It comes to me that he must have been making this commute for some time – and yet I only noticed him when he was sitting in the cafe just after what that man did, as if witnessing that unlocked some special sort of perception for me and then Andrew’s unhappiness made him stand out from the crowd.
There he goes each day, through the barriers, mounting the stairs, trotting back down again to Platform Six. All week I watch, and not once while he waits for the 07.49 to Stowmarket does he look behind him, at Platform Seven.
*
While he is at work each day, I decide to explore. There are no barriers to my existence, now, after all. Peterborough is my oyster.
After being trapped on the station for so long, I decide to start locally, then gradually widen the circumference of my world. I begin with Waitrose.
It’s vast. I don’t remember it being this vast. It’s almost empty when I go, midday, but for a few women pushing toddlers in trolleys and some retired couples. As soon as I enter, I am assailed by sugar and fat. Since when did doughnuts come in so many flavours; lemon icing, raspberry icing, salted caramel icing? It isn’t just the doughnuts. I traverse the aisles. Ice cream sauce comes in creamy fudge flavour, Belgian chocolate flavour, raspberry coulis flavour and – my favourite – Alphonso mango, passion fruit and yuzu. What is a yuzu? Is an Alphonso mango significantly different from any other kind of mango – by which I mean, does it actually taste different when it is bottled with passion fruits and yuzus and a shedload of sugar? Will Mrs Barker, when her inspector husband brings home ordinary mango sauce, say, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Peter, I can’t possibly put this mango sauce on my ice cream. You know I only like Alphonso mango.’ Or, perhaps, ‘Where’s my yuzus?’
Rice: pure basmati, brown basmati, white basmati and quinoa. Wild rice – I’m presuming that’s a lot more fun than pure rice, and if you tire of wild, you can always go home to aromatic and fluffy. Next to the packets of rice are the packets of microwave rice, which is rice for people who can’t be bothered to cook rice. And next to them are packets of something called Cauli Rice, rice made of cauliflower, for people who not only can’t be bothered to cook rice, they don’t even like rice.
When did all this choice become necessary, let alone normal? It was normal, for me, once. I was once a person who wandered up and down aisles such as these and thought nothing of it. How come our physical needs and desires are catered for in such minute detail and with such infinite variety and yet it is so hard to get help when we feel sad? Where’s the supermarket display for that?
Beyond the low wall made by the magazine rack, there is a cafe area, empty but for a solitary retired couple who sit opposite each other by the floor-to-ceiling windows. On the table in front of them, they both have soup of the day, which today is green soup, and diagonal slices of baguette. They lather butter onto the baguette without speaking, then sit spooning the green soup into their mouths while staring straight ahead, right through each other. Above their heads muzak plays, softly. I watch them for a while, and wonder if they hate each other or love each other – or both, perhaps – whether they are not speaking because they only snarl these days, or whether it is simply that they prefer to sit together in comfortable, companionable silence.
Then I go and confirm my suspicions about carrots: they are, of course, even more orange than I remember.
On my way out, I drift along the salad bar, glancing into the tubs of salad one by one, wondering why so many of them contain kidney beans.
*
Next, Queensgate Shopping Centre, starting with John Lewis – yes, I know this implies a certain poverty of the imagination but there’s something about these small expeditions that is incredibly exciting when you’ve been denied them so long, the mundane rendered thrilling by my long exclusion from it. Perhaps it is simply that I can’t quite believe the world is still as it was. My reality is my reality and yet, here it still is, the old reality, trundling along, which is both pleasing and offensive.
John Lewis seems to be on a lot more floors than I remember and none of them seem to be the ground floor. I go up and down from one department to another. Hundreds of lipsticks at the cosmetics counters. How did I ever choose? And what is it about our mouths anyway? The importance of our mouths, women’s mouths I mean – it isn’t because that’s what we use to speak, that’s for certain. When we paint our mouths we are advertising kisses, not conversation – and yet I never knew a man who wanted to kiss lipstick. Lipstick was a paradox, then, both an invitation and an obstacle. No wonder men can be so difficult sometimes – they’re just really confused. Looking at it all, I feel an ache of relief at how simple I am now: mere consciousness, it doesn’t come any more simple than that.
In the electronics department, there are vast televisions, all in a row, all showing the same shot of a whale swimming lazily through a deep but bright blue sea. The whale looks as though it has been swimming forever and has forever still to go, turning slowly from side to side in the luminescent water. Its head is slightly lifted, as if it hasn’t quite given up hope of seeing something that matters. I know how you feel, mate, I say in my head to the whale. Its multiple forms turn towards me on the screens and nod – slowly and graciously, the vast heads moving up and down in unison. We acknowledge each other, me and the whale. I wish the whale well and drift away.
Afterwards, I go downstairs to the shoe department and linger for a while, watching women slip their feet into heels as if they are trying on a dream of themselves in which they are admired and desired. There’s no need to hang around here – I could go anywhere and after nearly two years of being trapped, there’s a lot to explore. Each time I come out, I decide, I will go a little further, explore the town – sooner or later, something or someone is bound to jog my memory.
The one place I will not go is the multi-storey car park. I know that whatever is in there is malign. Odd, though: there are others like me but whatever is in the multi-storey car park is something different. A ghost is someone’s past trapped in an eternal present. The grey shape on Level Six is different. It feels more like a premonition – a malevolent future rather than an unhappy history; or both, perhaps.
*
One day, as the light is fading, I flow out through the Queensgate Centre and onto Cathedral Causeway, wandering down the pedestrianised area to Bridge Street. It is a dull November day, overcast, the cloud cover dense like those great, thick folds of cotton wool you get in hospitals – something plays at the edge of my memory as I think this, myself lying on my back on a hard bed, my head on something soft, a white plastic arch above me as I am slid into the machine and a voice coming into my ears saying, ‘How are you feeling, Lisa? Alright? Just remember, it’s going to be very noisy.’
Looking at the people around me, their lack of hurry, I gather it isn’t that cold: there is an aimlessness to everything. Even the very skinny brown dog that is trotting round and round the benches in the middle of the precinct seems to do so with a lack of purpose. Maybe all the inhabitants of Peterborough are lost souls; perhaps this is just where everyone fetches up in the end. Maybe even the dog is a phantom. But if that’s true, why will no one talk to me?
To test my theory, I stand right in front of a woman as she comes out of WHSmith. She is in her mid-forties. Her hair has whitened prematurely and hangs in loose, shoulder-length curls – it suits her, her olive skin, her large dark eyes. She wears small, rimless glasses, a black leather jacket. I watch her as she comes towards me. Her face is still and she is staring into the middle distance. She is gripping her phone in one hand, not looking at it but hanging on to it as if she thinks she might fall if she lets go. I read her thought as she passes through me. When is she going to call back?
I turn and watch the woman’s back as she walks briskly away from me at a slight forward tilt, still clutching the phone. She felt nothing as she passed through me, not even a shudder.
I turn the corner and there I am. The wine bar is halfway down on the left, The New
Place, a name that seemed like a great idea when it first opened. I know this place. I hover in front of it and look through the window. There’s nothing to stop me going in, of course, but I prefer looking in through the window, in the same way that I preferred looking at Andrew through his sliding doors. I’ve been here, several times. I know it.
Is it the kind of place that Andrew goes to? Might I see him in here, if I come along one evening, with Ruth, the two of them huddled together either side of a small round table in one corner, her earnestly expounding her love for him and being driven to distraction by how honest and reasonable he is being? I’m not sure. It’s a bit smart, a bit aspirational. He doesn’t strike me as that sort of young professional – he seems more down-to-earth, more of a local pub man than the swanky wine bar type.
*
Then I see: me on the floor by the bar, on my back, my legs twitching, heels drumming, and Matty beside me, hastily shrugging off a grey parka coat.
As I become still and start to recover consciousness, Matty is folding the parka and lifting my head tenderly with one hand, to push the coat underneath. The people around are staring down at me with moonlike faces and Matty is looking up at them as he kneels by my side and saying, ‘No, thanks, it’s really not necessary.’
I remember the physical sensations I felt as I came round, then, the way the wooden floor beneath me felt spongy, the muscles on my legs aching from top to bottom, my head full of stars.
If I had physical form right now, I would be pressing my palms against the glass as I peered in, seeing my still-living self there on the floor. I would be wailing, run.
*
I always end up back on the station after one of my expeditions. It’s my portal, my bridge from one form of existence to another. Aren’t portals and bridges generally two-way?
One morning, I see Dalmar leaving the DTL office on Platform One, coming off another night shift. He walks through the barriers at a steady pace, slowly and unobtrusively – for a bulky man, he has a knack of never getting in anyone else’s way. As he heads across the concourse, towards the exit, another staff member, a young man called Bob, is on his way in. Bob is very small, with white-blond hair, and has the cheery demeanour of someone who was picked on at school and is always ready to deflect aggression with a joke against himself. He claps his hand on Dalmar’s upper arm and I see Dalmar steeling himself not to flinch.
‘Hey, mate,’ Bob says.
‘Good morning, Bob,’ Dalmar responds politely, remembering how when he first came to the UK and he heard men calling each other mate all the time, he thought huge numbers of British men were called Mike.
‘Off home?’ says Bob, although as Dalmar is leaving a night shift, it’s highly unlikely he’s going anywhere else. This is something else Dalmar has had to get used to, the way the British love asking questions when the answer is already known or not needed. He has grown fond of the habit in some ways, has come to appreciate its merits. It is a useful kind of deflection.
‘Yes …’
‘Okay, take you long to get there, you got to get the bus, traffic’s bad …?’ Bob rattles questions like statements. The traffic is probably no worse than any other day, but traffic is like weather, part of the armour.
‘Not too long,’ and I feel Dalmar tighten. ‘See you.’
He turns away. Interesting, I think, why is where he lives something he needs to be secretive about? I follow him.
Dalmar turns left out of the station but instead of heading towards Waitrose, he veers right across the car park and towards the Brewery Tap. I wonder if he’s going for a breakfast pint – but he skirts the pub then walks along and crosses Bright Street, and I understand immediately why he is cagey about where he lives. It’s because it’s so close to the station. The streets round this way – they are considered the rough part of town. It was white working-class, once upon a time, with its tiny terraced houses originally intended for railway workers and navvies – my own grandparents grew up on Russell Street. Then, for a while during my adolescence it was called, in that casually racist way some people have, ‘Pakiland’. It had a couple of pubs that let in underage drinkers. One of the boys at school managed to have no fewer than three eighteenth birthday parties in the Hen House on Lincoln Road. Most of the Asian immigrant families did well for themselves in the taxi and minicab trade and gradually moved out to the suburbs and now it is a mix of white working-class, Africans and East Europeans. Several decades of the UK’s ethnic history exist in microcosm here. It is, of course, exactly the kind of area where someone like Dalmar would live, which is why he will never admit to his co-workers that he does.
Dalmar walks down Gladstone Street. All is quiet at this hour of the morning. The houses have bay windows with peeling paintwork – a lot of them have bright white PVC doors and old satellite dishes. Dalmar passes a house with boarded front windows, pieces of glass in a crazed and jagged pattern still in evidence, and notices the door, which has a metal grille screwed over it. He is thinking how that house will get its own shiny white PVC door eventually, the sort that is hard to kick in. There’s a lot of drug dealing in this area so you’re more likely to get your door kicked in than to be attacked on the street – it’s houses that get mugged, not people, which is a bit unfortunate when the residents of the house are just a normal Indian or Romanian or Sierra Leonean family trying to raise their children. At the end of the road, he passes the only attractive building in this grid of streets, the mosque, with its red and golden brick facade and large green windows. Dalmar lowers his head as he passes, and in his gesture I read something like shame, as if he believes it is not for him, that place, that community. Why does he believe that about himself?
Past the mosque, he turns right, then left at the intersection and a few houses down, lets himself into one of the bright white PVC doors with a small brass key that has a piece of string tied round it attaching another key, coloured silver. It’s poignant that he can’t afford a key ring – or perhaps he can, but regards a key ring as an unnecessary extravagance, when a piece of string he found in the office at work does just as well to thread through the holes in his keys and tie in a knot.
The hallway is small and square, an artificial hallway, I’m guessing, created so as to turn this tiny two-up two-down into four rentable rooms. There is a small stairwell ahead and two doors to the right. Dalmar turns to the right and uses the smaller, silver key to open the door of what would have once been the sitting room or parlour.
His room is not bad. He has the bay window, a single bed tucked against the opposite wall and a small television on a table in front of what would have been a fireplace – the only source of heating I can see is an oil-filled radiator. Against the opposite wall, there is an old, cheap wardrobe with one door ajar – I can tell just by looking at it that that door never closes completely. On the mantelpiece above the table is a small array of food: an unopened sliced loaf, a box of Crunchy Bran, three tins of tomatoes and a multipack of tuna tins with two tins missing. Next to the food is a lime-green kettle with a crust of rust around its base. I’m guessing there may be a communal kitchen with more cooking facilities in a back room but it’s probably tiny and not the kind of place where you want to leave your food unattended – maybe there isn’t even that. The landlord would want to maximise the number of rooms available for rent, after all. There’s probably a small bathroom upstairs somewhere but this looks like the kind of place where there’s every chance someone is sleeping in the bathtub.
Everything in the room is neat and tidy. The thin beige carpet shows stains but is clean enough. Whatever the privations his low income imposes, Dalmar has not sunk into despair. He goes over to the bed, sits on it – there is no room for an armchair – and lets his shoulders droop. The expression on his face is troubled.
After a minute or two, he reaches into his large coat pocket and pulls out a packet of Thai chicken-flavoured crisps. He opens the packet and begins eating the crisps slowly and methodically, posting the
m into his mouth with one hand, single crisp after single crisp, with no sign of relish. Eventually, his hand goes into the packet and comes up empty. He looks down, as if surprised to find he has finished them. Crisps seem an inadequate repast after a full night shift to me but perhaps they are his favourite. I hope there is something more solid going to go inside him before he goes to sleep for the day.
There is a light tap at the door. Dalmar closes his eyes.
There is another tap. Dalmar rises, folds the crisp packet neatly and drops it into the metal bin beneath the table, then picks up a tea towel lying next to the television and wipes his hands. He goes to the door.
On the other side is a woman in her forties, brown frizzy hair stranded with grey and held back by a hair elastic at the nape of her neck. She is sallow, angular, but her face has a certain something, a slender nose and thin lips, an alert look in her wide-set eyes. She could be East European or Middle Eastern, I think – there’s an indefinability in what she is – she looks to me like the kind of woman who would have been a beauty if she had ever, at any stage of her life, had any economic resources. As it is, I suspect that when she was a young child, people might have said, ‘She’ll be a looker when she grows up.’ Whereas now they say, ‘I bet she was pretty hot when she was young.’ Somewhere in between, she missed her chance.
The woman lifts her right hand and tucks some crinkled hair behind her ear in a way that implies self-consciousness.
‘Angela,’ Dalmar says politely. I detect weariness in his tone.
‘Dalmar,’ Angela replies. Then she hesitates, as if she can’t quite remember why she has knocked on the door in the first place, or as though she considers her news slightly awkward. ‘Mr Chadha called, he needs access Friday morning. You want to leave your key with me when you go to work that morning? I’m in all day?’ She does that annoying, rising-interrogative thing that a lot of my students did. It’s forgivable in an adolescent but I can’t bear it when grown women do it. Why make yourself sound insecure?
Platform Seven Page 10