Is this what has attracted me to him? I thought it was the slightly hawkish nose, the air of watchfulness – that’s something I share, of course. I thought it might be the way that, when he got warm in the cafe, he pushed at his jacket sleeves a little, a futile gesture because it’s not like pushing at a hoodie or jumper that you could concertina to the elbow. The jacket just slipped down again, but before it did, I had a brief but distinct glimpse of his wrists: the bones, the hairs on his arms, medium brown, the hands that seem a little too large to match his compact frame. His wrists; Caleb’s wrists. Men’s wrists are an underrated element of their attractiveness, in my opinion. I had assumed, in other words, that Caleb’s attractiveness to me was pretty much the same sort of attractiveness I would have responded to when I was a living, breathing human being, a body. But now I know it is much more than that.

I trail after him as he crosses the covered walkway. I think perhaps it was this: when I stared at Caleb, when I listened to him on the phone, when I watched his expression, I thought I knew him – but actually, I had no idea what he was thinking, and that was what drew me to him, what created my desire.

And then a heart-sinking thought occurs to me. The last person I couldn’t read was the man who threw himself from Platform Seven at 4 a.m. a week ago, the man in a donkey jacket with his face half covered by a scarf, who stood and swayed and stared with his watery eyes. Perhaps what links him and Caleb, what makes them both unreadable, is the depth of their own particular sort of misery. I don’t want to believe that. It implies that Caleb will be back, back to Platform Seven.

*

The exit barriers are open. Caleb walks through, for all the world like a man who is just leaving a railway station. Outside the station, he pauses for a minute, then puts his hand on his heart. Is this a moment of reflection? There is a small frown on his face. It’s just the phone in his breast pocket vibrating again. He doesn’t even extract it from the pocket this time. He sets off down the road, crosses the mini roundabout and heads down into the underpass. There are a lot of underpasses around the station and women don’t walk them alone after dark. This one is the first – the route towards it has the multi-storey car park on one side and the railings that demarcate the station on the other, then the path takes a sharp nosedive down to the low-ceilinged walkway. The cheery paint and the graffiti can’t disguise the gloom, the smell of urine.