As well as the staff and passengers, there are the others – I know that for certain now. They are on the station and in its immediate environs but they are all over Peterborough as well. Some of them have visible form – the homeless man with his hood pulled right over his head, for instance; perhaps quite a few of the people I have seen walking around Queensgate Shopping Centre. Others feel like flickers, images replaying again and again – the woman in the orange trouser suit, the picture of her walking the same few steps, her cigarette hanging loosely from her fingers, the smile on her face. I’ve seen her several times outside the station. I don’t think she has any kind of consciousness – she’s just a random image that has got stuck. She flickers into life, flickers back to nothing, the same few seconds trapped for eternity at the point in time in which that woman walked those steps through that particular slice of time and space. Perhaps that image got stuck because she was so vivid; maybe it’s entirely random. The only thing we have in common is that we are not alive.

There is only one of the others that scares me. It is the grey blur I saw on the top level of the multi-storey car park – the one that doesn’t feel quite dead. That one has consciousness, I’m sure: it may be blurry, like a long-lost memory or a premonition, imprecise, but it is frightening and unkind. It is like me but not like me. We are different but the same.

*

The days and nights come and go, slipping and sliding from one to the other, earth’s diurnal course. The sky grows slowly darker as the bruise of night spreads and deepens. Dawn breaks, the sky lightens as if the bruise is fading and blending into skin; again, again it happens. Dawn, I used to think: bloody dawn. There it goes again, breaking all over the place. Solipsistic dawn – who does it think it is?

But I am different now. I know what happened to me. I was not responsible for my own death – not like that man.

Ah yes, there is the man.

I have seen him around the station on several occasions since his death. Sometimes he is at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to the covered walkway, beginning his slow trudge up, like the day he spoke to me and told me that my name was Lisa. The next time I saw him, he was beginning again, then ten minutes later, beginning again, always determined, always alone.