Sensibly, Ruth ignores this outburst. ‘We do,’ she says quickly. ‘You know we do, we make a hundred choices every day.’
‘That’s different.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Yeah well,’ he says. The bitterness in his tone has not abated. ‘I choose not to think the past is past and the rest of our lives goes forward from here and I can put it behind me and all that crap. How d’you like them onions?’
‘I’m just …’
‘Lets him off the hook, doesn’t it? He doesn’t deserve to get let off the hook, he should have gone to prison and rotted and been scared to take a shower.’ He has a point.
‘He’s dead, he doesn’t know either …’
‘I know he’s dead! That’s what fucking annoys me. He didn’t deserve to get off that lightly.’
There is a small silence. The flickering orange flecks fly up from the bonfire and there is a crack from the very heart of the fire as something, a piece of wood perhaps, collapses onto the embers beneath. When she speaks, Ruth’s voice is so quiet I can hardly hear her. ‘You really think he got off lightly? You think he would have done that, could have done it I mean, done what he did, if he’d got off lightly?’
Andrew is silent for a while.
Ruth says, softly, ‘We’ve been there, and now we have, one thing I know was he didn’t do it because he thought it would get him off the hook, he did it because he was in proper agony. He got his punishment. I’m not just saying it to make us both feel better, seriously. Fuck this, you got a cigarette?’
‘Inside.’ He still doesn’t move. When he speaks again, his thoughts aren’t really a logical response, but his tone is a little mollified. He’s been listening, even though he’ll never admit it. Ruth has always been the disaster, after all, not him. It’s hard for him to concede the role of strong sibling, even for a conversation in front of a bonfire in the dark. ‘Yeah, well, just don’t start the forgiveness crap with me, okay? He doesn’t deserve it.’
‘No,’ she says, ‘but we do.’
I wait for another sarcastic response from Andrew but instead he puts his arm round her shoulders and she leans her head against him for a moment, just briefly, before they move apart again – neither of these two is good with physical contact of any sort, that much is obvious, and I’m pretty sure they are always going to bicker like crazy.
There is another silence, then Ruth says, ‘You still seeing Danny?’
‘Nah,’ he replies. ‘Haven’t seen him in ages.’
‘You know,’ she says, ‘I was walking to work the other day, along Eye Road, and I passed two women and one was saying to the other, they’ve chosen the name, it’s something or other, then a lorry went past at that point and I didn’t catch what the name was, baby I presume, might have been a dog but I think it was a baby. So she said, they’ve chosen a name, then she added as I walked past them, but they’re calling her Ella for short.’
The bonfire makes a crackle and they watch it.
‘Thing is, what do you reckon Ella is short for?’
Andrew presses his lips together and frowns, looks up at the sky. ‘I dunno, what do you think?’
‘Elementary?’ Ruth suggests.
Andrew puts his head on one side and frowns, giving it some thought. ‘Elephant?’
The flames die down and drop, the fire still glows. Then Ruth says decisively, as if it settles the matter, ‘Umbrella.’
*
There is one more stop to make before I head back to the station.
Angela is in her room, writing a note. She has decided to give it a last shot with Dalmar. He was rude to her when he left her room earlier that day but she knows that was because she crossed a line in putting her hand on his chest. In truth, she did it because it was what she wanted him to do. If she’d thought she’d be able to get away with it, she would have taken one of his large, soft hands and placed it on the hard bony space beneath her throat, just so she could feel the warmth of it on that space, and so he could feel the bone above her heart. She feels a bit bad about it now, because she knows that although it was alright for her to touch him first, it wouldn’t have been alright the other way around, and she feels the unfairness of that, in this particular situation at least. She wants to do it but, even more, she wants him to want to do it, and to feel able to do it. It’s all very confusing for her, but she knows it’s even more confusing for him.
Not all love is physical love, she knows that. And not all physical love can happen just because two people want to touch each other. Between two bodies, the air is often thick. For some months now, Angela has been wondering what it would be like to lie next to Dalmar in a bed – he is much heavier than her and the weight of him would make a gradient of either of their cheap mattresses, there might be a bit of rolling or sliding involved, but that would be okay if he lay on his back and she could park herself into the space between his torso and his arm. She would be quite happy to do this fully clothed, to not even stroke each other, or kiss. She just wants to know what it would feel like to lie down with him. She wants to experience the space between his arm and his torso, to be enfolded by him. That would be enough.
And so Angela takes her courage in both hands and slips the note under Dalmar’s door. It reads: I hope I didn’t embarrass you or anything but if you want to knock on my door later this evening like in an hour I’ll be back from the shops and we could have some pasta I’ve got. It’s fresh pasta. Vegetarian, just in case. Regards. Angela. She hasn’t added a kiss.
*
Dalmar is in his room, hanging a towel on a hook on the back of his door, when the note slides towards his feet with a soft hiss. He stares down at it for a moment, much as he might stare at a mouse that had just squeezed under the door. He bends and picks it up and after he has read it, sits on his bed holding it and thinking to himself: plenty of men would, after all. It has been so long, he has no doubt that the brush of skin upon skin would be enough – and what kind of fool is he, to look a gift horse in the mouth, isn’t that the phrase? (He has never understood it – with most English phrases, he has looked into their origins, got his head around them, but this one seems so palpably stupid, he baulked.) Perhaps, if that could be the end of it, one time, if he could guarantee that, he would be tempted. A man has needs, after all. But then he forces himself to think of all that would follow: the necessity of making sure that she felt okay afterwards, the passing each other in the hallway …
One of his friends in London, Raage, had said to him, ‘Dalmar, you will know you have recovered when you find yourself sitting in this country and instead of thinking about everything you’ve lost, you find yourself wanting to take care of someone or something. It doesn’t matter what. Plant something in the ground. Paint an old man’s front door. But best of all, listen, my friend, is find a woman to take care of. Then you will know you have your strength back. You will be a man again.’
He understood the sense of those words. Dalmar has always known the truth: that the great search of life is not to find the person who will love you, but the person you yourself will love. But there is a difference between knowing something and feeling it.
An hour later, he pulls off his T-shirt and puts on a clean one, and goes and knocks lightly on Angela’s door – in truth, the main reason he does it is because he has nothing else to do and the evening after a run of night shifts always feels strange and empty.
She asks him to fetch the chair from his room so that they can sit at the table together and she has clearly decided that it is her business to make him feel at ease, so she does all the talking while she boils the pasta. They sit down and eat. He likes the pasta very much; the bland bulk of it is surprisingly comforting. Food cooked for you by someone else, whatever it is – it always tastes so much better than food you cooked yourself. He’s happy for a while, just eating and listening to her talking. He is glad she has not embarrassed him by offering him alcohol, which seems to be the British solution to any form of awkwardne
ss.
After the pasta she makes coffee and, without saying anything, brings over a bowl of sugar, light brown crystals in a small blue bowl, with a teaspoon, and he knows he is making an apology of some sort as, without referring to his behaviour earlier in the day, he loads three teaspoons into his cup. She made a special trip to the shops earlier that evening to make sure she had sugar – and he has accepted it. She watches him while he stirs.
While Angela watches him, he watches his coffee. He watches the spoon going round and round in it as if the action is independent of his hand. A silence comes between them then and after a relatively easy and pleasant meal he fears that if he raises his eyes, one of two things will happen: either he will meet her gaze and drop it, which will be awkward, or he will meet her gaze and hold it, which will be more awkward still. He thinks it better not to meet her gaze at all. But he can feel it upon him, as plain as the round white light bulb in the shade above them.
As he stirs the coffee, the spoon clinks against the mug and the thought crosses his mind that perhaps he should make the effort, meet her gaze, and take whatever follows. He sighs inwardly as he carries on stirring beneath the full beam of Angela’s need because he knows that he is not strong enough. Her attention frightens him; and his fear makes him despise himself, and he’s had enough of despising himself. He likes Angela more now but really, he just wants her to leave him alone.
He won’t have to say as much – these things are better not articulated. He just won’t look up. He won’t look up on this or any of the other occasions that they eat or have tea together and he won’t meet her gaze when they pass each other in the hall and eventually she’ll get the message. She won’t be offended, he knows, she’ll just blame her own inadequacies. He won’t have to say anything.
‘Dalmar,’ she says then, gently, and the sound of his name in her mouth breaks something in him: his name, said by a woman, so softly, the gentleness of it.
‘Yes,’ he says, still stirring his coffee – he’s been stirring it for so long now there can be no doubt that it is fully blended but he’s watching it intently to make sure.
‘Look at me.’
I leave them to it.
*
I don’t know where PC Lockhart lives so I hope, as I make my way back to the station, that he will be on duty. I’m in luck. He’s starting a night shift and I find him sitting in the office going through the log.
He’s slumped in his chair. Bad for your back, that posture, I think. He has the logbook on his lap, but he’s staring straight ahead and I read right away that he’s thinking about Veena, soon to be married to his cousin, which will make her his cousin too. Melissa reminds him of Veena in some ways – maybe that’s all that was about. He is twenty-four years old. He has had three girlfriends, one of whom was serious for a while. The gentle pressure has already begun, the questions from aunties, the Scottish as well as the Indian ones, about his plans. He supposes that some time before he is thirty, he will marry, have children, but already he feels certain that the kind of marriage he will have will be one of companionship. He cannot imagine feeling the kind of helpless desire he feels for Veena for anybody else. Inexperienced as he is, he knows it is the kind of passion that comprises pain and pleasure twinned: the pleasure he feels just looking at her, the pain at the certain knowledge that is all he will ever be able to do. He also knows that it is circular: not just that the pain is intensified by the pleasure but that the opposite is also true. His love for Veena has never been – and never will be – tested by availability. That is what gives it its piquancy. Already, at his young age, he knows that the purest form of romantic love is the one unalloyed by consummation.
Perhaps he should try and find out a bit more about Bina, the Mortuary Manager, she’d be much more suitable than Melissa. He liked her plump smile – she had a sense of humour, that much was obvious – but he’s tired at the moment, really tired.
His phone is on the table in front of him and there is the dull buzz of an incoming text. It’s from Inspector Barker, who’s been on early turn the last two days, so their paths haven’t crossed: Had word with Lively, she’s agreed to send DC to record witness statement from Leyla Abaza and add to file. Any further complaints against the good doctor, it’s on record. Well done.
And something happens in Akash Lockhart’s chest at that moment, a kind of fullness, soaring like joy but not joy, something more solid and satisfying than joy. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. He has done his job as well as he could. A truth that might have stayed buried has been unburied, and PC Lockhart knows in that moment that the pure love he feels for Veena is only one kind of love, and even though he doesn’t like Inspector Barker all that much he gives the phone a great smacker of a kiss, just before his colleague PC Mitchell bursts through the door yelling, ‘And here it IS, Merry CHRISTMAS, everyBODY’s having FUN! Ready for another fun-filled Friday night, Kashi-boy?!’
*
I don’t want to do it, but I feel I really ought.
I cross Station Road. I pass through the barriers. I turn right and mount the stairs to the covered walkway.
Thomas Warren is sitting on the metal bench at the end of Platform Seven. He doesn’t turn or look my way as I approach and I think, he can’t see me any more, now I’ve decided what to do. Now I am free, I am already gone.
I look at him for a while. He doesn’t move. His consciousness is trapped here, reliving the moment before his death, again and again. As time turns, all he will do is enter the station, again and again, mount the stairs, cross the walkway, again and again, but there will be no further investigation into him, no love or diligence to set him free. Instead, he is destined to always end up here on Platform Seven knowing only that he is alone, and that he is terribly and deservedly afraid.
His mortal remains won’t fare much better. They will stay in the mortuary at Peterborough City Hospital for a very long time. The inquest will take place in Huntingdon in the New Year and after that the body would normally be released to the family for burial but nobody will claim Thomas Warren. Nobody wants him, even when he’s dead. He will remain in pieces in the fridge in the mortuary for many months to come, until eventually Bina the Mortuary Manager, who thinks about that nice PC from time to time, will contact the hospital chaplain. The chaplain will agree Thomas Warren’s remains need to be disposed of in a suitable and dignified manner and agree to help. He will ask if it’s more suitable if they go for a Catholic burial at St Jude the Apostle or the Pentecostal Church on the Rock and Bina will say, ‘No idea, I don’t even know if he had any faith. He’s white, that’s all. No idea what he was.’ The phone calls will go on for a few months more and eventually Thomas Warren’s mortal self, such as it is, will go to an unmarked grave at St Jude in a ten-minute ceremony that will involve only the priest. While Thomas Warren sits on Platform Seven, contemplating what he is about to do, again and again, his body will spend its final months before burial as an inconvenience that takes up too much room in a fridge.
I turn away from him, back towards the stairs, leaving Thomas Warren on the bench and leaving Platform Seven for the last time.
*
I go over to Platform Three. If I get the 22.39, I’ll have to change at Stevenage but that’s okay, it’s about a half-hour wait but only another eleven minutes from there.
There aren’t many people heading south at that hour. Strung out along the platform, singly or in twos, men and women huddle in the cold, coats buttoned. As I sit waiting, there is a distant noise to my right and then a huge clamour and all at once a goods train arrives – the size and sound of it, vast and all-consuming, thundering and screeching as it speeds past – then, in an instant, it is gone. The only sign of it having passed through is a white plastic bag a few feet above the tracks, dancing in the air. It comes to me, then, what is so fine about death’s inevitability – in the face of it, we carry on. Every single one of us walks around with that knowledge, inside ourselves, like a lump of lead, an
d yet we rise each morning and we hug our partners and our children and our feet go clack-clack on the pavement to work, each stroke could be ringing out the sound of our impending doom, we could all drop dead of a heart attack at any moment or be about to cross the road at the wrong time, but no, it is a hopeful sound. In the face of it all, we keep our heads high: and even though I’m dead and gone, there will be more and more of us, and even if I was forgotten then every nice thing I had done, every smile I had offered, would live on inside someone else and that is the way you are triumphed over, Death. Be off with you, freight train. You are defeated by wave after wave of us and every little thing we do for one another.
‘The next train to arrive on Platform THREE, is the ten, thirty, NINE to London King’s Cross. Calling at. Stevenage. And. London King’s Cross.’
Here it is. It’s almost here. I’m so excited.
My ashes lie in Eastfield Cemetery but they are just my remains. I am here. I have neither flesh nor bone but I have consciousness and I can still feel love – I can feel love for myself and I can feel the love of others. It is the love of others keeping me conscious – not the crazed passion I felt for Matthew or the self-serving desire he felt for me – not even the raw neediness I felt for Andrew or the yearning for Dalmar. The love that keeps me is the daily, ordinary love that Melissa and Tom and Dalmar and all the others on the station feel for each other, and their families; the love that Inspector Barker feels for his fellow ukulele players; the sense of duty and the desire to serve the public that PC Akash Lockhart lives by – that is the love that set me free.
I am going to find my mother. I am going to Welwyn Garden City to be with her. I am going to make her feel that just as she is threaded through me, I am through her. The picture of the woman I kept seeing was never my future self: it was always her. And I will be there when she wakes up tomorrow morning and sits carefully on the edge of her bed and reaches out a hand for the framed photograph she still keeps by her side.
Platform Seven Page 36
