Lucy Brown

Tickets

Lucy Brown

Touch to start. All right. Well, start then, you stupid thing.

The screen flickers a bit, bringing up a list of destinations, most of which sound like places you’d read about in a Harry Potter novel. If this is my locality then I don’t know it at all. As I click on ‘Peterborough’, I realise I’m not sorry about my ignorance, not one bit. I want city life, the closest to travelling the globe I’m ever going to get while buggering around on the East Coast Mainline. Then again, can Peterborough be considered the hub of anything? At least Grantham had given us Maggie Thatcher; all Peterborough ever seemed to give us was overhead line problems.

So – ticket type. Shouldn’t bother me, I’m not the one paying. But, nevertheless, I dither, trying to get the best deal for the firm until, finally, the machine tires of me and reverts to the welcome screen.

Let’s try again.

This time I’m swift. Peterborough – boom. Anytime return – boom. Payment method next. I tap the company’s credit card on my palm, delighted that it’s been entrusted to my fumbling care, and run over the pin number three times in my head as I push it into the slot.

Please enter your pin.

Rather grandly, I do. Then I stare at the floodlit ditch at the level of my clenched fist, waiting for the slips of orange to appear. They don’t.

Please remove your card. Go to the desk.

The horror engulfs me. My first day with the card! I can picture Dave sniggering if I’m forced to slink back to the office when I’m supposed to be en-route to a corresponding airless hole in Peterborough. Not enough money in your own bank account to cover it, mate? Well, no, actually; not when you’ve got a proper family to support and not just a drug habit and a spindly Cocker Spaniel.

Go to the desk. The shame. While I queue up the options flood my mind – I forgot to activate the card properly, I entered the pin backwards, I entered my own pin.

Standing here now, I can’t remember any number beyond 999 emergency.

I reach the head of the queue and a dumpy woman, chewing gum and her finger at the same time, surveys me with interest.

‘You were using the machine, weren’t you?’ she says. ‘Won’t get nowhere with that.

Always playing up, little buggers. Just won’t connect properly. Where are you off to?’

I wonder, as I stand here, if I even know.

Bag

Lucy Brown

It was a bad habit. I was nosy, always had been, but poking my nose into other people’s business – and especially other people’s bags – was going to get me into trouble one day. Maybe this was the day.

After I nudged the bag a few times with my foot and it hadn’t exploded I called the guard over. He gave me a weary smile, equating me with all those worrisome women who saw danger in a tin can. But we were told to be vigilant, after all, and this was a black holdall on a station platform. It just screamed danger while the lines in front of it screeched with the sound of an incoming train.

The guard did what he probably wasn’t meant to – he unzipped the thing. Well, first he gave a perfunctory warning to the nearby passengers that he was about to open a mysterious package. He probably shouldn’t have done that either.

A few people took a step back but most didn’t bother. Two girls, sixteen or so, carried on giggling at the semi-lewd pictures they were showing each other on their phones.

I’d noticed what they were up to when I circled the bag looking for its owner.

When the guard pulled the zipper I held my breath – then let it out in a huff. What I’d hoped might be a mess of wires was in fact a holiday bag, the top two items being a deflated beach ball and a pair of In the Night Garden pyjamas, adult-sized.

‘Another storm in a teacup,’ he muttered, maybe to himself more than me.

‘What will you do with it?’ I asked.

He just looked at me. ‘Thanks for your help. Better to be safe than sorry, love. That’s your train,’ he concluded, voice muffled as he bent down.

Panic overtook me. I’d been so intent on the bag that I’d forgotten my day in Doncaster. I jumped on, just as the beeping started, watching the door slide shut with a degree of satisfaction.

Then something struck me. The guard had said ‘that your train?’. A question, not a statement. As we pulled out of the station, I looked around for some logo, a carpet colour or something I recognised. I didn’t find it.

Probably because I was on my way to Penzance.