EXCERPT :
Haunted by Amy
1
Nauseous, Matthew let go of the scissors in his pocket. He’d realised how easy it would be to find himself using them, the moment he looked on the face of the girl who let Philip, the simpleton who had placed every ounce of his trust in him, burn to his death on a live rail. For that’s who she was, flicking her head away, her fine hair draping now on the shoulders of her coat. His teenage student, Amy Carter, slowly back-stepping into a recess from the platform, between the station buildings. She must have seen him, decided that by not openly running, she could make herself scarce enough to pass unnoticed.
He stared at her black coat. Black was “the thing” she’d once told him. He noticed her hem well above the backs of her knees where she always felt it did her legs “justice”, as she’d put it. And for a moment so much was true; for the curve of her calves and the line of her ankles tapering into her shoes distracted him. He wanted to believe that he, Amy's middle-aged teacher, had not just taught her about the metaphysical poets in classroom 12d but that she was the young woman who, despite all wisdom or logic, he'd grown to love. Even now, despite all the warnings that returned to him from his tormentors in 12d, it could still just be that Amy had back-stepped into the recess only because she was tense and rigid with the cold sweeping up the empty platform. She stood now behind trolleys stacked with luggage, trying to shield herself from the gusts. Yes, that was it; she wasn’t avoiding him, just the wind and the rain.
‘I know it’s you - from the rattle of those tablets. Don’t creep, Matthew!' The closeness of the voice took him by surprise.
He felt ashamed that her tone carried a weariness of him, was almost indulgent. He moved his hand inside his pocket to edge his handkerchief against the medicine bottle there and so muffle the embarrassing rattle of Diazepam tablets. But still it rattled, as did his nerves. At least his hand was no longer gripping what the voices of Jake Blacksmith and Darren Bassindale of the notorious classroom 12d had seemed to be nagging him to use on Amy, for he was no longer gripping tight to the scissors.
He pulled his hand from his pocket. He couldn’t begin to touch those scissors again – any more, it seemed, than the girl who stood next to him could begin to run from him. She didn’t need to run, he reasoned. And surely, Amy couldn’t have had it in her to push a simpleton on to a live rail. So far, at least, the truth had to be as simple as that: Amy Carter hadn’t tried to run because she had nothing to fear from him - except, he sensed, from a fear of being his.
Yet now he was standing cramped beside her in the recess, feeling foolish, conscious he and she were standing as rigid as queen’s sentries in their boxes, looking out across platforms at nothing, guarding only themselves from each other, neither able to turn and acknowledge the other. Words, once whispered over a pillow in a warm, shared bed, seemed to return where now neither he nor she could share even the cold. Their promises, their dreams, pulled like stitches.
He could smell her perfume, “Charlie” she’d called it, and from the corner of his eye he could see her face beneath the station lights. Amy was looking up the track, rigid, determined not to fully acknowledge him. She needed only her train… to come and take her off the platform; a platform which now she had no choice but to share, alone, with the man who’d been her college teacher, the man who’d owned the flat across Blackheath where she’d lain through the night giving herself...
Her arms, he noticed, stayed folded beneath her bosom. She was hugging herself from the chill, only her silence to protect her. He loathed himself for wrecking perhaps the only moment which could have been used to build a bridge. Yet his tablet had done nothing to stop the doubting; the ugliness that was welling again.
‘I’ve been the mug all along! Teacher, lover and mug,’ he had to speak to her profile. ‘I should have gone to the police after I’d read all the self-harm reports on you - the yellow carbon your father didn’t want me to see after the damage he must have known you’d done to Philip. You can’t walk away from that,’ he said.
She moved by degrees out of the recess and closer to the edge of the platform. He waited, watching her as she looked up the track where it narrowed into the distance.
Her back stayed turned on him, a wall which yet seemed to shiver inside. Yet when she did turn, there were no wild yellow eyes of recrimination to command his own, no supple tiger, poised unseen for its nightly hunt… only the short awkward breaths of a teenager, young enough to be his daughter, a girl wholly out of her depth with him or his regimen of Diazepam tablets, unable to cope with him any more.
‘Are we “detective superintendent Matthew” now we’re no longer employed as “Matthew the history teacher”? Or perhaps you just like stalking girls on empty train platforms?’
Amy jerked the strap of her bag over her shoulder. She seemed wary of him... like a girl afraid of being imminently mugged for the contents of her bag. He felt cheap. She was stiff, looking up the railway track again. He could feel her willing - for the tiniest dot of her train to appear on the horizon.
‘The only person who wants to hurt you, Matthew, is yourself and those pills you take because the world seems so full of all your 'enemies'!’ I know that back-street inner London students are not your forte but where do all the 'enemies' come from?' she said, still refusing to turn.
He wanted to put an arm around her, tell her she did have a possession - himself - and she was safe with him. But he sensed she was right. His accusations about her and her father's indifference to the simpleton's electrocution on the live rail shamed him.
A larger can rolled back and forth where the wind blew it between the legs of a bench seat. A Jack Russell barked at it before circling round the base of a platform pillar and proceeding to cock its leg while taking a fleeting look at him and Amy as if it recognised them as two of life’s wasters.
‘So nought out of ten for your detective work!” she called back into another gust of wind. She was walking, he noticed, along the edge again, close to the single yellow line, hugging herself beneath her breasts, back rigid with the cold, she still straining to see if there was any sign of her train from some distant spot down the track.
Matthew watched her hair toss and billow out on her shoulders. A Topic bar wrapper somersaulted down the platform and across her shoes until it toppled down between the lines, carrying it seemed as her life had carried her... into places, with people, where she didn’t belong. He wondered who would care for the girl on the platform if he didn’t... if he couldn’t...
‘My car’s -’ he checked himself. He’d been about to say: ‘If you can trust a burgeoning paranoid schizophrenic, I can still drive you home’.
But he couldn’t speak, not while his eyes settled on the glassy tubular object which the platform lamp had picked out. It looked like a tube of glass jutting at an angle from the corner of her shoulder bag. It was best, he thought, if he sidled up to her until he was in reach and then eased the stem of the bottle upwards, being quick to read the label. It was cherry brandy – De Kuypers, the same that had been reported to have been found in large quantity in the body of Philip Sidderton at the time he took the voltage on the live one.
‘Hey! Who give you the right to go in my bag!’ she shouted, snatching the bag back and holding it tight to her hip.
She eased the strap of her bag over her shoulder, there being nothing else to hide from him. He watched her as she folded her arms beneath her bosom again and stood, back erect, as if now was the moment when she needed to be a foot higher than her parents had made her.
Matthew waited and then, still holding the bottle firmly, confronted her with it, making sure she could see the label.
‘The papers reported that Philip had got the liqueur off a street sleeper. The sleeper had apparently lifted it from some seedy little general store near New Cross Broadway. That’s right Amy!’ he said. ‘Turn away - again! You don’t want to look at the label do you! It reminds you too much of who helped a simpleton drink the stuff - a whole bottle before his last walk down to an empty railway line!’
‘Listen to it! “The whole truth and nothing but the truth” is it? Now we can't be employed as teacher Matthew, we’re magistrate Matthew are we? Judge and jury! Is that it!’
‘Look at it!’ he insisted, curving his arm around her, forcing her to see the De Kuypers label. ‘The same that would have put Philip Sidderton into a bigger maze than his mind must already have been in after you’d led him to the tunnel!’ he said.
‘That’s a lie!’
He hadn’t been ready for the slap. He was confused, had no answers. A slap didn’t seem logical and he needed logic when all he’d got was a stinging and throbbing across his cheek. But he had a moment now to study her face, see if her indignation and her hurt were genuine.
‘And that’s my bottle! It’s for my Mum!’ she scowled. ‘I always have to buy her one of them De - Kuypers things - an errand every Tuesday after tenpin at Lewisham bowl.’
She’d surprised him again, for the bottle slipped out of his hand as she pulled it from him and returned it to her shoulder bag. He watched her bending into the bag, fussing to find a position for it that satisfied her, before squeezing her elbow into her side, making of it a vice that would hold the bag’s contents firmly to her this time.
‘You can’t look at me,’ he said to her. ‘Can you Amy! Then try looking at the other end of the track. You won’t, will you? You can’t, because it’s not far enough away from that tunnel - is it? The same tunnel that must have taken the echo of his cry when the line put more than 750 volts through Philip Sidderton, until his body took its last convulsion on the line.
He intercepted her hand in mid-air and clung on to it before it slapped his face a second time.
‘No Amy! I can understand what’s twisted your life up but I’m not going to have theatre! Not from you. Not from a teenage murderess.’
‘Stop it! Matthew! Stop it!’ she screeched, panicked as he clumsily urged her off the platform towards the tunnel where Philip had been found. 'And stop these!' she said, rummaging in his pocket to remove his bottle of Diazepam and stamp on it with her foot. Concrete eventually gave to the grass and bracken of the bank. Matthew led her up the line closer to the tunnel.
Her eyes… he couldn’t tell whether they warned of danger or signalled her fear. She was still, after all, a girl in high heels, sheer tights and a smart black coat, the whole incongruous against the dirty cable boxes, the graffiti-daubed maintenance hut and windblown litter behind her... but those eyes...
‘I want to see you stand! He tried to explain to her. ‘To stand near where Philip took hundreds of volts of current for up to a minute - God knows, maybe two minutes or more!’ Matthew said holding her fast again.
‘Off!’ she shrieked, jerking her hand free, having waited for the moment when he’d relaxed his grip. He’d been glancing down the line at the bouquets of flowers which still marked the scene where Philip had been electrocuted. He turned back to her. She seemed afraid to stay, afraid to run, standing back from him, trembling in what seemed genuine indignation.
She was right. He had become what Fairfax and Alexander, two psychiatrists, had skirted round, calling “only a tendency” - while half acknowledging that he might be clinically paranoid.
‘I can’t go down there - not with heels,’ she said, a first hint of concession in her tone. Matthew took it that she might be amenable if she swapped to her flat shoes.
He watched her bending over her bag and rummaging again, busying herself to the point of panic. She’d pulled out the pair of espadrilles she must have worn before leaving her evening at the bowling alley. The gust along the bank muffled her complaints as she bent, her hands trembling now as she busied herself fastening her laces. He wondered now, how he could have openly called the girl a murderess.
‘You can follow me! I’ll show you this time - what kind of nut you are! You’ll see me stand; you’ll see me stand right where Philip had his - accident. I’ve nothing to hide, not from nobody!’
Her plaited fibre soles slipped on the damp grass of the embankment as she began sliding on her bottom, her coat stuck with grass, seeds and spores, crumpling, making her whole demonstration a folly. Her arm sprang out to clutch on to the turn-ups of his trousers and then, he went with her, sliding down, the two bound, his own weight carrying her with its momentum, both tumbling backwards, rolling towards a bruising encounter with sleepers, pebbles and rail.
Matthew flinched back from the line, jerking Amy clear with him. As he stared over her at the line, his heart still raced at what he could see - the live rail. It hadn’t been that one which had ended their fall… it hadn’t been the live one he felt like reciting, until the full meaning of the words sank in to him.
Amy, he realised, had disentangled herself. It seemed as if she’d been embarrassed to be caught looking at him. She was pulling her skirt back over her thighs, picking out the crumples in her coat and standing, ready to show that she could walk, with a clear conscience, up the line, towards the bouquets and wreaths which lay on the bank before the opening to the old tunnel.
‘Are you coming or not!’ she challenged.
He looked up at her, cursing his greater age and weight for making him less agile.
‘You can watch me - stand, next to where I found your Philip! And holding this!’ she said, defiantly, advertising the bottle of De Kuypers to him as if it had been his own dirty linen.
‘Philip’s - his accident - was, it was his own. What you’re suspicious mind invents about me is evil - evil! Come on! Watch me! Watch me stand there, Matthew! I’ve nothing to feel guilty about - like you want me to feel guilty! Come on! What are you waiting for?’
He got himself back on his feet and brushed his trousers to give his hands something to do, all the time wondering whether he or his tablets had, after all, made a disgrace of him.
‘Come on then, sir! Watch me! Accuse me then of being the boy’s -’ she’d stopped short of “murderess”, and now she’d turned her back and begun to pick her way over the shingle between the lines so that she could be on the side where the bouquets had been set out a bit further down on the opposite bank of the cutting.
The thing they’d both forgotten, the only thing she’d come to the station for - the Blackheath to New Cross train - it was minutes late but, Matthew noticed, coming... and making ground - fast...
‘Come on! Watch me!’ she challenged against another gust of wind.
‘Amy! Amy, the train! It’s coming! Ameeee!” he shouted, the wind carrying her name.
‘Watch me!’ she shouted again, turning to see if he was following and then doing precisely what he’d most feared. She’d twisted her ankle, fallen between two tracks trying - if only to salve her dignity - to stand on the sprain. She reminded him of a fully grown mosquito, damaged and trying, in pulses, to raise itself before the next blow came to finish it but, for all her bravado, Amy Carter wasn’t going to get up this time.
There’d been no sounding of the train’s klaxon. Whatever else the driver had been doing, he hadn’t seen the figure in a black coat prone between the lines.
Matthew shuddered. If he couldn’t pull her clear - within seconds - the girl who’d once slept beside him and who, after all, had tried to hold out hope for him when all the voices from his students said he was ‘mental’, could end, eviscerated between two bland stretches of steel.
He ran along the track, losing the rhythm of his stride to tumble forward. He corrected himself to avoid an outright fall on his face. Matthew was afraid to look up again at the yellow face heading for him. But this yellow had been sprayed on metal to form a face which had a bright main lamp for its mouth, a number for a nose, two windows for eyes, a trunk of piping hanging beneath each eye like tears and, beneath those, shunting discs for death rattling towards him, rattling louder now, vibrating beneath his feet...
‘Tiger’ Amy's fakin’ teacher!’ Class 12d seemed to remind. ‘Wise up! When it’s too late for you, she’ll get up, turn and push. Just like she pushed your Simple Simon on that there track.’
Amy was huddled in her short coat, rigid, as Matthew tried to get his hands under her armpits. He strained to heave her up, conscious only that she was still clutching her shoulder bag into her bosom as though it, at least, might be her friend to the end. And then he remembered. There was still one rail that had to be live and that no part of Amy or he should touch it.
He willed his legs not to buckle, not to let the wall of iron hurtling closer have its way, smack their two bodies into the air leaving them heaped on each other; an abandoned human sandwich metres down the rails. He put in the extra effort, swearing, while he heaved Amy beneath her arms. He had to hump her safely over each line, pick his way carefully, so carefully between each of the stretches of mute iron that seemed still to wait for his first and last mistake.
The sight of the lines reminded of what Philip’s last seconds must have been like. Those seconds were becoming his and Amy’s... justice finally meted to them... from Philip Sidderton’s cold grave. The shock, the current that silently waited, could convulse himself and, by attachment, Amy; if in panic he stumbled on the live one. Both shock and current would be the more hideous if it was to be the workings of a dead man’s discontent… the moment of Philip Sidderton’s final equalling of the score that had been stacked against the simpleton from his birth.
From the line, Philip’s face seemed to be returning... that wide grin which had once been so slow and endearing, now making the boy’s mouth appear stiff and unyielding... like that uncompromising slit smiling out of a pumpkin on the night of Halloween...
Matthew toppled and stumbled backwards, Amy rolling on top of him on the opposite bank. The rattling of wheels was diminishing, the waft of wind the train had left in its wake confirmed... it had passed... passed and he... and Amy... they were both unscathed. They were... intact... perfectly... intact...
He was exhilarated. He laughed until he wasn’t sure whether it was the dust the train had wafted into his eyes or his own own tears which made the water stream down his cheeks in the cold air. But neither mattered, for he was laughing, hysterically now. It was only the sight of Amy Carter’s right espadrille made him stop.
A thick disc of glass, the base of a broken beer bottle was hanging from the canvas on the inside edge of her shoe, the material itself smudged into a bizarre pattern where her blood had seeped and spread. Beads of blood were building up and beginning to slide down the shard of broken glass where it must have completely penetrated the shoe and lodged itself into her foot. Her blood was filling and circling round a groove in the brown glass. She must have tripped while trying to avoid the bottle someone had tossed between the lines, but she’d been too late to stop her weight falling on it. The shard had easily penetrated the canvas, scything into her skin.
She was writhing on the bank, letting out weak moans. Matthew removed his anorak and tried to wrap it round her legs; making out of her short skirt something between a dress and mummification where she’d had nothing to keep out the cold gusts of wind and the long wet grass. He did up the buttons of her coat to her chin where only a lucky-heart necklace had kept the night air from her neck. Crumpled in her pocket he found the Indian red shot taffeta neckerchief she said she wore for him but which, she always said, embarrassed her when before the others of her age who came along on her bowling alley nights. He wound the fabric round her neck, crudely stuffing the flimsy material into her collar to give as much warmth as he could before propping her back against his chest.
With glass lodged deep into her foot, he couldn’t risk trying to hump her any further back along the track nor out into the little side road opposite the station where he’d left his car. She’d have to be carried off the bank on a stretcher. If he tried to remove shoe or broken glass, either could be tortuous for the girl so long as she remained conscious. He had a hand he could free to press out three nines on his mobile.
The paramedics had been preoccupied with administering pain killer and carrying Amy back to the waiting ambulance. Matthew took his opportunity, climbing up into the back of the vehicle. For a second, the platform dipped with his weight but the paramedics seemed too busy to notice. The movement had made Amy momentarily open her eyes against the sedation.
‘You didn’t see me?’ she moaned, needing his assurance.
‘See you? How d’you mean “see you” - Amy?’ he asked, not sure whether she could re-open her eyes. She did. Her eyes, from what he could make out, were dull but carried in them a deep dependency.
‘Stand!’ she strained to assert. ‘You didn’t see I could do it - stand, like you said, stand and face the line, near the tunnel? Face where your friend, Philip -’ her eyelids closed on her again.
‘Don’t fret,’ he said. ‘I can see! Now I can!’
He shifted an oxygen cylinder so he might find a space to sit closer to where the paramedics had laid her.
‘No - don’t come with me!’ She insisted, trying to keep her eyes open for a moment longer.
He sat cramped on the stretcher base.
‘I made a mistake Amy - when I saw you with that bottle of cherry brandy I -’
‘I don’t want you to come!’ she said, her lids now too heavy to open against the drug.
‘“Don’t” because I’m an embarrassment?’ he tested, ‘Or “don’t” because -’
‘You - you called me a murderess!’ she said trying to raise her voice against the wind and the ambulance’s engine, finding strength for a moment to flutter her eyelids.
‘Teachers make mistakes, Amy!’ he tried to speak softly. ‘They make them all the time! Paranoiacs more than others!’ he tried to joke but feeling inches tall.
‘I said, go! Leave me!’ Her face creased with the ultimatum.
Matthew knew he was doing more harm than good. Amy's lids had closed on her again, her mouth hanging open. Her bag, where it lay beside her, seemed the only friend she knew, its mouth seeming to flop open, like hers; as if equally unable to defend her against his suggestion that with the cherry brandy she may have lured Philip Sidderton, a simpleton who had put all his trust in him, to the live rail.
Matthew looked into the bag. Only the stem of the De Kuypers bottle pointed up towards him, as if telling him now what he should have always accepted; that the liqueur could have been no more than the errand her mother gave Amy on Tuesday’s after tenpin.
2
Matthew was relieved to be away from the railway lines but, equally, ashamed to be watching the AMBULANCE sign shift away along the road before him. Lying on a stretcher inside, part of the base of some slouch’s discarded beer bottle still lodged in her foot, painkiller in her veins, was a sixteen year old girl who could have been in her bed... in her home.
He could have stayed with her in the ambulance but instead he’d lamely done what she’d insisted, leaving her alone with the two paramedics for her journey to the hospital. He could start up the engine, follow, wait for her in Accident and Emergency. He wasn’t her lover any more, not even her teacher. How was he going to swallow the studied silence of those paramedics again when he tried to tell them he was Amy’s “friend”?
He started the engine. If he was sharp about it, he could follow the ambulance before it turned the corner into Belmont Hill.
But had she snubbed him out of anger in the ambulance… did she want to conveniently cut herself off? Did she, after all, have something to hide? Had somebody been watching in those moments when Philip Sidderton took enough voltage from the live rail of the Blackheath to New Cross line to make him move like a worm cut by a spade?
Matthew was driving almost against his will now, mesmerised by the back of the ambulance which was beginning to circle the tiny island at the top of Belmont Hill. He couldn’t settle the fight between head and heart as to whether he should continue to follow or turn back to his flat. Despite Amy’s effort to demonstrate that she’d had no qualms about leading him along the track to stand before the scene of Philip’s accident, they hadn’t, in the end, reached the scene - not together. If they had done, he would have sensed, for sure, whether there was more to the newspaper headline than her simply “finding” Philip's body.
The car horn and the Cockney voice bawling inanities at him from the side window of a four track made Matthew brake suddenly. He was on the wrong side of red lights and, worse, he had forgotten whether the ambulance had turned in the direction of Lewisham or New Cross. He’d let the red traffic lights and the irate driver be his omen, decide for him that there was another direction in which he should have been driving all along.
Matthew? WE’LL always be f-f-friends... Philip seemed to whisper to him from the back seat of his car as if the boy was still alive and leaning forward to speak. The thought was madness, Matthew told himself, but not before finding that he’d had to glance in the rear-view mirror.
Even so, something had spoken to him, perhaps his conscience. He’d take another route.
Yes, he’d lay down a bouquet for Philip Sidderton, lay it on the railway embankment. He’d never been able to properly say goodbye. If he circled, returned via Eliot Hill up to the heath and across to Blackheath railway station, he could find a moment when the platform was empty again, walk down the track until he came to that lonely spot near the entrance to the tunnel. There, quiet, except for the occasional gusts of wind along the bank, he could share - still share - with Philip. Then, he might know whether his head or his heart told him the truth about Amy... whether, as Philip had always said, she “wouldn’t hurt nobody”…
The Digoxin which Matthew had found in his glove compartment was beginning to do its job, keeping down his pulse as he knew he’d have to do when that moment came for him to walk beneath the arched entrance to the station foyer, down the steps to the platform and finally edge his way to the end before quietly slipping down the embankment towards the part of the line on which Philip had been electrocuted.
3
Matthew walked along the track. His eyes watered in the wind which channelled between the embankments as he looked into the distance. He hoped to get closer to the bouquets which marked the spot where Philip’s body had lain.
You should have followed Amy, M-M-Matthew. I’m not cold and not hot any more and I don’t have to take in-j-jections to kill the pain like Amy does. And I’ll never have no glass in my foot like her...
‘Not cold, not hot, no pain, no glass!’ Matthew found himself saying, his heart pacing faster than his legs could carry him towards the bouquets. He wondered whether his next stride should make it his turn to feel a broken bottle pierce his foot; pierce it for every hurt done to Philip Sidderton and to Amy Carter.
Like broken friendship Matthew... if you don’t turn and follow Amy!
‘What d’you call “death on a live rail” Philip? Isn’t that broken friendship?’ Matthew called, scanning the embankment, half afraid that Philip might materialise there, perhaps burnt beyond recognition.
Forget the bouquets, Matthew. Turn back to Amy…the voice from beneath the spread of nettles and long grass seemed to implore. Amy’s kind! Gave me lots and lots of track!
‘And cherry brandy, Philip? Did she give you the cherry brandy?’ Matthew called towards the spread of bouquets.
Wouldn’t hurt nobody, Matthew...
‘No, she “wouldn’t hurt nobody” - would she Philip?’ he said, booting more shingle along the track as he went, glancing every now and again at the live rail.
It’s you who’ve got to live now M-M-Matthew. I want you to live with a kind person. Can you hear me? From the tall grass? L-Live with Amy… L-L-Live!
‘And who have you got to live with now, Philip? Didn’t you ever want - a different kind of friend?’
This time Matthew heard no voices from the embankment or the tracks, nothing but rain which now began to sweep across his face and puddle in potholes around the sleepers.
‘I mean a lady friend Philip? Someone to make daffodils look brighter and fresher in April? To make the white cherry blossom in May, when New Cross slaps your face with concrete and graffiti? Didn’t you want that kind of friend? Someone to make the song of a harp or cello lovelier when the traffic of students spits in your ear? Someone to make you feel you’d something to build, something so much more tender than a piece of metalwork or a model train? Didn’t you ever want that?’
Again there was not the reply from the line to which Matthew had become accustomed. Of course not. He’d heard nothing… except his own longing to speak again with he to whom there’d never been, nor ever could be, a goodbye. Some bouquets and a wreath had rolled down the bank to float in a muddy puddle beside the track where days ago Sidderton had burnt… here there’s no more graffiti, no din, no ugliness Matthew. I watch all the trains I want go by! For ever! For ever... Philip’s voice seemed to gurgle from beneath the puddle.
It sounded so real and Philip... he was, he was approaching ... running, with a wreath. The lad was hugging it, wanted to show his teacher friend that the boy from the college’s basement corridor basic metalwork class had become important to someone.
Matthew stopped walking, wanted to step sideways, off the track, altogether. Philip was who he’d come to see, but not running towards him... not as real as the last time he’d seen the boy, when he’d given him the little note of his telephone number, watched Philip’s big clumsy fingers stuff it excitedly into the cabin of his miniature loco’...
See Matthew? My prize from college! For best metalworker and best train spotter! Fast one’s coming now - see? No? No! ’Cos only I can see! It’s coming! Look closer! I’m on it - see?
Matthew held his breath. He recognised his fear and it was not founded on any likelihood of an approaching train; it was a fear that made him stand still on the shingle between the track, strain to keep control of his bladder; a fear of Philip Sidderton... approaching still…
Of course there was no sound of wheels, no vibration beneath his feet, nothing to see, yet the banks of the platform seemed to have become walls, threatening to move in on him from either side... the night sky had swooped down to become a roof, shutting out the stars. It was a building in which he seemed to stand... a corridor, in which there was no further he could go sideways, no further backwards... doors lining both sides but none to exit, all locked to him... like classroom doors... and Philip... Philip Sidderton still running, moving steps closer to him with his prize of a wreath...
And now the wreath was shaped like a ring of model train track. Approaching behind Philip there was a score or more of his students from 12d, Matthew was sure, and at their head stood Amy Carter. Another ring of track was dropped over Philip’s head, this time by one of the tall, gangling youths. He was Darren Smith and Smith’s gang were laughing while Philip grinned, knowing only the pride and pleasure of clutching his wreath to his chest as he ran closer…
See Matthew? My prize! K-K-Kind! Like Amy, they’re all so kind!
Track was being stuffed down his neck by the close crops and the unwashed who followed. Now they were surely stuffing track into Philip’s pockets, down his trousers, a single corner-curve even pushed into his mouth like a bone to a dog and those students behind him... all those who’d made classroom 329 impossible… laughing… at Philip.
‘Give me the track Philip. I’ll break it, to pieces! As they broke you and me,’ Matthew said, conscious that he was talking to nothing except a chimera, yet unable to stop himself from calling.
No Matthew! Matthew? Don’t take my prize away!
‘Give it to me, you fool! Can’t you see? 12d, they’re laughing - at you!’
Matthew ran, occasionally stumbling forward, just succeeding in righting himself as he stretched forward to take from the approaching
figure the model track which it seemed still to clutch to itself so full of pride.
‘Philip! Philip!’ Matthew called, ‘They’re laughing at you! Can’t you see? Let me break the track! Every bit of it!’
No! Please! Don’t take the prize they give me!
‘Give it to me! Philip! You’ve got to let me take, at least, the piece they’ve stuck in your mouth - are you going to let them make a-dog-with-a-bone out of you? Their puppy and retriever?’
Matthew grasped up into the air to snatch the curve of model tracking out of Sidderton’s stretched mouth.
No! Matthew! I was your sp-specialist friend!
Matthew stopped, unable to believe what seemed to be the figure of the girl behind the boy, trying to stuff into the baggy side pocket of Philip’s coat ... a bottle... with one of those stems... and now the label De Kuypers. And the girl had the face of Amy; a pale yellow now in the uncompromising light that shone from a lamp above the embankment... it was smiling, teasing; a smile that had once been teased from her.
‘Don’t snatch the track out of his mouth Matthew! I told you, it’s rude to snatch. Like Philip snatched you off me when you came to - to pity him!’
It didn’t matter that he knew Amy to be in hospital, for she… her voice was also here… as free, as real as the present could be.
He wondered whether he should turn back along the track, forget about laying his bouquet now only yards ahead on the banking. He hesitated, turning to look at the length of track he’d walked. Behind him… standing the breadth of the track from both sides of the cutting and preventing his exit were his ex-students from 12d…
‘Remember what we told you teacher? It was tiger Amy give your Simple Simon friend the De Kuypers,’ they seemed to be saying. ‘Then gentle, so gentle, Amy tiger give ’im that - push! It was “Bar-B-Q time” for Simon! Confused teacher? Feel like wettin’ yourself right where you’re standin’ dumb as a scarecrow between them lines of track? You’re afraid to go back to Amy tiger. You’re afraid to go forward to 'im who lies cold, cold as steel. Afraid eh? Like we made sure you was! Your mental teacher! Mental…mental…men’aaal!’
Matthew decided on “forward”. He would continue for those last few yards, lay his bouquet on the embankment. After all, that appearance of Philip running up to him between the tracks was just that and no more – an appearance, like that of his students gathering on the line, as doctor Fairfax could have told him. Of course, there was nothing but track and the beginnings of that old tunnel ahead of him, he decided. He zipped his anorak tighter beneath his chin, turned the collar up around his neck, feeling foolish to have believed in appearances.
He turned once more to look behind him at the track he’d trodden. Just as he’d reasoned, there were none of his ex-students forming a barrier across the width of the cutting. The track was free for him to walk and his task was done, bouquet placed, farewells said. That track would lead him back to the station, his car and the roads to the hospital where he might find Amy Carter in a hospital corridor...
Go back M-Matthew, to the hospital! She needs you! You need her! Philips voice seemed to return faintly on the wind. But there were no more appearances of Philip anywhere on the tracks. Of course there weren’t. Philip was dead.
‘She killed you, Philip – you, a lad who couldn’t properly dress yourself,’ Matthew called along the tracks, deserted now except for a few tossed cans and the occasional soggy cigarette packet.
‘She killed you!’ he shouted. ‘Killed!’ he cried, opening up his lungs.
No, M-Matthew...
‘It was slaughter!’ Matthew shouted into the night.
Needs you, M-M-Matthew…Philip’s voice echoed… Amy needs you like you need her!
Which was it to be? Matthew wondered. He kicked shingle along the line until it scattered before him and then kicked. Which?
When he saw Amy again, the truth would be in her face.
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