The shoppers with young children head over from Queensgate and take their offspring – small and squally, hungry and tired – back to the towns where they live. Others will come over the bridge later – at this time of year, the shops are open for some time after dark. The London shoppers won’t return for ages yet. They will mingle with the clubbing crowd. Hundreds and hundreds of people will come and go and all of them will stride right through me. None of them will be Caleb.

As dusk falls over Peterborough Station, I drift around the entrance, feeling endless and just wanting to be one thing or another, not trapped in this gloom, not here. My sadness has come back and I need more of Caleb to alleviate it. Will he come on Monday, try to go to work again? Perhaps if he does, and fails again, and sits in the cafe, we can hang around together for a bit and I’ll think of a way to communicate with him at this barricade, this blur between the living and the dead.

It happens on the edge of the car park. I have drifted outside again for a bit and I’m perched on top of the double telephone kiosk opposite the taxi rank. Odd that those telephone kiosks still exist, but maybe it’s more trouble to take them out, what with the wiring and everything, than it is to leave them there. I remember using them years ago, when I was a teenager, how the enclosed space always seemed to trap the cold, how they smelled of stale cigarettes. I am thinking this, watching the shoppers and gazing across the road towards Queensgate Shopping Centre, when I see something – it isn’t a someone, it is definitely a thing. How to describe it? A grey shape, greenish-grey, with a bulbous top and drifting tail, like a large comma or a giant tadpole, but blurry at the edges, floating on the sixth floor, the top floor, of the multi-storey car park, just hovering there high up above the yellow metal railing and blowing slightly in the breeze, like the column of smoke from a fire but with more definition. I know immediately, instinctively – and it is a cold feeling – that in some way, I recognise it.

Odd that my reaction should be so leaden, so full of dread: you would think I would be delighted to know for certain I am not alone, with all these hot fleshy humans rushing about their business and unable to even see me. But I stare at the shape for a while and a feeling comes over me that I would describe as fear if I were capable of fear. I’m dead – what is there to be afraid of? And yet although I don’t know what the grey thing is I know this, with certainty: it is looking back at me, and it is full of malice.