Lost property in a depot is written in a book by the driver who found it, with the route and the time, and put on a shelf, and the shelf is cleared after three months. Every night at half past eleven an item is written in the book from the last sixty one, a route that was withdrawn in 1987, in a hand that belonged to one driver, and the item is on the shelf in the morning, and the items are all one person's.
I am the depot clerk at a bus garage and the lost property book is on my counter.
The book.
A ledger. Date, time, route, item, driver's initials. The driver who finds a thing on their bus at the end of a shift writes it in and puts it on the shelf behind me, and if nobody claims it in three months it goes to the charity shop. It is a system that has worked for longer than I have been alive.
Every night at half past eleven there is a line in it that nobody wrote.
The line.
Route sixty one. Last bus. Half past eleven. Item. Initials. The initials are two letters and the hand is a big open hand in pencil, and the same hand wrote lines in the older books, in the store, in the 1980s, and stopped in 1987.
The sixty one was withdrawn in 1987. Its last bus was at half past eleven from the station.
The item is on the shelf in the morning. Every morning. A glove. A scarf. A library book, stamped, with a return date in 1986. A shopping bag, with a receipt in it from a shop that closed. A pair of glasses. A hat. They are all a woman's, and they are all, by the look and the size and the years, one woman's, and none of them has been claimed.
What has been checked.
The book, watched. I have sat at the counter at half past eleven with the book open and the pencil on the string, and the pencil has lifted and the line has come, in the big open hand, route sixty one, last bus, and the item, and the initials, and I have watched the letters form and the pencil go down.
The shelf. Empty when I look at it at half past eleven. In the morning the item is on it, at the end, where the night things go.
The initials. The office has the old rota cards. A driver, on the sixty one for nine years, the last bus every night, who had retired when the route went and died the year after, and the old hands say he was the sort who checked every seat at the terminus with a torch and wrote everything in.
The woman.
I put the items together on the counter one morning and looked at them as a set, and it was clear that they were the things a woman loses on a bus over years, one at a time, in the ordinary way, because she took the bus every night and was tired and it was late. Nine years of the last sixty one. A glove in winter, a book in spring. All handed in. None claimed.
I asked the old hands. One of them said, oh, that's her, and told me. A woman who worked late somewhere in town and took the last sixty one home every night for years, and was known to the drivers, and was in the habit of leaving things, and who had, one night in 1986, not got on, and the driver had waited at the station two minutes past time, which was not allowed, and gone, and she had been found in the morning in the town, and it had been in the paper, and he had driven the sixty one for another year with her seat empty and then the route went and then he went.
He is still handing in her things. One a night. Everything she ever left on his bus, in order, and the shelf is where they go, and the three months go by, and I have not sent one to the charity shop.
What is done about it.
The night line is in the book, and the book is the record, and the auditor who checks the lost property against the charity receipts has asked why a route number that does not exist appears in the ledger nightly, and I have said, it is an old driver's habit, which is true.
What I do.
I keep the book.
The shelf has a box on it now, at the end, a proper box, with her name on it, which the old hand gave me. Everything goes in the box. The gloves, the books, the glasses. It is nearly full. I think he is nearly at the end. I think there were only so many things a woman could leave on a bus in nine years and he has handed most of them in.
There is a column in the book for claimed, with a space for a signature. I have started signing it. Each morning, for the night's item, in my own hand, claimed, and my initials, and the date, because somebody should take her things, and there is nobody else, and because a driver who has been handing in a woman's gloves for forty years should be able to see, in the book, that they got to her in the end.