We were waiting at Salerno station for the train to Sicily when a woman on the opposite platform collapsed. Her husband held her head while she shuddered, her arm extended. It was the arm you see in Renaissance paintings, fearsome and knowledgeable. Men jumped down from our side and ran across the tracks to the couple. One held her legs up. Then her head fell to one side, her face went from white to blue, or purple, and her husband stood up, clutching a pillar, his screams filling the station.

Every face petrified as fear percolated down the platform. A woman stroked her baby and turned away. Other women covered their mouths, their eyes wide. A sheet of death washed down the line, cold and impenetrable. So life can be like that! You can be waiting for the train to Rome and then you're gone, your hand pointing to your fate. Again the husband called out, and again. Around the woman’s body a group of people clustered.

A man was positioning his hands above her chest for resuscitation when the scene disappeared from our view, shielded by the side of their train pulling in to the station as if everything was normal, as if everyone on that platform was just waiting to get to Rome. Our platform sighed in relief. Excused from having to see any more we tried to look somewhere other than at the carriage that hid them from us.

When the train to Rome moved on the clustering people had gone with it, their weaving and shuffling replaced by the sharp movements of paramedics. The frantic husband, down on his knees now, fluttered around his wife's revived body, holding her hands and soothing her down as she tried to sit up. A paramedic dressed the wound on her head where she had fallen, and another listened to her heartbeat. More people arrived with a stretcher. Our platform relaxed, able to move, to check the indicator for our train’s arrival. When I next looked across the woman was gone. Her husband, the paramedics and the stretcher all gone.

Like a coda to a performance, a cleaner appeared. First her head bobbing, then her whole body straining at the top of the stairs, heaving a bucket. She walked along the platform to where the woman had been lying and leaned on her mop, pushing it heavily across the stained cement. She put her mop back in the bucket, turned around and, step by step, disappeared back down the stairs.