The inside of me was full of cold air and my breath shallow, as if I had just swallowed a mouthful of crushed ice. I had a moment of doubt, then. It was the hands in pockets, the stillness of the figure. Was it Matty? Or was it someone who had come out from the Portakabin to see what I was doing? The moment rushed through me, as quickly as a high-speed express. The face was lost in darkness – but I knew that whoever it was, he had seen me.
I turned, ran along the access road and within seconds reached the end – there was a gate in the fence that led onto the tracks to my right and I ran up to it and put my hands on the cold hard metal but knew before I pulled that it would be securely locked. To my left, there was a junkyard. The fence that bordered it was a saggy wire mesh in a diamond pattern, curled and bent along the top and held loosely in place by old concrete posts – some residents of the housing estate in the distance had used the yard as a short cut, I guessed. I pulled at the wire mesh, dragging it towards me and down, lowering it with ease. I swung a leg over and was inside the yard without looking back along the slip road.
On my right, there was a row of rusting yellow skips; on my left, some vast metal tubs full of chunks of concrete in long thin shapes; beyond, a stack of old wooden pallets, next to it a pile of sheet metal with jagged edges, some upended wooden sidings, a heap of something that looked like rusted engine parts. There had to be a way through at the far end of the yard. I stepped behind one of the skips, stumbling again on the rough ground, paused and listened.
My breath made clouds in the air. There was the distant hum of a generator of some sort from the direction of the Portakabin. From the station, I heard the fox bark once again, then nothing. The ground was so rough, I would hear his footsteps if he was following me. Would he really come after me in here? Did his headlights catch me as I took a left and ran down towards the depot? Was it even him I saw?
I leaned forward so that I could peer around the skip. I could see right up the access road and the path that ran alongside it: there was no one there. Could I have imagined someone standing and staring at me, hands in the pockets of his big grey parka?
I paused for a moment, steadying my breath, although my heart pounded inside me as hard and as heavy as a piece of industrial machinery. I closed my eyes briefly, thinking of the agony in his voice when he called. He was worried for me. I thought of his face when he was booking the flights to Venice, his happiness and excitement, the way he kissed me when it was done. I clenched my eyes tight shut. Matty – had I got it all wrong? He had only ever been concerned for my safety. He knew how unstable I was. What’s wrong with you? Why are you so paranoid? And in a moment of clarity, I knew: I was many things but I was not mad. I did not doubt myself.
I heard a noise, then, the scrape of a shoe against gravel it sounded like, although I couldn’t tell whether it was from inside the yard or just the other side of the sagging wire fence. It was enough.
At the far end of the yard, there was another wire fence, also easy to pull. I was over it as quickly as the first. See, not nearly as incompetent as you always thought, Matty. Tall undergrowth lay between me and the housing estate but now, just a couple of metres to the right, I had access to the tracks. If I walked alongside them a few metres, I’d be able to cross in the darkness – and I could see, from where I was, a row of access steps at the far end of Platform Seven, with a narrow barrier it would be easy to swing round to get onto the platform. I’d be able to nip up those and go up the ramp and across the walkway.
Over on Platform One, in the distance, I saw a lone staff member, a black guy in an orange hi-vis jacket, night staff of some sort. He was walking slowly away from me towards the exit. I could run over to him. I’d have some explaining to do but I was trying to get out of the station, not in, I’d talk my way out of it, make up some story about my mum being ill and how I had to get to Dogsthorpe as quickly as possible. If there were any taxis at the rank I’d get one but at this hour there probably wouldn’t be – maybe I’d be able to get the man in the orange jacket to call me a cab, if he was nice, or maybe I’d just walk, I didn’t care – I’d run up Lincoln Road if I had to.
The man disappeared from view. Don’t go anywhere, I thought, I need you. I glanced behind me, where the junkyard was swallowed by the dark, then I lifted my foot over the first rail. It would take two seconds, that was all.
Light explodes around me. The air is full of sound.
23
I wonder at what point Matty decided to ruin my parents’ lives, to ruin Rosaria’s life, the lives of my colleagues at school, of some of my more vulnerable pupils who, with their endless capacity for solipsism and self-blame, might well have turned on themselves and thought, I was always so horrible to Miss. Is that why she did it? The ramifications of a suicide rumble on for as long as the people who cared for the dead person are alive; they ripple out far and wide. Even someone who had only a glancing acquaintance with the dead person can agonise over their own conduct. A suicide kills many more than the individual involved – that’s why people only do it if their pain is so terrible it blinds them to the pain they are inflicting on the people they love.
I wonder at what point it happened? When the police came to my flat, perhaps? The knock on the door, the officers steeling themselves, thinking through the form of words they would use – the death message, they call it. I know all about it now from listening in to the conversations at the BTP office. I can picture the way the officers would have arranged their faces as Matty opened the door.
I imagine Matty sitting on the sofa, in shock, his head in his hands, his whole body shaking with the authenticity of his grief – he isn’t a monster, after all. I imagine an officer reassuring him that there will be a full investigation as to how I ended up on the tracks at that hour of night. People don’t know about the freight trains, after all, he says, and at 3.15 a.m., well, most people would just think the station was closed.
The officer will know about me being reported missing the month before, how I was found by his colleagues in a distressed state in the middle of the night and taken home, but he will want to spare Matty any unnecessary upset at this point, and so he will assure him that we can’t jump to any conclusions just yet. Every aspect of this tragic incident will be looked into, the officer says. He means it, as well. They are good like that, the cops.
Was it then that it occurred to you, Matty? Really? Surely, even you could not be that cold and controlled?
If it was you standing at the end of the access road to the freight depot, you would have seen me step onto the tracks. You would have heard the blare of noise from the freight train, whisking through at sixty miles per hour. Perhaps you were even close enough for the backdraught to blow the hair from your face. If so, you did not stay to see what had happened – you ran back to your car. You fled to our flat, and waited for the knock on the door.
Was it later, perhaps, when you made the decision? The next morning? Or a few days after, when you thought about how many questions would be asked about my state of mind and how, as the man who lived with me, you would be expected to provide the answers? Or maybe it wasn’t until nearer the time of the inquest in Huntingdon, while I was drifting aimlessly around the station, with no memory of what had happened to me or who I had been.
I think about what a fine figure you would have cut on the witness stand at the inquest – tall and straight, a young registrar doing your best to be calm and lucid despite the grief etched on your face.
I wonder whether you would have been questioned by the Coroner or whether, as it was a rail death, the BTP or Network Rail would have engaged a solicitor and counsel just in case any fault would be apportioned – like I say, I’ve heard them talking about it in general in the office but I don’t know the detail of what happened in my case. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, there was a barrister. You are standing in the witness box and the barrister shows you a note – it is handed up to you in a see-through plastic bag. And the barrister asks, looking down at
her desk in a show of tact, ‘Dr Goodison, do you recognise the note you are being shown now?’
You nod. ‘I gave it to the police myself.’
‘And can you confirm that that note is written in Lisa Evans’s handwriting?’
You nod, and she looks up and says gently, ‘If you could just say yes for the written record, please, Dr Goodison.’
‘Yes,’ you say, the monosyllable ringing loud, and at this I imagine my mother, who is sitting next to my father, might give a single sob of distress, an involuntary exhalation that she quells immediately. She has been warned about the evidence and of course the forensics of what happened to me are dreadful – all through that, she has stayed composed. What has undone her is the note, the thought of her daughter scrawling those few words, the confirmation of my state of mind. She will never forgive herself for not understanding how unhappy her daughter had been.
‘Your Honour, in order to spare the witness, I will read the contents of the note, if I may,’ the barrister says, and she lifts up her photocopied version and reads out loud in a firm voice: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do this any more.’
At this, you lift a hand and cover your face, your long pale fingers spread. The whole court falls silent. Then the barrister says, again gently, ‘Dr Goodison, I just have one more question for you. I’m sorry, but could you confirm to the court exactly where and when you discovered this note?’
Matty’s shoulders lift and drop a couple of times. He removes his hand and takes a deep breath. There are no tears on his face but it is set hard, the lines etched, and very pale, as though it were plaster of Paris that has hardened. ‘I found that note after the police left, later that morning I mean, when they came round to tell me Lisa had died,’ he says. ‘It was on the kitchen counter next to the kettle, set back in the corner, just to one side and behind the kettle, that’s why I hadn’t noticed it earlier when they were there. If Lisa had left it in a more prominent position, I would have seen it and I might have been able to do something in time, gone after her perhaps.’
‘You found the note after the police had left that morning, after they had told you that Lisa Evans was, sadly, deceased?’
He nods.
Oh Matty, Matty. Even when it comes to the lie about the note you have to add that exculpatory detail – if I had left it in a more prominent position, you would have seen it in time. You cannot allow anyone to think there is even one ounce of responsibility at your door, even in the matter of not noticing a note.
On the night that I really wrote that note, four weeks before, I did indeed leave it fully visible on the end of the counter top. It was gone when I got back and I never asked about it – it was a note ending our relationship. I had no idea Matty had kept it. Why did you keep it, Matty? Just in case you ever needed evidence of how bonkers I was?
If it were not for the note, the Coroner might have recorded an accidental or open verdict – my parents and all the other people who loved me would have grieved for me just as much but at least they might have been able to believe that it was a senseless and awful accident, a moment of disastrous ignorance as I crossed the tracks.
But then they, and the authorities, might have asked why I had fled my own flat in the middle of the night. Why was I so desperate as to run onto the tracks and why was I even in the freight depot in the first place? Mrs Abaza might have been interviewed. She might have reported the shouting she had heard on more than one occasion. Questions might have been asked: and Matty cannot have that. He cannot have one ounce of blame attached to him or his conduct – he has to be the doctor who helps everybody all the time, who everyone admires, and in defence of his own reputation he throws my parents, Rosaria, and all the people who cared for me under that train with me. Whether or not he killed me may be open to debate but he has certainly killed them.
*
I never knew Matthew Goodison, that is what I realise now, when it is far too late. Did he hide himself, or was it that I projected something onto him? I think, perhaps, it was a mixture of the two: eighty per cent his manipulation and twenty per cent my blindness – but I paid one hundred per cent of the price.
There was a moment, I think, where I saw him, a moment where for some reason – sheer exhaustion, perhaps – he was robbed of the energy necessary to hide himself, to keep up the facade. It was that night, the one when he went to sit on the balcony in the enveloping and enervating dark, and I approached him silently, ghostlike, from behind, and he knew I was there.
‘I’m not good for you.’
I don’t believe he would have said that to me face to face: it was the dark that allowed it – almost as though he was speaking to himself in a moment of plainness and honesty. I like to think that in that moment, a small door opened inside him and Matthew knew the truth of his own behaviour.
I did not speak to him that night. I did not go and put my arms around him from behind, rock him as if he was a child. What if I had? Would he have opened, then? Would he have turned to me, perhaps even cried a little? It is tempting to believe in such fantasies – we all ache to believe – but they don’t stand much exposure to daylight.
The next morning, Matty rose as he always did, slipping out of bed, going into the kitchen to pour himself a bowl of cereal. He came and kissed me before he went to the hospital. I was dressed but my hair was still damp from the shower and he put his hand on the back of my head and said, ‘I preferred your hair before you had it cut.’
Neither of us ever referred to that moment in the middle of the night, when I had stood behind him and he had spoken the truth into the dark – but even now I am dead and there is so much that cannot be undone, I think of it with a small ache of longing – for what, I wonder? For it all to be different, for the comforting fantasy to be true. Even now that I am no more than a thought, I cannot help those moments of yearning, so traitorous to my former self. We all have our weak moments, after all. The sad, sobering and undramatic truth is, I made the same mistake that women and girls throughout the ages and across continents have so often made, the one that is so easy and seductive, so flattering to ourselves. I mistook possessiveness for love. By the time I realised the magnitude of that mistake, I had too much invested in it to unpack it, and so I had to keep on making it in order to justify the fact that I had made it in the first place. It was too large and complex an error to admit – and how could I explain I had made a mistake to family and friends when I didn’t even understand how I had made it myself?
A woman is ill, or depressed, or stressed, or alcoholic, or unreliable in a myriad of other ways … It’s so much easier for a man to believe, so much more palatable, than him having to be accountable for his own conduct. However manipulative such men may be when they are calm, in their more heated moments they are utterly sincere. In the wake of my death I have no doubt that Matty was devastated. He didn’t fake his sobs when the police came to his door, or his distress on the witness stand at the inquest. He believed himself to be a man who, through no fault of his own, had suffered a terrible bereavement.
*
After PC Lockhart has got the nod from his boss, he leaves the BTP office and walks round to where Lisa Evans used to live. It is good to be outside in the bluster of the day: December, the trees stripped bare, the verges sodden and muddy. He sort of likes it in a way, midwinter, honest cold. He’ll be going back to Southall for Christmas – the first Christmas for three years he hasn’t been on duty, as the officers who don’t have children often do the decent thing and volunteer. He’s looking forward to it, seeing his cousins – his dad does an amazing roast. Only three days, though. He’s back on for the New Year.
When he gets to my old block of flats, he pauses and checks his notebook, then presses a bell on the row to his left.
I watch as Leyla Abaza opens the main door and I see the shades of tiredness round her eyes. I think, I wonder what your story is? I lived in a flat above her for years, passed her in the hallway or on the street a score of times, yet never aske
d. I just saw a slightly intense middle-aged woman who, I was guessing, had had a troubled life in some way or another. I thought about our brief conversation in the hallway, the morning after the first time I had run from Matty in the night. You do not have to put up. I know, now. They told me.
I just thought of her as a tired-looking woman, Mad Cat Lady. She had complained about us. Her English was poor.
Leyla’s eyes widen in alarm when she sees Lockhart’s uniform and he raises a hand and says, ‘I’m very sorry to bother you, Mrs Abaza, it’s nothing urgent, just a routine enquiry. Is it alright if I come in for a minute?’
Leyla takes him into her flat, which is stifling hot and full of soft furnishings. He accepts her offer of a drink – a little queasily, he’s drunk some pretty rough cups of tea over the years, but when it comes it’s in a small glass and is strong and black and piping hot, with two sugar lumps on the saucer that he plops in and watches dissolve. They sit down at either end of a squishy sofa and then he asks about Lisa Evans and Matthew Goodison. She tells him about all the shouting she used to hear upstairs, the banging, the slamming of doors. She tells about him about the occasions she saw me run out of the flat, and how I was often inadequately dressed and in a great hurry. Sometimes, she heard me crying.
She tells him it has bothered her, ever since she read about the inquest, that no one ever asked her about the things she had seen and heard, and so she never got to tell anyone that she was awake that night, the night I died. The yelling and banging had woken her – when she says this, I think of Matty kicking the wardrobe door, the cracking sound it made. She heard me running down the stairs and she heard the front door bang – as he must have seen, it’s right next to the entrance to her flat in the hallway so if someone slams it, the sound is unmistakable, she explains to Lockhart. Then, just a few minutes later, she heard the door bang again. She went to her front window and looked out and saw the man, the man upstairs, stride past the bins and march to his car with a furious expression on his face – she saw it quite clearly in the lamplight. He jumped into his car, slamming the driver’s door, and took off in a tearing hurry.
Platform Seven Page 32
