being able to do nothing is a curse.
What would I tell Shelley, anyway? I would tell her it’s okay to be confused. It’s a confusing business, when the man who seemed so keen on
you turns out to be the same man who ends up making you feel bad about every aspect of yourself. Hold your head up, Shelley, I would tell her. Don’t doubt yourself. If it’s wrong for a man to grab your arms or throw things around then no matter how upset he is, it’s still wrong. When your gut feeling tells you he’s lying about where he’s been, don’t let his anger deflect you. Above all, the minute he starts telling you how paranoid or insecure you are, how you think too much and have an overactive imagination – then be certain you are absolutely right. When that moment comes, Shelley: don’t walk, run.
It is the day after, and I am in the British Transport Police building opposite the station, in Inspector Barker’s upstairs office. He is at his computer, using two stubby forefingers to bash at the keyboard so hard it sounds like woodpeckers having a row. Every now and then he stops, lifts the fingers and sighs melodramatically. I am staring at the map on the wall behind him. All around the station, there is a boundary line, drawn with a green Sharpie. It covers Station Road, but not the Great Northern Hotel. It sweeps past the bike racks but doesn’t go as far as Waitrose. Round the back of the station, it swerves in a dogleg to include the freight depot. Something about this line is making me feel odd, inside, in the same way you feel a little odd just before the beginning of nausea, an uncomfortable feeling, unidentifiable as yet.
And then it comes to me. I stare at it in disbelief, although it is myself I disbelieve rather than the line. To double-check, I trace the line again, beginning at the main entrance to the station and following it round, picturing the different points that I am so familiar with after nearly two years, and eventually, I come back to the beginning again and am outside the main entrance, halfway between it and the steps of the hotel. There is no doubt about it. The line delineates what used to be the boundaries of my existence. It replicates to the metre the area where my bodiless form was allowed to drift, the invisible force field that circumnavigated my world.
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