Charlie Hughes
Travel south by train from central London, via Blackfriars or St. Pancras, perhaps on your way home from work or on a daytrip to the seaside, and you will pass me by.
I wait at Crofton Station.
Imagine an in-between place, a link in the metropolitan chain – south London, forgotten London, swallowed London.
The station sits on concrete stilts above the tangle of streets, surrounded by Victorian terraces and stumpy 1950s council blocks. There are two platforms, two routes for escape: back into the madness of the city or away to the commuter belt and the sea.
My body rests on a patch of land beyond the furthest end of the platform, trapped between tracks and boxed off by concrete walls. The construct around my corpse suggests some essential piece of railway engineering. Instead, the cavity is filled with thick twists of overgrown brambles and mountains of rubbish – my grave goods, my shroud.
I am almost hidden, but not quite. To have any chance of spotting me, a Crofton commuter must do something unnecessary, counterintuitive: walk up the platform, beyond the benches and the information screens, away from the place where the trains come to a stop. If they peer down into the opening, focusing on the gaps between the overgrown shrubbery, in the right light, they might see white bone and the remains of a pastel-green kitten-heel shoe, poking out from beneath black polythene.
There was a teenage graffitist in ’01. He climbed the end of the platform to tag the barrier, looked down, and saw my femur in the dawn light. He knew what he was seeing. He pondered the news for a moment, then went back to spraying.
He’s a father now, working in a warehouse in Colchester. He still thinks of me, sometimes.
* * *
I had a flat and a job and a life.
Crofton was an easy route to work, an affordable place to buy. Back then, it didn’t seem strange to be single, on a low income and purchasing a home in Zone 2. In 1995 and ’96, I worked long hours, ate badly and went to gigs in Camden, Kings Cross and Brixton whenever I could afford to.
I wasn’t stuck. I had forward motion. Three years at university, four years working at the museum in Derby. Eventually, I got the job I really wanted, at the British Library, and so arrived in the capital. My parents were proud. They told their friends how I worked with rare manuscripts, mended them, catalogued them. It’s a precious thing to love your work, more precious still to be admired by your family for doing it. I treasured their admiration, kept it close when things were tough.
I had Olly too, with our half serious, half not-so-serious relationship. It wouldn’t have lasted, but I didn’t know that then. We’d met through work, kissed at the Christmas party and traded night-time trysts three times a week thereafter. By the spring of ’96, just before my transformation, we talked teasingly of moving in together.
After, when I was gone, Olly left his job at the library. He couldn’t stand the looks from our workmates, even the sympathetic ones. He lives in Edinburgh now. He drinks too much.
* * *
It isn’t how you think. I don’t rise from the brambles and float around the station, spooking commuters.
No, I receive the world in strange, uneven layers – images and smells and sounds that come in and out of focus. Time washes over me, through me. I am never tired, never hungry, never lonely. The rhythm of the trains leaving and arriving, the shifting moods of the passengers give me structure and meaning. You would be surprised how comforting it can be to see a regular leap onto a rush-hour train just as the doors shut behind them.
Jadon is my favourite. If I re-dressed him, took him out of those hipster dungarees, gave him a ’90s Gallagher-haircut, and a Shed Seven T-shirt, he could be Olly. A younger version. He listens to terrible dance music on headphones and draws pictures in his notebook while waiting for the train. I think he wants to be an engineer or an inventor or a designer for a theatre. I try to guess from the pictures he draws. Outlandish steampunk contraptions that defy imagination.
One of my favourite things is to sit next to him on the bench as he draws, watch them morph and grow.
There is a ‘me’, a location for my consciousness, but different to when I was alive. Inside the station, I am nowhere and everywhere at once – on the steps, inside the ticket office, on the platforms. When something happens, anything which heightens the nerve endings of my visitors, I am instantly present, in the thick of it.
Place is important too, but it’s hard to know how or why. This is where my bones are, so this is where I am. The station is my universe, my cage. I can go anywhere I want, as long as I never leave.
Last week, three teenagers accosted a boy on the platform, deep into the small hours of the morning. He was from the wrong postcode, the wrong school. He shouldn’t have been in Crofton, they said.
They held him down, placed a kitchen knife at his throat and made him beg for his life. He pissed himself and cried for his father and they laughed at him. In moments like this, I see and feel everything in vivid emotional detail.
I reached out for the boy with the knife. There was no hand for me to see, nothing visible resting on his shoulder, only his reaction, the knowledge on his face. The price I pay for breaking the veil is always heavy. In an instant, I knew more about the young man than any human should know of another. All his traumas, all his humiliations, the inside-out of his pain, the full force of his hatred for the world. A terrible thing.
To his friends, to the kid on the ground, it appeared the distant sound of a siren made him turn and run.
I know different, and so does he.
* * *
I am aware of the Railwayman immediately, the very moment he enters the station. A chemical odour surrounds me. A cloying memory, an alarm.
He has thick, dark brown hair, swept back, sculpted with a product which makes it glisten in the winter sunshine. There are wisps of grey at his temples, a counterweight to a smooth, featureless face. Medium height, average looking, no need to notice him at all except for the forced muscularity of his shoulders, which bulge beneath a blue office shirt.
I call him the Railwayman because that is how he thinks of himself. Come into this station and there is a good chance I can guess your name, your home address and whatever gripes or joyous victories are dancing across your mind.
But the Railwayman is harder. All I see is his name, and the red spots of anger that pulse around his head like midges in summertime. I want him to go away, now.
It is midday and the station is quiet. A smattering of college kids, toddler parents and the elderly wait on the platform. He walks casually between them, looking at his phone screen, circling back and then turning again, pretending he has no specific destination in mind. A train for Blackfriars arrives. All the people get on. He does not.
When the train pulls away, he moves more quickly towards the end of the platform. I do not want him to come nearer to my bones. They are sacred, a binding with the physical universe. Whatever he has in mind, his nearness is sacrilege, a desecration.
When he spots my leg, my shoe, he tilts his head to one side, as if puzzling out a difficult maths problem.
From his perspective, he is looking down on me. From mine, I’m stood beside him. I want to know what he is thinking, but I don’t want him to know I am here. I brush my finger gently against his arm, and instantly wish I had not.
* * *
You might think the manner of my passing has trapped me here. ‘Taken before her time…damned to purgatory etcetera, etcetera.’ Nonsense. Before it happened, there were twenty-five years of highs and lows, choices, mistakes. A whole life for me to form bonds, break them and mend them again. During that time, I learned some things about myself, faculties distinctive to me, things you don’t know yet. Some you never will.
But I’ll tell you about one. Something that made little sense when I was alive, but has taken on new meaning since 17th October 1996. I possessed, I believe, an ability to connect with the dead. There were times when I could feel and imagine the presence of people who had passed.
Touching objects helped. The more personal, the more emotive, the better. Letters worked the best.
I first realised this at the age of sixteen, long before I ever worked at a museum or library.
Shortly before my grandmother’s funeral, when we were clearing her house, I found correspondence written by her, hidden in a false drawer in her dressing table. These love letters were addressed to a man fighting his way towards Berlin in 1944. They were returned, unopened. As I read, certain names and unknowable understandings came to me: images of my grandmother as a teenager sat at her desk writing the notes, her heart yearning for the young man. These pictures came with vivid clarity, alongside her emotions at the time, transported, undiluted across the decades. My grandmother never stopped loving him, not even on the day of her marriage to my grandfather, and she thought of him constantly throughout the following forty-seven years of her life, never once mentioning his name aloud again.
It was no coincidence that I eventually landed in a job where contact with personal correspondence was commonplace, and intuitive knowledge could prove useful. At the British Library, I quickly gained a reputation for my ability to spot forgeries. Eventually, it would have made me a rich woman.
So, I ask you, am I here now, stranded at Crofton Station because this is the fate awaiting all victims of murderous assault? Are the graveyards of the world crowded with the spectral presences of the buried? Or is it more likely that we only get to hang around if, in life, we’re comfortable in the blurred spaces between death and the ever after?
* * *
He’s back with his chemical stink and tight-fitting shirt, visiting my station again and again. Never taking a train, just wandering around looking to the place he left me twenty-six years ago.
The Railwayman wants my remains. He thinks endlessly about how he can recover them without setting off alarms or being seen by the station CCTV. Having left me here for decades, the idea of my clothes and bones being found by the authorities fills him with dread. Something has happened, recently, to make this a matter of great urgency to him.
I must stop him, of course. If he takes what remains of me away, hides me in his home or destroys my bones somehow, two things are certain: he will never pay for what he did and I will no longer have my station and my people.
He stands at the end of the platform and casts his eyes over the cavity between the tracks, his nose twitching as if he can smell me.
He’s taken life many times and left us all next to places like this. Stations are his thing. Trains are his thing.
“Bitch. Bitch.” He mumbles this under his breath, over and over. I can’t tell if he’s referring to me or someone else.
After an hour of wandering the platform, he turns and rushes out of the station. As he exits, he passes Jadon who is on the way in, one of my regulars. Jadon follows him with his gaze. There is a momentary crackling in the air, static feedback.
I wonder. I wonder.
Jadon continues into the station, sits in his normal spot on the bench and takes out a notebook.
I’ve never done it before. Never tried to communicate with them. My passengers come and go as they please, and I enjoy their company, but there has never been a need to ask anything of the living. I don’t even know how.
He puts in earphones and heavy bass overwhelms his senses. Jadon takes out his notebook and begins to draw.
I place a hand on his back. Jadon’s pen hovers over the page.
Before anything can happen, before I can form the image in my own mind, I remove my hand.
The Railwayman is walking back up the platform. I don’t want him to see anything. I don’t want him to know Jadon exists.
* * *
How could I have been so stupid, so slow to react? I hesitated, and now he is back in the dead of night.
The Railwayman is dressed all in black, an Action Man Paramilitary. He moves fast, sprints down the platform and climbs the safety barrier. No alarm sounds. No siren calls from the street. The only sound is the low, anonymous hum of the city moving around the station, turning away from me, turning away from him.
He bounds through the stones which bed the ground between the tracks, crunching the gravel beneath rubber-soled boots. At the wall of my grave, he unclips something from his bag, extends it and places it on the ground. Steps, to help him over. He sets them down, gets on top and grips the apex of the wall, shifts his weight up and hauls himself over to the other side, my side. The chemical smell is overpowering now. Details of what he first did to me come pouring back, memories I tried to banish forever come flooding in.
The cloth over my mouth, the van, him over me.
I rage against his presence, but I’m impotent. I may as well be a soulless bundle of bones and rags wrapped in polythene.
With a large knife he hacks at the brambles. He only needs to move in a few metres when his head-torch catches my feet and the polythene. He bends down and pulls at me. I stay in place. The thicker brambles are locked around my neck and upper arms. He pulls again and my body separates, ribs dislodge, my hips come away from the backbone. He pulls me out, but only half of me.
Quickly, he stuffs bones and rags into a bag. Once full, he slings it over the wall. It makes a loud crashing sound on the other side. He breathes, unevenly, heavily.
He starts to grab the rest of me, but then he hears it and I hear it too. Metal wheels on rail. The unmistakeable sound of a train approaching. It gets louder and louder as it nears. He’d planned around this. He’d checked the schedules. There are no trains due at this hour, not even through trains, travelling fast to major stations. Panicking, knowing the bin bag is exposed on the other side, the Railwayman jumps onto the ledge, and hauls himself back over. He scoops up the steps and the bag and sprints across the tracks to the other side of the junction.
What he doesn’t see as he flees into the hedgerows is that the slowing train has no illumination inside the carriages. The out of service train will wait here until morning, then proceed to the coast.
I feel myself waning as he moves away, and I start to understand how this works now. The world seems to shrink from me, the lights on the platform lose their sparkle. I want to be on the platform, watching him run through the trees, but I move slowly, heavily from my place. By the time I get there, he is long gone.
He will be back for the rest of me soon.
* * *
Jadon sits on a different bench, further down the platform. I need to be close to him, but the distance between us feels impossible.
I am fading, disappearing. For a while last night, after he’d gone, I went blank. Not sleep or unconsciousness, I mean complete oblivion. The absence of existence. When I came back, it was worse than ever. The colour has drained out of the world and suddenly movement requires effort and concentration.
Thankfully, Jadon is still in place when I arrive at his bench. I raise myself up and stand behind him, like a country baron posing for a family portrait. Tentatively, I reach out and place a hand on his shoulder. There it is again, just like before, a crackling, a change in the air pressure. I feel him tense, then take in a long, deep breath, but he continues sketching.
There is no trauma in my contact with him, not like the Railwayman or even the boy with the knife. We are aligned, attuned to each other. His life is rich and complex and even painful, but his soul has not been twisted out of shape, nor deformed into something ghastly and unnatural. Games. That is his thing, he wants to design video games. He loves to make dozens of moving parts fit together, creating something that flows perfectly from one element to another. Jadon works for minimum wage at a development company in north London. He is more talented than all the people he works with, but struggles for opportunities to demonstrate this skill.
I place my other hand on his opposite shoulder and squeeze a little, willing a stronger connection. Again, the crackle in the air, stronger this time. His pen starts to move more quickly over the page, abandoning the contraption which had held his attention, and now beginning something new. I cannot see Jadon’s face, but his body is shaking, juddering under the pressure of our connection. For my part, I concentrate on one image, one idea. The pen flashes this way and that, creating new shapes and shading on the page at an unlikely speed. I squeeze again, and the pace increases. Jadon is in a frenzy now, a fugue of possession, as he reproduces the image in my mind, in his.
A man passing on the platform stops and stares at Jadon. “Are you all right, mate?” he says. I want to swat him away, but I can already feel the connection loosening, Jadon’s pen slowing.
“Fella?”
And it’s gone. I rock back, falling away, towards the platform, and I may have gone too far now, dug too deeply into my reserves, because this time the descent feels final. The world goes blank.
* * *
When I come to, I am looking up from my resting place, through the brambles, thorns, beer cans and crisp packets. I feel weak, tenuous.
Jadon is there on the platform, looking down at me. I would smile and wave if I could. I realise he cannot see me. Not yet. Jadon keeps looking at the notebook and then back down here.
I want to scream, “I am here! Come and find me, Jadon.”
But then another figure appears alongside him. Medium height, bulging shoulders, the faint smell of formaldehyde accompanying his arrival. To me, they are silhouettes against the grey sky. He stands too close to Jadon.
“What are you doing?” he asks. In my head, the Railwayman’s voice is booming and distorted, louder than it can possibly be.
“I think there’s something down there,” Jadon says. “Something that shouldn’t be there.”
“Oh yes? What makes you think that?”
He proffers the notebook.
“Who drew this?”
“I did,” Jadon says.
“I don’t think there’s anything down there. Just a load of old rubbish.”
“I can feel her,” Jadon says, quietly.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” he says and walks away.
* * *
It is night-time, freezing cold. Wisps of white breath appear above the wall. The Railwayman is scrabbling over, desperate to get the last of me, to wipe me out forever. He hacks away until he can reach my torso, my skull.
He lets out a scoff, a half-chuckle. His hand takes hold of my cranium, his thumb pushes deep inside my eye socket. “There you are,” he says. “Caused me enough trouble, haven’t you?”
Proximity brings me one final insight: the reason behind this mad-cap retrieval of my bones. His younger brother – a man on a downward spiral, divorced, no access to his kids – was recently arrested after a bar fight. The Railwayman spoke to him on the phone, feigned brotherly concern and casually asked if he’d had to give a DNA sample. He had.
He hasn’t forgotten my scratching, fighting, grasping hands, nor the hair I pulled from his head. He was right to be worried. Tiny strands still adhere in my closed fist.
The Railwayman wants perfection, to never get caught. He fantasises about confessing on his deathbed, telling them that he beat them all. The brazen location of my body has always brought him amusement, but suddenly I’ve become a dangerous loose end, a vulnerability.
“What are you doing?” The voice is high, scared.
The Railwayman spins around, almost falling. “Wha…who’s that?” He looks up to the platform.
Jadon repeats the question. “What are you doing?”
The killer gathers himself with unlikely speed. “I could ask you the same question. What are you doing here in the dead of night? No trains now, son.”
“I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about it, about what’s down there. It’s a body, isn’t it? A woman?”
“No,” the Railwayman says. “But I wondered about what you said, so I came to look. I’m a policeman, see. There’s no body, but there is one thing. You might be interested.”
Jadon recognises him now. The man who spoke to him about why he was looking. “You’re police?”
“Yep. CID. I thought to myself, ‘If that young lad thinks there’s something down here, I should come and check it out.’”
“Where are the others? The police dogs?”
“No need for all that just yet. I needed to check. And I found one thing. Stay there, I’ll come up and show you.”
In one smooth movement, he leans over to his bag, takes out a knife and slips it into his pocket.
Why isn’t Jadon running? Can’t he see what is happening?
“Just a minute,” the Railwayman says cheerily before swinging back over the wall.
“You’ve got ID, right. Police ID?” Jadon asks.
The Railwayman shouts over his shoulder as he lands on the stones. “Wise boy. Yes, got that too.”
Run! But Jadon just stands there, waiting for him.
I feel it boiling in me. A rage beyond description, a hatred for this man bound up tightly with all that he took from me and the thought that he will do it again. I feel it all, exquisite in its purity. It lifts me up high, so that I am suddenly looking down on the station, down on the Railwayman walking towards Jadon.
The pain he caused my family, my poor mum and dad, Olly and his emptied heart. All the beautiful moments he stole from me. And now he will do it again, smother this bright light of intelligence and insight and beauty just because he can, just because he needs the power of it coursing through him. The arrogance, the idea that he can just kill, kill, kill, taking the young to sate his evil, his inadequacy.
Dogs in the back gardens around the station begin to bark. First one, then another, then a chorus of canine alarm fills the air.
He is below Jadon, clambering up to the platform. Jadon still waits, but his head has turned to wonder at the noise made by the dogs.
I see it again, so clear. The cloth over my mouth. The van. Him.
Whatever essence of me remains now glows white hot with outrage. I can feel it snapping through the air. Connecting, conducting along unknown pathways of energy.
The lights on the station platform flicker.
Jadon takes one step back as the Railwayman pulls himself up on the barrier and clambers over.
It grows exponentially: a certain knowledge that I must protect Jadon, must stop this killer from enacting the slashing, stabbing, slicing, which has formed into a fantasy in his mind’s eye.
Wind bends the trees inwards towards Crofton Station.
“Where’s your ID?” Jadon is moving back now, still facing him, but is aware of a wider turbulence, a warning.
“Don’t go away. I want to show you what I found.” He steps forward.
The lights on the platform flash on and off and the air is pierced by the sound of the station alarm. The Railwayman is shocked rigid by the piercing din.
The wind grows stronger. One of the benches bolted to the platform strains against its brackets.
With the alarm and the dogs and the wind, people are starting to come out into their back gardens and look up to the station. One voice calls up, “What’s going on up there?”
Jadon looks down towards the station exit and sees the information boards have lit up. Instead of train times and details, a single word is repeated over and over:
run run run run run run run run
The Railwayman draws the knife. “Look what I found. Is this yours?”
Jadon looks back and sees the grey metal of the blade.
“Stop now. Police. Stop there.”
But Jadon is gone, darting away, flying down the platform towards the exit. The Railwayman follows, but pulls up short when he sees the glow of flashing blue lights beyond the station entrance.
I am expired now, fading fast into oblivion again, knowing I won’t return, but also knowing Jadon is safe.
The Railwayman looks up and sees the new message on the information screen:
caught caught caught caught caught caught
And I depart.