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Back Platform Seven Save as PDF
Chapters (42)
  1. Cover
  2. Landing Page
  3. Platform Seven
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. Contents
  7. PART ONE
  8. 1
  9. 2
  10. 3
  11. PART TWO
  12. 4
  13. 5
  14. 6
  15. PART THREE
  16. 7
  17. 8
  18. 9
  19. PART FOUR
  20. 10
  21. 11
  22. 12
  23. 13
  24. 14
  25. PART FIVE
  26. 15
  27. 16
  28. 17
  29. PART SIX
  30. 18
  31. 19
  32. 20
  33. PART SEVEN
  34. 21
  35. 22
  36. 23
  37. 24
  38. 25
  39. Acknowledgements
  40. About the Author
  41. By the Same Author
  42. Copyright

I trail them for a while, then turn and leave them to it. I am thinking about love, about all the different kinds of love that exist and how some are easy to articulate and some aren’t – the quiet kinds get so little credit. Now that my memory is back, I feel I was a fool for the whole of my short life.

As I go back along Cowgate, a mouse crosses my path, stops dead in the middle of the road and turns its head to look at me. It isn’t a real mouse, though. As if to prove my point it twitches its nose, then vanishes into the air. At least I recognise a mirage when I see it, I think – at last. I am wiser now than I ever was when I was alive.

20

I have no memory of my funeral. I’m glad I don’t. It would be unbearable, surely, to watch the pain of those who loved you, to see their stricken faces, hear them weep, and yet be unable to communicate with them. It would make you want to scream – although there would be no point as you couldn’t be heard – to yell that you are not gone from the world but merely lurking invisibly in the air around them. I am beginning to understand that being trapped on the station served its purpose: that it was so much easier to reside amongst people who hadn’t known me when I was alive. Perhaps it wasn’t love that set me free, or even if it was, perhaps I was trapped there by my own inability to confront my past, by simple cowardice.

Would Matty have been at my funeral? I presume so. He might have sat in the front pew with my parents. Halfway back, on the other side of the room, Rosaria would have been sitting with her cousin Elena, looking straight ahead, tears on her cheeks and furious incomprehension in her heart.

I presume I was cremated. I was too young to have a will or leave a letter of wishes – but my parents used to say that was what they wanted for themselves and when my father’s younger brother died, my Uncle Ted, that’s what they did for him. Uncle Ted had never married or had children – I think nowadays he would have been diagnosed with learning difficulties or Asperger’s but back then he was just thought a bit of a loner. There were only half a dozen of us at his funeral. My father bought a plot for his ashes in Eastfield Cemetery. It’s not far from where we all lived, so I’m presuming that’s where I went too.