They talk a little more. He tells her about coming to the UK, although not anything about the journey. When he talks about moving to Peterborough she says, ‘I did wonder why you weren’t in London. Aren’t you all in London?’
He choses to ignore her probable definition of that ‘you’ and says, ‘It’s true, most Somalis are in London, there’s a big community in East London, Camden too, and Cardiff I believe, but I was happy to move away from some of those people, some of those people …’ How to begin to explain the complexities of clan and sub-clan to her? ‘Some of them are okay, but some of them were not my people.’
They fall to silence, then he says, ‘And what about you, Angela, where are your people from?’
She gives a small smile then, and he knows it is because it has pleased her to hear the sound of her name in his mouth. ‘Bolton,’ she says, ‘in Lancashire. My mother’s father was from Iran but he came over when he was a boy and we never talked about it so we never knew about it really, we’re just, you know, normal.’
His tea is finished. He drains the dregs ostentatiously and rises and she says quickly, ‘Another cup? I’ll have sugar next time.’
He shakes his head. Seriously, she is kind, but they live in the same house and it’s all going to get very awkward if he doesn’t make his position clear. He isn’t interested. He’s never been interested in white women. They always look sickly to him. Even when they are fat, like Susan in London, they seem somehow insubstantial, and Angela is as bony as a bird.
‘I’ve got to …’ he was about to say, do some cleaning, then realises how insulting that would sound, ‘… take my uniform to the launderette. You know, the twenty-pence pieces …’ He makes a circular motion with his hand to indicate the drying machine, which only gives you a few minutes for your twenty pence and fills your clothes so full of static they make a crackling noise when you take them out.
‘That must be hard,’ she says sadly, softly, ‘the night shift, I mean, you must get very tired. Are you on again tonight?’
‘Not really, I sleep during the day. No, not tonight, tonight I’ve got to get back to it, to days.’ It’s the changeover he finds hard.
The room is so small that he has to walk sideways to head towards the door from the bed. Angela stands up too and takes a single step towards him, coming right up to him, so that she is half in his way. He would have to push past her to leave so he stops and stays motionless, waiting to see what she will say or do next. She looks at his chest for a moment or two, then she lifts a hand and, without saying a word, places it flat on the chest, resting it on the old T-shirt he is wearing. She keeps the hand there and stands very still, as if she is waiting for his body warmth to seep through his clothing in order to make sure he is real.
He stands there, not knowing what to say or do, her hand flat against his T-shirt, the fingers spread. She is looking at her hand where it lies against him, frowning slightly, as if she has just discovered a mark on his clothing.
And then his hand does something equally unexpected. It comes up, his right hand, and it covers hers.
She raises her gaze, and looks him in the face. Neither of them speaks. I can’t kiss you, he thinks, it’s not that I can’t remember how to do it, it’s pretty automatic as I recall, it’s that I can’t remember how to want to do it.
She smiles then, as if he has spoken aloud. She gives a small nod. ‘It’s okay,’ she says. She looks at his large hand covering her thin bony one, still resting on his chest, and it is as if this is enough, for now at least, as if this will keep her going for as long as it takes and that she understands that might be very long, or never.
‘Next time I’ll have sugar,’ she says, and they both drop their hands, although he can still feel the imprint of hers against him. For the first time in twelve years, it occurs to Dalmar that instead of having to make everything happen, he could just let something happen, that someone else could make it happen and for once, the something that someone else makes happen to him could be a good thing, a kind thing, or at least worth the risk.
And then he thinks of how little she knows of him, and turns away so brusquely that Angela steps back with one foot, a startled expression on her face.
‘I don’t like sugar,’ he says, loudly. The echo chamber of his chest means his voice is startlingly deep when he raises its volume, a whole register lower from when he is softly spoken.
He looks at her and sees she can tell this statement isn’t true, that he’s only saying it to disagree with her, put her in the wrong.
He turns to the door and opens it, not looking back at her and not closing it behind him when he leaves. He strides the few paces to his own door and closes it firmly behind him, not slamming it but bringing an emphatic full stop to the encounter. How many times must he close his door before this woman gets the message?
In his own room, Dalmar sinks to the floor on his knees and clenches both fists and brings them up to his head, pressing hard on each temple, hard enough that his knuckles will leave a mark. Here he is, in this room on his own, safe, and there is this woman in the room next door wanting something from him and doesn’t she understand? He was responsible for the death of a woman like her.
I see the picture in Dalmar’s head, then, the picture he spends his whole life trying to keep out of his head: the other men arguing, the woman crouched and whimpering in the bottom of the boat, her jilbaab dark with sea water because she had been sitting low in the middle, where it was dirty and wet, and Dalmar’s friend Abshir sitting next to him. Four of the other men are on their feet and shouting, and one of them grabs the woman by her upper arm and hauls her up – she gives a cry of pain, collapsing in his grasp, too weak to stand, and as the man shoves her towards the side of the boat she cries out and prays and Dalmar’s friend Abshir gets to his feet but before he can protest, Dalmar reaches up with one of his large hands and pulls him back down, hissing into his ear, ‘Sit down, you fool, or you will be the next to go over the side!’ There must be twenty men in the boat, the waves are bad and the small vessel sits low in the water and bounces up and down – the argument is rocking it to and fro. There is no land in sight. A young man, a boy, really, no more than fourteen, sitting opposite Dalmar, has his eyes closed and tears streaming down his face. The men either side of him are muttering prayers. Dalmar is thinking, we are all going to die. It makes no difference whether we intervene or not, this argument will tip the boat over and then we will all die.
The woman shrieks and begs for her life as the men who are on their feet manhandle her over the side.
And I realise it was not that Dalmar didn’t intervene to save the woman being thrown over the side of the boat, it is that he prevented his friend from doing so: that is what haunts him. Some of us are haunted by the things that have been done to us and some of us are haunted by the things we’ve done and for some of us unhappy people, it is both. We are tossed on the waves of our memories in a boat so small that it can scarcely contain our unhappiness.
If Abshir had intervened, or Dalmar, they would have been next over the side – they would have almost certainly given their lives for nothing. Or the ensuing fight would have overturned the unseaworthy vessel and everyone would have drowned, including the woman and the weeping boy sitting opposite. But that is not what Dalmar is thinking as he crouches on the floor of his room with his knuckles crashed against his temples, brought to his knees by a woman’s kindness and her tea and her custard creams – he is thinking that he is a terrible human being who let a woman drown, and it doesn’t matter how many Somalis have extended the hand of friendship since he came to this grey, freezing, poky little island of a country – it doesn’t matter how many invitations he gets to the mosque or how many women want to comfort him when they see the damaged look in his eyes – what is wrong with these women? What do they get out of this constantly being understanding? Do they just enjoy feeling really good about themselves? It is all immaterial, in any case, because Dalmar, although he has never
been a Believer in the way he was raised to be and the way he knows he ought to be, believes enough to feel that it is in our lifetime we are punished for wrongdoing, or failing to prevent wrongdoing. Who knows, maybe if he hadn’t gone off sick the night that young woman died, maybe he would have been able to prevent that? That was another moment when he failed. Those moments of failure: we are punished by being stuck in those moments for as long as we live, trapped inside them, unable to forget the pictures; the men on their feet, the look that Abshir turned on him after he had pulled him back down. And then the woman’s head, bobbing in the waves, a black dot becoming more and more distant … and it was a man’s head that he had seen on the tracks at Peterborough Railway Station, just resting there between the tracks, looking up. Only a few minutes earlier, he had been drinking tea with Tom in the DTL office on Platform One and thinking about training in Customer Services and thinking, for the first time, that he could move forward in this country now, leave everything else behind, because Tom was friendly and helpful and didn’t care where he came from or what he had done – and that was why the man had been sent to remind Dalmar what a terrible person he was. That is how you are punished, with pictures. That is why you should never look.
*
I go out into the street, as low as I have ever been, my head full of Dalmar’s distress, his inability to forgive himself and my inability to communicate to him that none of it is his fault – least of all what happened to me. I wish I had never remembered anything about my past and I wish I didn’t know about Dalmar’s. To live in a world where such things happen – I’m glad I’m dead. Dalmar is right to hide himself away. All is known now; all is finished. Matty caused my death and lied about it and he got away with it. He is living with his new girlfriend in Longthorpe and soon she will be pregnant with his child. Andrew and Ruth have paid their last homage to their father on Platform Seven and are now trying to get on with their lives. PC Lockhart has completed his investigations, to no effect, and is wondering whether CID is for him. He is trying to pretend he hasn’t fallen for Melissa because he needs another unattainable beauty in his thoughts like he needs a hole in his head. Dalmar feels bad about Angela and Angela feels even worse about Dalmar. Inspector Barker has yet to take his new ukulele to rehearsal, despite Tom’s repeated requests, nor has he owned up to his wife about its purchase. It’s all shit. The world is shit. I wish I was still trapped on the station with no memory, half asleep, in blissful and interminable ignorance.
*
I can’t face going back there now, so I turn down Bright Street and head towards the city centre – Peterborough town, with its occasional and lovely old stone buildings hanging on in the midst of all the seventies and eighties crap, and once upon a time the crap was incongruous but it’s all rubbish now and the nice old buildings are the incongruous ones. It’s called progress.
It is December. As the light fades, the reds and oranges and yellows of the Christmas lights come into their own. It’s the office party season and there are people out on the street – some of them look like they have been at it all afternoon. Men have inane grins and tinsel wrapped round their skulls. Women who would never be seen dead in a red dress all year round have discovered their inner Santa. It’s all one last desperate gasp of fake fun and consumerism and it’s pointless, I think: the expense, the false bonhomie, the waste – in their hearts, people know it is pointless. And all it will mean to me is more of the dark.
I turn onto the pedestrian drag full of bitterness and hopelessness: and then, I see her.
She is sitting in the window of a noodle bar called Chop Chop. I only notice her because I turn to look at an argument that is going on in the doorway. The manager, a young Chinese man, is trying to block a couple of drunks from entering, middle-aged white men in bulky working jackets. The young manager is waving his arms in a shooing gesture, much as you would to a couple of flies, and one of the drunks has his fists raised and is ready to make something of it but the other takes his mate by the arm and says, ‘Come on, they deep-fry fucking rats in there …’ and pulls him away.
As they pass the window, they stop to make leering gestures at a woman sitting at the counter – one pulling a face, the other grabbing his crotch and shaking it up and down – and the woman gives a slow blink of contempt and turns her face away.
The men have gone and in their place there is me, staring in at her.
She’s dolled up for a night out, eyebrows thickly drawn, the upward lift of them a combination of irony and approval. Her hair is full, her lips glossed. She’s wearing a yellow jumper with a gold thread through it. On the stool beside her, there is a black wool coat with a shawl collar. I was with her when she bought that coat from TK Maxx. It’s a label of some sort, I can’t remember which. It has huge gold buttons. Rosaria, my friend, how are you?
She stares out into the night, her look vacant for a moment, then she looks down at her noodles. That girl was always crazy for chow mein. She’d eat it for breakfast if only she left enough time for breakfast before she had to go to work. The chopsticks in her right hand delve and bring up a mouthful that is far too large to eat in one go. I was always telling her about that. She shovels it in and then ends up having to bite at it when it’s half in, half out her mouth, bending her head low to let the remainder of it drop back into the cardboard box, although a noodle slithers down her chin on its way, leaving a trail of soy. Jeez, girl, you are such a messy eater.
She puts the chopsticks back into the box – jamming them in so they stand upright – and checks her phone. I wonder if she is waiting for someone, a friend or a date. If it’s a date, I don’t feel it’s one she is particularly looking forward to. There is no alertness in her gaze when she looks back out at the street, no sense of anticipation. She eats a bit more, plays on her phone, gets bored of it, looks around, goes back to the phone. Eventually, she becomes still and just sits. I am guessing the noodles are in preparation for a night of drinking, with a group perhaps. She was always big on lining her stomach first.
I look at her through the glass, my beautiful friend, and it’s almost as if our gazes meet for a moment, as if what she sees is not her own reflection but mine, in the same way Andrew did the night I followed him home and hovered outside his kitchen door. She can’t see me, of course, only her own gaze looking back, but I feel certain that in that moment she can feel the fact that she can’t see me. Because I am there, she feels my absence – to a greater or lesser extent, my absence is always there.
She gives a sigh, picks up the paper napkin on the counter top and wipes her chin. The box of noodles is half full but she’s lost interest. She pushes it away and turns to the handbag sitting on top of her coat. She pulls out a spotty plastic make-up bag, plonks it on the counter and extracts a compact mirror and a lip gloss. I smile to myself. I gave her that compact. It’s a vintage one I found in a car boot sale, gilt, scallop-shaped, with a slightly rusted clasp. The mirror inside it was still good, though. It inspired us to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon watching Audrey Hepburn films. She said for her next birthday she wanted a feather boa and a cigarette holder but I think by the time it came round, I forgot.
She rubs her lips together and then pauses, the mirror still held high – she is thinking about me. She breaks into a smile. She lowers the mirror, still smiling, and I see the pictures in her head. The time we worked together in the admin office of the Further Education College, a holiday job processing enrolment forms – that was how we met. The short bald guy called Gilbert who was obsessed with her and used to leave bars of Dairy Milk on her desk – anonymous chocolate – and it was a week before we realised he was only the fucking Principal. The holiday we had in Corfu, which was a bit of a disaster because I was saving for my flat and so had booked us something called Bargain Fun – turned out it meant the cheapest flat possible in the noisiest resort on earth and so we bailed and went and stayed in a nearby village and on the last night in the local taverna we joined in a dance that was called
something like dance in a ring of fire. The waiters lit candles round us and all I could think as we danced was that I was wearing a halter-neck I had borrowed from Rosaria that had one of those labels saying keep away from fire. On the flight home, we had a row about some money she owed me, and didn’t speak for four months, it was awful.
I rang her in tears one day, about a horrible Saturday job I had in a sofa store where my boss was a woman in glasses who was such a bitch to me, and Rosaria said she was going to come to the store and we were going to go into the woman’s office and tell her together just where she could stick her upholstered leather armchairs and she would have done it as well.
Rosaria misses me terribly, but she’s glad of all the things we did together, the fun we had, the conversations – and it doesn’t diminish her grief or her bewilderment or anger but she’s made a choice. She has chosen which pictures to remember. Right now, as she sits in the window of Chop Chop with her half-eaten prawn chow mein, she is remembering the time when she had flu and I made her a cake and took it round but because I’d put the butter icing on before the sponge was completely cold it had melted and flowed off the top and down the sides of the cake. When I handed over the tin, she prised off the lid, looked down at it and said, ‘Oh Lis’, puddle cake, my favourite.’ We sat on her bed, with snotty tissues on the bedside table, and each had a Lemsip because I was feeling a bit rough too and ate the puddle cake with spoons. Thank you, I think to myself, and she can’t see or hear me but all the same she puts her head on one side, scratches her scalp, rubs her lips together, sighs, and smiles.
Thank you Rosie, oh thank you for having the courage to remember happiness.
It is time to say goodbye.
Platform Seven Page 34
