Everything on the shelves has a docket saying which train it came off. The things on shelf nine have dockets too. The train numbers on them have not run since 1988.
Lost property is the dullest job on the railway and that is why I took it.
I had come off the gateline after an incident I do not talk about, and they were good about it, and they found me something quiet. Quiet is the word they used and quiet is what it was. A room under the concourse with a roller shutter, a counter, a computer that took four minutes to log in, and about nine hundred things that people had left on trains.
The job is a system and the system is not complicated.
An item comes in from a guard or a cleaner or a member of the public. You give it a docket. The docket has a number, the date, the headcode of the train it came off, the coach if they know it, and a description in your own words. You bag it, you tag it, you put it on a shelf by category. Bags on one to three. Coats and clothing on four and five. Electronics in the cage. Documents and wallets in the safe. Umbrellas in a bin, because nobody has ever come back for an umbrella in the history of the railway.
After ninety days it goes. Auction if it is worth something, the tip if it is not.
There are eleven shelf bays in that room. I want you to have the number right. Eleven, and they are numbered on little riveted plates that were screwed on when the room was fitted out, and the plates are painted the same cream as everything else and you can only read them at an angle.
Shelf nine is the third bay along the back wall.
Nobody puts anything on shelf nine.
Nobody ever told me that as a rule. It is not written down, and it was not in the handover. It is simply that on my first morning, Maureen, who had been in that room for twenty six years, took me along the bays and said bags, coats, electronics, documents, and when we came to nine she carried on walking.
I said, what goes on nine.
She said, nothing goes on nine.
She said it flatly, the sort of remark you get about dodgy electrics on one side of a room. Practical. Not spooky. And then she showed me the kettle.
Shelf nine is not empty.
There are eleven or twelve items on it at any given time. I say eleven or twelve because it changes, and I will come back to that. They are bagged and tagged the same as everything else in the room. They have dockets. The dockets are on the same pale green stock, filled in in the same hand, in blue biro.
I read one on my third day because I am a person who reads things.
The docket said: brown leather holdall, one, contents not searched, off 1V47, coach unknown.
1V47 is a headcode. Four characters, and every one of them means something. The number is the class of service, the letter is the destination area, the last two are the individual train. It is not a random string.
1V47 has not run since 1988.
I did not know that on the third day. I knew it looked wrong, because the current headcodes on that route are all in the 2 series and the letter is different, and I thought, well, that is an old docket, and I put it back.
It was a fortnight before I looked one up properly, and by then I had read all of them.
Every item on shelf nine has a docket. Every docket has a headcode. None of the headcodes have run in my lifetime. The oldest one I could place is from a timetable that came in with the 1962 changes and the newest is from the late eighties, and there is nothing after that, nothing at all, and the room itself was fitted out in 2004.
The handwriting on all of them is the same.
It is the same as the handwriting on the current dockets. It is the same as mine.
I need to be careful with that last bit because it is the part that sounds like I am unwell.
Not literally mine, and not a forgery of mine. All the dockets in that room, going back through the boxes of old ones in the cupboard by the shutter, in forty years of them, are written in one hand, and it is a plain hand, quick counter writing, done standing up, and mine looks like it, and Maureen's looked like it, and the man before Maureen, whose name was Keith and who I never met, wrote like it too.
Maureen said that once and only once. She said: you will start writing like the room.
She was not being poetic. She was telling me something.
Now the part about eleven or twelve.
I counted shelf nine on my first Monday. Eleven items.
I counted it every Monday after that, because I am the sort of person who once they have counted a thing will count it again, and it was eleven for five weeks. Then it was twelve. Then it was twelve for a long time. Then it was eleven.
Nothing came in for it. I know that, because everything that comes into that room comes through me, over the counter or in a crate off the trolley, and it gets logged on the computer before it gets bagged.
Nothing goes out of it either. The ninety day clearance is a report you run and a list you print, and the list is generated from the log, and nothing on shelf nine is on the log, so nothing on shelf nine has ever been cleared. In forty years.
Twelve items, then eleven. Something left.
I want to tell you about the day somebody claimed one.
A woman came to the counter on a Thursday afternoon in the dead hour, about half three. Fifties. Good coat. She had the manner of somebody who has rehearsed on the way in, which most people do, because losing something makes you feel stupid and you want to get the words right.
She said she was looking for a holdall.
I asked the questions I ask. When, which train, what does it look like, what is in it. And she gave me a date, and the date was in 1988, and she gave it to me completely flatly, as though it were last Tuesday.
I did not correct her. You do not, on a counter. You find out what is actually going on first.
I asked her what was in it, and she said, a pair of shoes and a tin.
I went and got the brown holdall off shelf nine and I brought it to the counter and I opened it in front of her, which is procedure, you always open it in front of them.
A pair of shoes and a tin.
She signed for it.
That is the bit I keep going back to. She signed the release, and I wrote the docket number in the book, and the docket number was one that is not in any of our sequences, and it went in the book anyway because I wrote it there.
She said thank you very much, and she said it warmly, and she picked the bag up and she went out through the shutter and up the stairs to the concourse.
I went up after her about ninety seconds later. I would like to say I do not know why. I do know why.
The concourse at half three on a Thursday has maybe three hundred people on it and sightlines the whole way to the barriers. I was on the steps in a minute and a half and she was not on it. Not walking away, not at the barriers, not in the coffee place.
I checked the cameras the next day with a lad in the control room who owed me a favour.
She is on them coming in. Twelve minutes past three, through the north entrance, good coat, empty handed. She crosses the concourse and goes down the steps to the lost property shutter, and that is our own camera and it is a bad one and it only sees her back.
She does not come up.
She is not on any camera again. Not that day, not that week. The lad ran her against the whole estate for a fortnight because by then he was interested too, and there is nothing.
Shelf nine was ten items after that, for about a month, and then it was eleven again.
I did not read the new one for a long time. I knew it was new because I had photographed the shelf by then, all of it, every Monday, and I could see a bag that had not been there.
When I did read it, in November, it said: navy rucksack, one, contents not searched, off 1M12, coach D.
1M12 ran until 1991. And there was a description in the box at the bottom, in that hand, which there never is on the others, and it said: handed in by counter staff.
I am the counter staff.
I have never handed anything in. There is nobody to hand it to. I am the person you hand things to.
I left the job in the spring. Not because of shelf nine, or not only. The room was quiet and I had needed quiet and then I had had enough of it.
I trained the woman who took over. I walked her along the bays and I said bags, coats, electronics, documents, and when we came to nine I carried on walking, and she said, what goes on nine, and I said, nothing goes on nine, and I sounded exactly like Maureen and I heard myself do it.
I did not tell her the rest. I have thought about whether that was a kindness and I have decided it probably was not.
The last thing I did before I gave my pass back was count it. Eleven.
And on the way out I looked at the one nearest the front, the navy rucksack, because I wanted to see it one more time, and the docket had been updated. There was a second line under the first, same hand, blue biro, which is what a docket gets when an item is claimed.
It gave a date. The date is next year.
It gave a name. The name is mine.