Platform Seven

by Louise Doughty

  She was so disturbed by this she couldn’t go back to sleep, so she was still awake when she heard the car come back less than half an hour later. She looked out of the window again and saw him get out and close the driver’s door behind him much more quietly this time, glancing from left to right as he strode back into the block of flats. This time, he closed the main door to the block very gently, supporting its weight until it was almost shut. She still heard the clunk, though. She was listening at the door to her flat. She was wondering where I was. She was so disturbed by all this that she couldn’t sleep, but when she heard someone answering the main door again, an hour or so later, she stayed in bed. It was only a few days later that she realised it must have been the police.

  So it was Matty at the end of the access road, the silhouette in the grey parka, hands in pockets, contemplating his next move. I wasn’t imagining it.

  *

  A woman is lying in bed. She wakes. Her eyes open but she remains motionless, curled on her side, 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.

  From where she is lying, on her side, she can see the bedside table, the box of tissues – she still buys Kleenex for men because that was what her husband used even though they’ve been separated for over a year – her packet of Atorvastatin and the glass of water she always leaves out before she goes to bed in case she wakes up coughing in the night. And next to them, on the edge closest to the bed, the photograph: the three of them, her and George and Lisa. Lisa is just a baby – it was their first holiday since they’d had her and the sun is on her face. Her mouth is open as she stretches out a hand to touch her mother’s face.

  *

  After his conversation with Leyla Abaza, Lockhart puts together a report on my death, which he presents to Inspector Barker, and Inspector Barker agrees to speak to his counterpart in Cambridgeshire Constabulary.

  Inspector Janet Lively at Thorpe Wood is sympathetic, but Lockhart’s report isn’t enough. Reopening an inquest can only be done under Section 13 of the Coroner’s Act if it can be proved there was a failure in law. And she’s read the report of her CID officers and is convinced they did a thorough investigation – even Lisa Evans’s boss at work said she’d been under a lot of strain at the time. She’d had a history of health problems, been on medication, missed work due to her mental health – and gone missing in the night on at least one occasion beforehand; there was quite a history leading up to the tragedy. Her partner was a doctor, after all.

  PC Lockhart is crestfallen when Barker tells him this. Lisa Evans’s death has bothered him for the whole of the time he has been putting together the Coroner’s Report on Thomas Warren – one has seemed so obvious, the other so much less so, and the ambitious part of him couldn’t help but think what a feather in his cap it would be if he found out something CID had failed to discover – but he’s realising there is such a thing as practicality, and resources, and rules, and of course he already knew that but part of him had hoped, deep down inside, that his own passionate conviction could trump all that. He’s young.

  For a few minutes after he has left Inspector Barker’s office after being told there will be no further action, PC Lockhart wonders why he bothered. He goes downstairs and sits on his chair, deflated. He wonders if policing is really for him – the pay is pretty shit, after all. There’ve got to be easier ways of earning a living.

  Then he checks his watch, and jumps to his feet.

  *

  I follow Lockhart over to the station. He stops on the concourse, underneath the information boards, looks at his watch again. While he waits, I look to the right, over at the cafe area, where I first saw Andrew. Stacey is nowhere to be seen today and Milada is managing alone – I say managing, there’s only two customers, who are together. She serves the couple two flat whites and I watch her face as she puts on her smile and says, ‘Sugar and spoons are over there,’ and ‘Anything else I can get for you?’ As the couple turn away with their drinks, her expression becomes bland again – not sad, exactly, but blank. I wonder what the future holds for her. She looks as though she is wondering that too.

  Melissa strides through the barriers towards us, legs scissoring, and turns at the Information desk, leaning over to say something to the staff member there, nodding, turning back. It comes to me that I miss my friend Dalmar. After this, maybe I will go and track him down. I know he’s on nights at the moment and as it’s mid-afternoon, the light is fading, maybe he’s still asleep. Or he might be up by now, eating something that will do a passable impression of breakfast. I hope it isn’t crisps. I feel a need of him, all at once, his goodness and solidity.

  ‘Hello,’ Melissa says to Lockhart, and he nods in return. ‘They’ve just called,’ she says, ‘they’ll be here any minute. Thanks for popping over.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Lockhart says.

  ‘It’s not that I think we’ll need you or anything,’ Melissa says, ‘it’s just, useful, I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Lockhart repeats. All the cops at the BTP are used to this: half their job is being visible, standing around, just in case.

  Andrew and Ruth step through the sliding doors behind us, look around and see Melissa waiting for them. They come over and shake hands. Melissa introduces them to Lockhart and says, ‘He’s going to walk over with us.’

  The group turns and walks through the barriers.

  *

  On Platform Seven, Andrew and his sister stand next to each other, very close together. Ruth lifts her hand and grasps her brother’s arm as they stare down into the four-foot in their moment of silent homage.

  The platform is quiet, no train is due. The light is dull, the sky darkening. Beyond the freight depot and the junkyard, above the row of council housing, the clouds bunch together as if huddling for comfort against the night to come. Dusk is always lurking in wait at this time of year and soon it will begin its inexorable descent.

  Andrew is trying and failing to be brave – I can read him now, he is just like any other person on the station. He is thinking that he is an adult and should have an adult’s understanding – perhaps, even, the power of forgiveness. He cannot manage forgiveness, though. Whether that is a fault in him or the very concept of it, he cannot fathom. He only knows that all he can manage is a kind of letting go. It happened. It is in the past.

  Ruth, for all her needy clutching at his arm, is feeling less than him. She has been the most overtly damaged, but now she is here on Platform Seven what she really feels, although she won’t admit this to Andrew, is kind of nothing. She will choose her own route to letting go, a fiercer one, based on rage – a letting go that is less kind to herself than Andrew’s, and one that may be storing up problems for her later in life. But that is in the future. For now, she stands clutching her brother’s arm, so tightly it is actually a little uncomfortable for him, as if she might fall, and she stares down onto the tracks and thinks this simple thought: I’m glad you’re gone. Not dead, gone. She has never wished her father dead, not even in her most bitter, vengeful moments, but the fact that he is gone gives her a release of sorts, for now all forms of bitterness and revenge are pointless, after all. It’s just her and her brother, and they are together for this moment at least.

  I can only guess their future. I think of Andrew feeding his hedgehog on the evening when I first followed him home, feeding the hedgehog before himself even though he was hungry enough to eat a bowl of cereal as soon as he went inside. I think Andrew will be alright because he has the capacity to care about a hedgehog. Ruth, I am not so sure … For all the years of therapy, there is something about her that is more destroyed. I’m not sure how well she will be able to love. The jury is still out.

  *

  To their left and a little further back, Melissa stands discreetly out of sight. She is glad she has allowed this small visit even though she is freezing cold and has an
awful lot of work to do so hopes they won’t be too long. I got it wrong last time, she is thinking about the poor parents. I want to get this one right. Her mum is cooking a beef casserole with dumplings tonight, her favourite. Her mum always puts herbs in the dumplings and makes sure they have crispy brown tops, not like the soggy lumps you get with pub lunches. She wasn’t sure how long this visit would take or how close she would have to stand to Andrew and Ruth so she’s glad she asked PC Lockhart to accompany them.

  She didn’t want any members of the travelling public to interrupt them so before she left her office, she took off her red VTEC jacket and put on her fine wool coat, the long navy one, and wound her apricot-coloured scarf around her neck. She has her arms crossed and pressed tight to her body, against the cold, hands tucked between her sleeves and her coat because she forgot to put her gloves on. Her sleek hair is held in a ponytail.

  PC Akash Lockhart stands a couple of metres away from Melissa, a little bit behind so he is well out of Andrew and Ruth’s eyeline, giving them some space. His presence isn’t necessary but all the same he can’t help feeling a little nervous as he watches them stand on the edge of the platform. He wonders when the next train is due and thinks, should I be a bit closer to them, just in case? He watches them while pretending not to.

  This involves watching Melissa, who is in between him and them. He’s never really looked at Melissa for any length of time and this is the first time he’s seen her not in uniform. She has a neat nose, slightly retroussé. Her hair is fine but there is a lot of it and it shines across her scalp, the ponytail band tight at the nape of her neck, and just at the point that he is noticing her, she glances his way and gives a shy smile, in acknowledgement that what they are doing is a little unusual. He gives an involuntary smile in return while the ground opens up before his feet and it is as if he is tumbling in while thinking, oh no, really? Surely not. She’s in her thirties, and she’s white. Really?

  Melissa has noticed Lockhart too – or, to be more accurate, she has felt the spark that crossed between them as they exchanged their smiles, noted the tiny, mutual flicker of it in their look. She is not thinking, oh no, though, she is smiling to herself and already moving on. Melissa is not looking for anything. She is thinking of how great it will be to go home to her mum’s beef casserole – it’s just the two of them now, although her brothers live in Peterborough. She’s thinking of how she reckons she can be Level D in Area Management within two years and then, well, the field is wide open. She looks around the station and thinks that it may not appear to be glamorous or fun but she loves working here. Her job is to make sure that all the thousands of people who pass through every week scarcely notice her, or her staff, because they are doing their job so well they are invisible. All these people, men and women, young and old, all these souls, and she keeps them safe, and they never know, and that suits her fine. She loves her staff too, every one of them. If anything happens, every one of them will do their best. They will all put their lives on the line.

  *

  Dalmar should be here, I think. But Dalmar has not been invited. It hasn’t occurred to anybody that he should be. Andrew and Ruth don’t even know about Dalmar. They don’t know that he was the last person to see their father alive, that he shouted at him across the tracks in a vain attempt to save him and was the first person to rush over to Platform Seven: that he saw what they are trying very hard not to imagine. Only I know what witnessing Thomas Warren’s death has done to Dalmar, the ghosts it has unloosed in his head.

  Even Dalmar himself doesn’t know that it was him I saw across the tracks the night I died but I know now why I felt that yearning for him, as my memories came back: he was the last glimpse of safety that I saw. I’m glad he doesn’t know it, with his capacity for self-blame. Nothing was his fault – it was what I was running from, not towards – but I’m not sure he would see it that way if he knew.

  It feels wrong that he has been left out of this afternoon’s small ceremony. I go up the ramp, along and out of the station, turning left, to the narrow nearby streets where Dalmar lives.

  24

  Dalmar isn’t in his room and the bed is neatly made: he’s been up for a while, I’m guessing, maybe he’s out on errands. I’m about to leave, when I hear voices coming through the wall that divides his room from the back bedroom, the low rumble of his voice and a more high-pitched one responding.

  Dalmar is in Angela’s room, standing self-consciously in the centre of it while Angela is crouching on the floor, unplugging a kettle that sits on the carpet near a plug socket. She rises, a little red-faced, and without looking at Dalmar, takes the kettle over to a small sink in the corner – a tiny sink in fact, the kind of sink where, if you bent and splashed water over your own face, you would soak the carpet around your feet. As she turns the creaking tap, she says over her shoulder, ‘Sit down.’

  There is a wooden chair next to a small table on the other side of the room but Angela has gestured behind him, to the single bed against one wall. Dalmar glances around and then sits, carefully. He has the air of a man who agreed to come in for a cup of tea two minutes ago and is already wondering how soon he can decently leave.

  While Angela returns the kettle to its socket and kneels on the floor beside it, two mugs and an open carton of milk next to her, he looks around the room. It is darker than his, being at the back of the house, and a little smaller, but she has done it nicely enough. The bed has a quilt in pinks and purples and a matching purple cushion, huge and square, propped up against the headboard. It is the kind of thing Dalmar guesses is useful if you think of drinking tea in bed as a treat, a strange British habit that he has never acquired. On the wall perpendicular to where he sits, there is a scarf, a kind of garbasaar, but with tassels, which she has pinned to the wall with brass tacks.

  She looks up from where she is still kneeling, making tea, and catches him looking at the wall. She gives a small laugh.

  ‘That wall’s had damp,’ she says. ‘That’s what that scarf is for. It’s supposed to be fixed but there’s a stain. I painted over it but the paint flaked off, maybe there’s still some damp there, I don’t know, so that’s just to cover it. I got it at the market.’ She’s embarrassed, but Dalmar thinks it was a good thing to do. He thinks that however little you have – the scarf was probably two or three pounds – you can still brighten a place, make it your own. He thinks that it is the kind of thing that a woman likes to do whereas a man would just look at the damp and feel depressed. Women’s habits, women’s things: how long is it since he has seen women’s things? He’s seen plenty of women, they’re all over the place in this country in various stages of undress, but their things, their scarves and cushions and little – what is that odd English word? Ah yes, knick-knacks. That funny little collecting habit they have …

  Angela brings tea over and hands him a mug and he looks down into the tea, which is not any shade of brown that he is used to drinking. ‘Oh sorry,’ she says suddenly. ‘You probably have sugar, don’t you? I haven’t got any, I gave it up.’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ Dalmar says, even though he doesn’t really see the point of tea without sugar. He manages to sip it without wincing and smacks his lips so that she knows he is actually drinking it.

  ‘I do have biscuits though.’ Angela opens the cupboard above her table and brings down a packet of custard creams, unopened, which he suspects she may have bought especially for this occasion.

  He says, ‘Thank you,’ and takes one, nibbling the edge of it. He has to admit, for a country whose food is so uniformly dreadful, the snacks are pretty good – he loves crisps, eats two packets a day sometimes. All the same, the effort Angela has gone to is making him feel tired. Her gas fire is on full and because her room is quite small, the fug in the room is making him drowsy even though he has only been up for an hour. He never manages to feel fully awake when he’s on nights, not until he’s actually on the station in the pitch dark and it’s so cold his manhood shrinks to the siz
e of the white grubs his uncle used to dig up from around his sugar cane at the beginning of the rainy season. He wants to be polite, but he doesn’t want to be so friendly that she gets the wrong idea, for he is now realising what has been blindingly obvious for a while, that Angela is hoping for a little more than friendship.

  He has been worrying about where she might sit – he has plumped for the middle of the single bed and not moving up to make room for her seems rude but to do so seems like an invitation, which is much worse. Luckily, she saves him from this dilemma by taking two biscuits for herself, putting the packet on the bed next to him, then turning and sitting on the brittle-looking wooden chair in front of her table. She looks at him and says, ‘What did you do, back home?’

  Odd to launch into such a question so quickly: she must be nervous. He attempts to keep his voice neutral as he says, ‘I was a research engineer. I worked on a hydro-electric plant. I was developing a new cooling system.’ He sees her blank look, then adds, ‘My job was to draw diagrams, you know, to design the machines, the systems.’

  As he explains this, he observes Angela shrinking a little before his eyes, in her fragile and unsteady chair. Her shoulders sag, minutely, and her chin drops. She was assuming he was like her, one of life’s no-hopers, someone who had never quite got anything right, but the pride and clarity in his voice has told her something different – he is not any sort of loser, merely a man dealt a rough hand, who could have just as easily been successful, both personally and professionally. He could be wearing a suit to work and living in a large house with a wife and a brood of children. He and Angela may be living in neighbouring rooms in one of the poorest areas of Peterborough, England, but they are not alike at all.