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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 had it all in front of me. Who knows how many men I would have slept with, loved. Perhaps Caleb and I would have bumped into each other in real life, been a thing – maybe that’s why he is so attractive to me, that would explain it: maybe he was the man I was to meet? Perhaps I would have had a child with him: a little girl with fair hair in a fringe, and I would have trimmed it at home with sharp narrow scissors, whispering to her, ‘Close your eyes,’ and she would have kept her eyes tight shut after I had finished so that I could bend towards her and blow on her face, gently, to breathe away the tiny fine hairs.

*

Instead, I was killed on Peterborough Railway Station and now I’m trapped here. The people who work here, Dalmar, Tom, PC Lockhart and Inspector Barker, Stacey and Milada and Melissa, and all the people who pass through like Caleb, none of them will ever know me, not as anything more than an anecdote they have heard, that woman who died – or as a cool wind whisking past their ears, the kind of unexpected breeze that whooshes past unexpectedly and makes you turn your head and look at the emptiness around you, a little surprised, because you could have sworn that just then, someone whispered something. But when you turn there is nothing, no one, just the cold air.

6

Girl meets boy; she falls for him; only one problem: girl is dead.

All weekend, I hover around, waiting for Monday, thinking about Caleb and trying to work out what is wrong with him – thinking about what sort of person he would be when he was happy. I caught a glimpse of it in that phone call, his ability to joke around, his concern for others. Perhaps I’m over-interpreting – after all, I have very little information to go on – but he strikes me as someone who is fundamentally … nice. What a meagre compliment that sounds – until, that is, you have intimate experience of not-nice.

The demographic of the station changes on Saturdays: more children during the day, more revellers in the evenings. In the morning, there are the visitors who arrive from the Midland and East Anglian towns around Peterborough to go to Queensgate Shopping Centre, which is quite big and exciting if you live in a small town. Flowing the other way through the station are the Peterborough residents going down to London because Queensgate Shopping Centre is so small and boring. It’s all about perspective.