25
I’m going to start by saying goodbye to some people I haven’t even said hello to yet: the others.
The woman in the orange trouser suit can’t hear me – I float alongside her, talking to her while she smokes and smiles. I stand in front of her and she passes right through me. I was right, she was just a random image, no consciousness at all.
The homeless man on Priestgate is still sitting on the kerb. He lifts his head when I speak to him, although he keeps his hood pulled up and stares at me with a hollow gaze. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ I ask, ‘but what happened to you?’ He looks at me. ‘Drugs, compounded by malnutrition and untreated pneumonia. You can’t get a GP without an address and anyway, I don’t like authority figures.’ I had wondered if he was a refugee or asylum seeker but his voice is quite posh. Public school, I’m guessing, starting with something Class B at the far end of the playing field, graduating to the hard stuff at university, perhaps.
‘Was it right here?’ I say, and he nods.
‘Want to know how many people walked past me before anyone called an ambulance?’ he says.
I shake my head but he tells me anyway. ‘Twenty-three.’
I suppose if I hunted around Peterborough I could find plenty of other others – I’m avoiding the station itself, where Thomas Warren is still trapped, and the multi-storey car park with its grey malice. That one is still blurry, formless – it sounds like an odd thing to say, but I’m not sure it’s dead. I think there are probably hundreds of different types of others, if the truth be told. I think the living inhabitants of Peterborough wander around with no idea there is a parallel universe walking right next to them, through them. Well, maybe some of them know.
I want to say goodbye to the living too, as best I can, but I have one more special journey to make before I can. I am hoping she won’t be there, but I know she will be – that’s why I have to give it a try. If Lockhart did it for me, maybe I can do it for her.
*
I’m not rushing in the way I was that summer’s day when I was en route to meet Katie at the Showcase. I take my time as I drift down Star Road, going slowly because I’m coming from the opposite direction and it’s dark and I don’t want to miss the house. They are all very similar but I remember that the one I’m looking for had a concrete plant pot in the front garden, a wide thing filled with weeds, the kind you’d leave in your front garden for years, always intending to plant something.
It’s still there, and in the dark, the grey circle of the plant pot glows pale. I look up at the cheap sash window, which has no curtains or blind. It looks uninhabited and it is – but she is there, in the window: Donna Carlton.
It’s almost as if she’s been waiting for me. She isn’t at the bottom of the window, like she was before, her face staring out and her eyes large with desperation. She is standing up, in the middle of the window frame, as if it is the border of an oil portrait. She is wearing a loose, beige-coloured dress – I’m not sure if it’s a dress or a nightie. Her hair is brown, unwashed, I can see from here, drawn back into a loose ponytail. She doesn’t look much like her photograph in the Weekend Journal, it must have been an old one – but she is alike enough for me to have recognised her when Matty made sure I saw that report. Something in the eyes.
I go up to the window to take a better look – that’s something I couldn’t do last time. She watches me as I rise.
As I reach the window, she lifts up a hand and lays it flat on the glass. I lift mine and lay it flat on the other side, so our hands are palm to palm. She is trapped in the room in the same way I was trapped on Peterborough Railway Station. Behind her, I can see it is shabby and empty, no furniture but for an old sideboard against one wall, the carpet so threadbare it is completely worn through in places. There are two alcoves that look as though they once held shelves, screw-holes waiting to be filled in, rims of dirt and discoloured paint along the lines where the shelves once had been. What a desolate place to be trapped, I think. At least I had the staff and passengers to watch. All she can do is look out of the window at passers-by who never helped her and never will.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘What you sorry for?’ she replies.
‘I saw you in the window one day. If I had called the police you might be alive now.’
She shakes her head, slowly and sadly. ‘Oh right, love. No, you weren’t the only one and anyway I would have sent them away, did enough times.’
I stare at her and feel ineffably sad. We want so much to believe we are wrong and they give us just enough evidence for that.
‘What happened to you?’ she asks. ‘Did someone kill you?’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but not in the way yours did, not in a way he could be done for.’
She nods. ‘Mine got four years. The judge said it was clear that his remorse was genuine. He’ll be out soon if he’s on his best behaviour. I heard the cleaners that the council sent round. One of them said, apparently she was a real nightmare. Pissed me off, that did. I’d give her nightmares alright if I could.’
We both stay like that for a while. ‘I thought love set me free,’ I say, ‘but it wasn’t love, at least, not the kind of love I thought.’
She nods and says, ‘I had a lot of friends when I met him. I gave them all up. I had a cousin I was really close to, he was gay but he still didn’t like me seeing him.’
‘I should have done something that day.’
She tips her head on one side and gives a small smile. ‘I’ve told you, it’s okay. It wouldn’t have made any difference, not at that point. You know, it’s hard to explain, but he was always so sorry afterwards, sometimes it almost felt worth it, for the closeness we would have for a bit after, how he would hold me and hold me and tell me how amazing I was, how special I was. It would feel like nothing or nobody could hurt me, then. Thing is, the judge was right. It was always genuine. It just didn’t stop him next time. And each time it got a little bit worse, just a little bit each time, until one day it got as bad as it can get.’
‘Yes, well, I learned my lesson,’ I say. ‘When I saw you that day, it wasn’t just a test that I failed, it was a premonition.’
And then I reach into the room, bold as anything, right through the glass, and I take her and I lean back and I almost float horizontal, with my head raised, as a lifeguard does when she’s floating on her back and saving someone in a swimming pool, and I pull the woman right through the window and out of the house, until we’re floating above the pavement, and her mouth drops open in surprise and a smile lifts her features and I know I’ve done it – I failed to save her, but I’ve set her free.
‘You mean I can just go anywhere?’ She looks around in amazement, up and down Star Road, where a few pedestrians make their way home in the dark and a few others head the other way, towards town: a woman in a hijab with two young children; two lads, all dolled up and pushing at each other’s shoulders; an elderly man with a stick.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘there’s others like us and most of them are okay, you can talk to them. Just stay away from the multi-storey car park in Queensgate, there’s something nasty in there.’
‘That’s alright,’ she says. ‘I hate multi-storey car parks.’
‘Go to Waitrose,’ I say, as I turn to float off down Star Road, ‘the doughnuts look amazing.’
‘Where are you going?’ she calls after me.
‘I’ve got some living people to check on,’ I say, ‘to say goodbye.’
It isn’t just that I’ve set her free, after all. I’ve set myself free as well.
I’m going to see what they are all doing, one last time.
*
I catch up with Inspector Barker as he steps into the dim yellow glow of the low-ceilinged lounge room at the Bull and Sparrow. He walks straight into Tom, who has stopped just inside the door to put his bags down and unbutton his coat. Barker gets Tom’s attention by kneeing Tom in the back of his leg but Tom is too short and sturdy to collapse. ‘Oi, yer bastard,’ says
Tom as he turns, knowing it’s Barker behind him. The way they speak to each other in the band is completely different from the way they speak to each other if their paths cross at work.
Barker pulls a cheesy grin and lifts his new case to his chest, cradling it as you would a child, patting its bottom.
‘That’s never …?’ asks Tom.
Barker beams.
‘We are going to get a good look, aren’t we?’ says Tom.
Barker hesitates. He has been both anticipating and dreading this moment. He knows that Tom, of all people, will appreciate the beauty of an Uluru. Not everyone else will – not even band members. Not all ukulele players are collectors, after all – incredibly, some members of the band only own one, not so much as a mandolin on the side – but many are, like him, sufferers of UAS, or Ukulele Acquisition Syndrome. Tom has it even worse than him – he has eleven instruments to Barker’s six.
He wants Tom to appreciate the Uluru but he doesn’t want to hand it over and let him play a few chords, not on its first outing. It would be like handing Tom a pair of brand new shoes he had just bought and inviting him to take a walk in them with no socks on.
He goes for the obvious delaying tactic. ‘What you having?’ He nods towards the bar.
‘He’s got Jaipur in tonight, pint o’ that would be very nice, thanks very much,’ Tom replies.
‘Jaipur, really?’ Barker had come in looking forward to a Citra but Jaipur from the Thornbridge Brewery hasn’t been in since the last Beer Festival.
Barker bags his chair round the table by leaving the Uluru propped up on it, still in its case – nobody will touch it when it’s all zipped up.
There are half a dozen people at the bar already, getting their pints in before rehearsal starts while Bob, their conductor, waits impatiently for them all to assemble. Barker takes two pints of Jaipur back to his seat and puts the Uluru on the table in front of him while he settles, takes out his iPad and props it up on its stand.
As they wait for the rest of the band to take their places, Peter Barker, Inspector of the British Transport Police at Peterborough Railway Station, a man not given to generous impulses towards other men, reaches out and picks up the case in front of him, unzips it and removes the Uluru and turns to Tom, handing it over with a soft ‘Here you go, mate.’
Tom looks at him and takes the ukulele from him, saying quietly, ‘Mate … thanks …’ He holds it up and the people sitting either side of him and Barker turn to look, murmuring their approval. It’s a concert uke, acoustic only, hand-made in Vietnam, none of your Chinese factory production for a single element of it. Tom examines it front and back, its fine sheen, the inlaid flower on the headstock, between the tuning pegs. Mellow it looks; mellow it will sound. It will sing for them. Out of respect, Tom doesn’t strike a single chord, just holds the ukulele up and breathes, ‘It’s beautiful, Peter … beautiful …’ and Barker feels, as emphatically as he’s felt anything, that having someone else understand and share your love for something is a fine feeling, so it is.
Bob taps on his music stand. He doesn’t have a proper baton – he’s brought along a chopstick from home. It’s a standing joke.
‘Okay everyone,’ he says cheerily. ‘Right you are, enough of the chit-chat, let’s launch straight in, shall we? “The Story of My Life”.’ Those who haven’t opened their iPads yet lean forward and swipe their fingers across the screens to find the beginning of the playlist.
As Tom hands back the Uluru, he leans towards Barker and says, ‘You know he topped himself, don’t you? Thirty-eight years old. Silly sod. Imagine, you’re the British Bing Crosby and you go and blow it.’ Barker tucks his new ukulele into position in his arms. ‘Here’s a philosophical question for you,’ Tom murmurs. ‘Would you rather Michael Holliday had lived an ordinary life and never done all those songs or is it better he had all that success, gave everyone all that pleasure, and topped himself at thirty-eight, what do you reckon?’
It’s a daft question, Barker thinks. The British public would no doubt opt for having the songs but if you were Michael Holliday’s mum or wife or girlfriend you’d plump for the other answer. Luckily, he’s not obliged to respond, as Bob taps his music stand again and raises his arms in the air, the chopstick at an admonitory angle.
‘Here we go,’ Bob says, ‘let’s give it a bit of welly. I want everyone doing the whistling bit loud as Peter.’
Everyone round the table smiles at Barker and, as they launch into the song, him playing the Uluru in front of other people for the first time, he can’t help beaming with pride. As skills go, having a loud whistle may not sound like much, and given the choice he’d rather be a virtuoso player, but that evening he feels simply happy in his heart.
*
After the rehearsal, Barker drives home, whistling to himself. He wonders if tonight would be the right night to own up about the Uluru to the missus. Maybe not. She’s been a bit cold on him recently. He’s not sure what to do about it.
He pulls into the drive of his house and parks his car at the side, by the kitchen door. It’s dark but Janey has not yet closed the blinds in the kitchen and he can see her at the sink. She’s wearing Marigolds and a slight frown. She lifts a hand from the washing up to where her fringe, which could do with a trim, is annoying her, but because of the gloves she can only push at it with the back of her hand. She wrinkles her nose. He remembers how, when they first met, at the age of seventeen, she would wrinkle her nose when she disagreed with him, pausing before she spoke, as if the wrinkling was her way of thinking about it. Her hair was long and curly then. It’s shorter now, although still curly, and stranded with grey. They don’t argue much – unless it’s about money, like most couples. He’s more of a spender than she is, fair to say, although he wouldn’t call himself extravagant.
Peter Barker, Inspector of the British Transport Police, gets out of the car and takes both of his ukuleles from the passenger foot-well. He locks the car, opens the kitchen door and steps inside. Janey turns to greet him but he raises a finger to prevent her. He puts the Luna Pearl down on the counter top and extracts the Uluru from its case. Janey stands looking at him, her hands in the Marigolds raised up, foamy. He knows she is taking in that she hasn’t seen that particular uke before.
Peter Barker sings ‘The Story of My Life’ to his wife while playing his brand new Uluru concert ukulele. Janey still has her hands raised and the foam from the Marigolds has slid down her wrist and is dripping from her elbow to the floor, but he carries on staring at her as he sings, plays and whistles, so that she has to keep looking at him, because he means it.
She shakes her head slowly at him but he carries on. One more verse to go. He can do it. It suddenly feels incredibly important that he does.
He finishes with a flourish and raises the ukulele high, holding the pose for a moment. Then he gives a small bow.
He stands looking at her. She’s a bit thin now, is Janey, but how warm her smile is. She’s always had a beautiful smile.
‘Soft git,’ Janey says.
He smiles back.
*
It is my second visit to Andrew’s house and I can’t help thinking, as I turn into his road, how much I assumed when I was last here, and how little I knew.
At first, I wonder if he is out, as there are no lights on at the front, but a glow from behind the house tells me to check the back garden and there I find him with Ruth – they have returned after their pilgrimage to the station. They both have cans of beer, and fleece blankets round their shoulders, and they are burning something in an old metal drum that Andrew has placed in the middle of his plain square lawn. I wish I had been there in time to see what they are burning – family photographs? Old school books? Or maybe they just decided, as it was a clear night in December, that they might as well have a bonfire. Neither of them earns much money I reckon, so a night out on the town before Christmas maybe didn’t appeal.
They are sitting on the edge of the patio, in front of the sliding door
s, and watching the bonfire against the night sky. Orange flecks fly upwards, thin rectangular shapes flickering and rotating, like odd-shaped fireflies, quite high they go, before disappearing into the night. The garden is so small that they are sitting close enough to feel a bit scorched at the front but their backs are still cold. ‘I’ll make us a coffee in a minute,’ says Andrew, although he doesn’t move.
‘Got any hot chocolate?’ Ruth asks, after a while.
‘Not sure. I’ll look.’ And then, seamlessly, he adds, ‘He didn’t even say sorry in the note, don’t you think he could’ve? If he was going to top himself, after what he did, wouldn’t you think that any person would want to say sorry?’
So, they are burning the past. Good on them, I think. I’m all for it.
‘Well, he wasn’t any person, was he?’ Ruth says quickly, as if she would really rather not have this conversation.
‘You’d think …’ Andrew says, and his voice cracks and all at once it is as if they have swapped roles, and Ruth is the strong one.
She reaches out with a hand and grabs his right knee and wobbles his leg from side to side before releasing it. He wouldn’t take a normal embrace, or anything sentimental, but a rough gesture like that, with a hint of admonition, he’ll take that, just about. She knows her brother well enough to let go quickly.
‘Look at those sparks,’ she says.
‘If you tell me it’s his spirit going up to Heaven, I’m going inside now,’ Andrew says and although he tries to make it sound like a joke, they both know it isn’t.
‘No, I wasn’t going to say that,’ she said. ‘He was a fucker. If he’s anywhere he’s down there or, I dunno, trapped somewhere for all eternity. But I think that burning that stuff was good, for us, like, it can still be the past, can’t it, burning up, turning into sparks, can’t it?’
‘Is this the bit where you tell me we have a choice?’ Andrew says, and I’m surprised by how bitter he sounds. ‘How we can’t control what happened to us when we were children but we’re adults now and now we have a choice, how today is the first day of the rest of our lives or tomorrow is another day or some shit like that? How’s the yoga going, by the way? Learned to knit your own falafel yet?’
Platform Seven Page 35
