I hang around for a while, in the growing dusk, until the fading of the light gathers pace. Another afternoon is tumbling towards evening, down into another long night. I turn back into the station, cross the concourse and go through the barriers, back towards another stretch of time; aimless, formless, clothed only in dark.

At the bottom of the stairwell that leads up to the covered walkway, just where I was sitting next to Dalmar this morning – I have been thinking about him a lot today – I see a man. The man has his back to me. He is wearing a heavy navy jacket, a donkey jacket, I think it’s called. Never as warm as they should be, those things.

Slowly, he turns. He has a black woollen hat and a sea-green scarf that is pulled up round the lower half of his face. His watery eyes gaze at me and in a light, mocking tone, he says, ‘Oh dear, Lisa, did you think you were the only one?’ And then he carries on up the stairs, crosses the bridge and disappears from view.

My name was Lisa.

PART TWO

4

It is Friday morning, three days after the man in the donkey jacket died: 10.12, to be precise – living on a railway station has made me something of a pedant when it comes to timings.

I’ve taken to loafing around by the concourse and the Pumpkin Cafe where there is a bit more to look at: people being dropped off, people being met – people doing nothing much, there’s always plenty of those. A railway station’s entrance hall isn’t just a place where people wait for transport; it’s where they wait for life. And to tell the truth, since the man in the donkey jacket, I don’t know, I’m getting a bit phobic about the platforms.

The bulk of the rush hour has been and gone: the cafe is empty but for an elderly couple sitting at the counter on the high stools watching the electronic display and a young man seated at one of the small round metal tables, near the floor-to-ceiling windows that look out across Station Approach. Outside it is appropriately grey. A few raindrops fall against the glass and once they have fallen, stick and slide.

The young man’s table has only one chair and he is sitting on it – I’m guessing that when it was busy, people moved the other chairs to nearby tables to sit together. There are four other empty tables but I know instinctively that the young man has chosen the table with the single chair so that if the cafe fills up again, nobody else will be able to sit down next to him. That’s the kind of thing I used to do, I think distinctly, with a rush of fellow feeling for him.