Originally published in 2019, Platform Seven is Louise Doughty’s ninth novel – a haunting and eerily timely page-turner following two deaths at Peterborough Station, recently adapted for the screen by ITV. Read the opening to the second chapter now.
Is it painful, being dead? Of course not. You feel no hunger, no cold – you’re never tired, but there is a sensation that comes with being bodiless, as if you are drugged. The best way I can describe it is – you know that feeling when you wake in the middle of the night and need the toilet and you get out of bed and walk across the hallway? You’re awake but not awake. Your body works automatically and you don’t even think about it as you push open the bathroom door. Sometimes you don’t even remember you did it until the morning, when the person you were sharing a bed with grumbles, you woke me when you got up last night. It took me ages to get off again. And you say, really? I got up in the night? Are you sure? That feeling, that dreamlike state, awake but not awake, that’s what it’s like being me.
‘When you don’t have a solid self any more, you realise what a lumpy, demanding thing it was to be chained to: all those needs, the weight of them.’
When you don’t have a solid self any more, you realise what a lumpy, demanding thing it was to be chained to: all those needs, the weight of them. The hard thing is that this dreamlike state applies to my thoughts as well. I can’t remember who I was. A person with amnesia might say, I just want to know who I am – I know who I am, I’m a ghost, invisible and silent, nothing but consciousness. I want to know who I was.
The other day, I saw a mother kneel in front of her child as they waited on Platform Three: a grey-haired mum, the child a small girl, around three years old, wearing a navy blue duffel coat with plastic-wooden toggles. The mother knelt and pulled the child’s knitted hat a little lower down over her forehead, then tucked her fringe beneath the hat. The girl stood very still as the mother performed this small, unnecessary gesture, and then she smiled – a smug smile, I thought: the smile of a child who knows herself to be loved, who is certain that her mother belongs to her.
The mother kissed the child’s nose before she stood up and I felt a pang of recognition, like torchlight down a long tunnel. I was loved, at that age. I had a fringe when I was small. My mother used to trim it by holding it up from my forehead between two fingers and then, very slowly and carefully, cutting the hair along the line her fingers made. Afterwards, she would let the fringe drop and say, ‘Close your eyes,’ and then trim, here and there, where the edge was uneven. Then she would purse her lips, exhaling on my face, my eyes and nose, to blow away the tiny loose hairs.
When you don’t have a body, time is no longer even or consistent: it stretches and bends, folds in on itself. A moment watching someone walk along a railway platform becomes a decade. Two years pass in a flash. It’s a bit like gazing at an electronic information board. The minutes on it bear no relation to real minutes – sometimes you stare and stare at the letters and numbers that represent your train for what feels like hours, and nothing happens. At other times, the display seems to jump from saying you have twenty minutes until your train to telling you it’ll be here in two, better run. My whole life is like that. Life – I use the word in its loosest sense. My whole time would be more accurate. I don’t have a life any more: I just have time.
The clocks went back last week. An hour lost; an hour gained – when we lose that hour in the spring, we are supposed to feel joyful that summer is coming: the lighter evenings, songbirds and all that, but a lost hour is a whole hour that has fallen down a crack. What if that hour was the hour when you might have bought the lottery ticket that would have transformed your life, or met your one true love? What if it was the hour when you made the best decision of your life? You’re never going to get that hour back, it’s gone – live to ninety-six and that’s a whole four days you’ve lost. The hour you gain in the winter isn’t your lost hour from earlier in the year, reappearing. That hour isn’t a gift. It is time cracking open, bulging and splitting, wide enough for all manner of things to crawl out. The next day, you will be plunged into darkness at 5 p.m. and even though you knew it was coming, it still feels sudden. Things are walking abroad that weren’t there before and the long British winter stretches ahead. From now on, it will get darker and darker. And at 4 a.m., it is darkest of all.
Our TV tie-in edition of Platform Seven by Louise Doughty is out now in paperback. You can also stream the full series on ITVX here.
The gripping, brilliant novel from the writer of BBC smash hit drama Crossfire, and Number One Sunday Times Bestseller Louise Doughty