“That place is haunted,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”
The man’s expression indicated this wasn’t the first stupid comment he’d heard today, though it was probably the most.
But I’d felt that the moment I set foot in the Station Arts building and put my hand on the staircase balustrade. The original railway station had been built in the 1880s and the stairs were dark and heavy jarrah; the handrail felt solid enough to survive a bombing. Also, the case curled up to the first floor and because no lights had been turned on yet, beginning and end sat in pools of darkness, which for anyone familiar with ghost stories is a sure sign that others inhabit the shadows.
For the next three weeks, every time I put a foot on the staircase I couldn’t shake that idea I was sharing it with others, but this wasn’t an old country mansion where strange and terrible things had taken place, it had been a train station, a government building. The station master may have lived here but everyone else arrived at a set time each morning six days a week, made themselves a cup of tea or coffee then went to their assigned places to begin a process that would not stop until five on the dot Monday to Friday, and Saturday mornings at twelve. That’s when they let out a collective sigh and started talking about God knows what as they shook themselves into their overcoats and bumped the dents out of their hats.
Everything they did depended upon routine: communicating up and down the line to ensure the trains were on time, that the passengers disembarked, the mail was unloaded, that carriages were coupled and uncoupled, telegrams interpreted, tickets sold, complaints answered, tea brewed, sandwiches cut, floors swept, every activity had its moment, and the staff moved about the building with a sense of purpose, carrying pieces of paper that needed a signature or a stamp, or pushing trolleys between rooms, pulling gears to shunt the tracks, glancing at their watches, shouting at off-siders; routine suited them. They worked best when today promised to unfold the same as yesterday, which is the nature of railways.
Had they remained in this building in some other-worldly form, they were too focused on the task at hand to be aware or even remotely interested in any actual human presence. Rather, they wafted through the rooms and up and down the stairs six days a week because they had once done that for fifteen years or more and, psychically speaking, it was all they knew now.
But I’m not sure when I said ‘haunted’ I was thinking of ghosts.
Every evening I wrote notes, about the photographs I’d taken and the people I’d met, and the last thing I wrote that first night was “don’t know what keeps Beverley alive.” It sounds presumptuous considering I’d been here only a matter of hours, but the tone mattered. I wasn’t baffled, rather I understood, even vaguely, that to get any purpose out of my stay, that question was worth asking. I knew, the way you do with all country towns, that history mattered.
The next morning I loaded the cameras on the bike and rode across town to the Anglican Cemetery.
