Karl’s death hit Dan very hard as well. The two men had been close friends, and with Karl being only a year older than Dan, his passing was like a blow to his belly that pressed all the air from his lungs. Dan was too young to be burying his friends – yet that was what he was soon going to have to do.
A few days after Karl passed away, Dan and Sara went out for a drink. Usually, Karl would have joined them, ordering Jägerbombs to get the party started, his laughing voice putting everyone in a positive mood. But as Sara and Dan collected their drinks at the bar and retreated to a table, laughing was the last thing on their minds. Instead, Dan found himself crying about his friend’s death. Crying in a Wetherspoons – it was hardly cool, but he couldn’t help it. Silently, Sara reached a hand across the table and held his own tightly. She didn’t need to say anything; she knew exactly what he was going through. She was simply there with him, just as he was there with her.
For months now, Sara reflected, she had been putting off telling Dan how she felt about him. There was time enough for all that, she’d told Karl over and over; she would tell him when the time was right.
But Karl’s sudden death was making her realise time was not an infinite resource. Why was she waiting, really? What was she waiting for?
As for Dan, he found that Karl’s death made him re-evaluate many aspects of his life. Life was short. Too short. You did not know how long you had to live; Karl’s tragic death underlined that with emphatic clarity. And if he could be happy with Sara – as he thought he could be, perhaps even should be – then what on earth was he doing in not acting on his feelings?
There was never an official moment when things changed. Dan never said, ‘Will you be my girlfriend?’ and Sara never asked him if he wanted to date. With Karl having passed away so recently, it wasn’t the time for anything as trivial as all that. What was going on between them was somehow deeper; it needed no label, no articulation, no moment where a line was crossed. It was more that their friendship was heading in that direction and neither of them did anything now to stop those flourishing seeds from growing, an inevitability that Karl had long foreseen. Rather, it was that their clasped hands on those pub tables became a little bit more common, that their hugs when they said hello lasted just that little bit longer than the norm. When they laughed at work in the team leaders’ office, watching Felix as she frolicked about on the floor, they kept smiling at each other long after the joke was over. Felix, in fact, was probably the first to know what was going on between the two of them.
It was just as well she was so good at keeping secrets.
There was a horrible bittersweetness in their coming together as a couple now, though. For, simply: Karl should have been there to see it. He, who had done so much for them both, would have been thrilled to see them happy. But, no matter how much they might have wished it otherwise, Karl was gone.
16. Time to Say Goodbye
Karl’s funeral was held on a cold, dry day in November 2017. The temperature itself was sobering, but the bite on the team’s cheeks that day was a wake-up call they did not need. Everyone arriving for work that morning knew the itinerary for the day. They climbed the stairs to the station with a hushed air of respect, walking the same route as Karl had once done, his forever absence present as they traced the steps he would never walk again.
Ascending the stairs that morning were the TPE colleagues who worked in the booking office, such as Angela Dunn, and those who had volunteered to cover the shifts of the staff who worked on the platforms. The latter knew Karl best of all and needed to attend his funeral. Naturally, they weren’t coming into work that day. So the railway family pulled strings and swapped shifts so that all those who wanted to could be with Karl for his final journey.
When the railway loses one of its own, it is a tragedy that ripples all the way along the network. And as Karl had worked on the rail-replacement buses before joining the team at Huddersfield, he had made a massive impact on people all over the railway. Everyone wanted a chance to say goodbye, even if they had to work on the day of the funeral. Karl’s family also wanted their boy to bid farewell to the place he had loved for so long. A special send-off was now devised for this very special man. It proved to be so special that no one who witnessed it would ever, ever forget it.
At about 1 p.m. on 6 November, Karl came to Huddersfield station one last time. The word went round, and people from all over the network came to pay their respects. They arrived in ones and twos and groups: drivers and conductors and even some executives from head office. As they stepped through the gateline, it was with very heavy hearts. The concourse at Huddersfield was often the setting for affectionate reunions of friends and family, who rushed at one another to hug, the excitement of coming home eclipsing all else, but that morning there was little warmth to be found among the travelling TPE workers. Colleagues embraced or shook hands or acknowledged each other with formal, gruff nods, but there was no joy in their being together. For the one person who had brought them together was painfully absent.
In the booking office, Angela Dunn was fighting her way through her shift. Then, at the appointed hour, she gently drew down the window on her serving hatch. All work at the station ceased. Before she left the office, she draped a bright red pashmina over her navy uniform; everyone had been asked to wear red today for Karl, in honour of his favourite football team, Manchester United. Angela planned to wear her scarlet scarf all day long. It was nice to feel that she was honouring her colleague in this small way, even though she couldn’t go to the funeral. Customers would ask why she was wearing it, and she would tell them, and in speaking Karl’s name there was a kind of comfort, as though it was helping to keep his memory alive.
As Angela stepped out on to the station steps that lunchtime, she saw that everyone else had got the memo: all the TPE colleagues were wearing ruby-red hats, scarves, jackets and jumpers as they ranged along the steps of the station – about fifty people or more, all told. The steps were absolutely full. The colourful clothing made for an incongruous burst of brightness. It seemed at odds with the solemnity of the day – and yet, somehow, it also perfectly summed up the man they were mourning, he who could always cheer his colleagues up, no matter what was getting them down.
Despite the numbers there, a hush soon fell among the gathered colleagues. At that moment a big black hearse pulled off the road by the taxi rank and crossed on to the regal sandstone floor of the square itself. Driven at a sombre pace, the car pulled up in front of the steps – and there it remained.
The square fell silent. Even the pigeons pecking in the fountains seemed to stop what they were doing and be still. Karl’s coffin was wreathed all over with flowers; one that stood out in particular was a love heart made of pink roses from his fiancée.
Angela Dunn blinked back tears. It was a very emotional moment. Karl had been so young and his death so sudden, and he had been such a wonderful, kind bloke. His was a truly tragic loss; there were no words to explain how everybody felt.