Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Passenger I Board With
The half-empty carriage will not take one seat off its books, and the man has started saying sorry to the seat before he sits.
- perspective: close-third
The 08:12 arrives at Owlerby as it arrived at Owlerby before he was born, with its three lamps lit and the smell of the brakes cooling off the bank. Ronald Skeat boards it with his ticket already in his hand, as he has done for eleven years, and walks down the train to his carriage, which is the fifth, and to his seat, which is the window seat three back from the doors on the left going down, seat 51.
The carriage empties the way carriages empty, stop by stop, men standing to gather their things early, and by the river bend it is half empty. He counts it there. He has counted it there every morning for eleven years, at the bend, where the light lies flat and even across all the seat backs and there is no arguing with a number. Seats, sixty-four. Heads, thirty-one, including his. Seats standing empty, by the eye, thirty-two, no more and no less, the exact half of the half. And then the ledger, which is printed at the terminus every morning and carried by the seat-diagram man from the front of the train to the back, and which stands for the truth of the whole company: empty seats, thirty-one. Sixty-four take away thirty-one leaves thirty-three. The sum is out by one seat, and the seat is 51, and 51 is his.
It is his in the ordinary way first, by habit — eleven winters of the same window, the same shade at the same hour, the door of the carriage at his shoulder where the draught is honest. Then it is his in the other way, which came later, and which he would now trade all the ordinary way to be rid of: in the brass saddle above the seat rests a reservation label, printed at the same terminus, on the same paper as the ledger, and it carries his name. He has never reserved a seat in his life. He asked at the gateline, in the spring, in the decent voice he uses for officialdom, and The clerk looked, and found no reservation at all, and gave him his season ticket back with an apology twice in one minute.
The label came before the asking. That is one of the facts he keeps very flat, because keeping it flat is all the keeping it needs. He has tried to date it — the label first, or the shortness in the sum first — and the two arrived in the same month, and not one of the stationery offices that matter is interested in which, whereas he is interested in it the way a man with a stone in his boot is interested in the sole of his foot.
On the eighth of November? He did try once to take nothing for granted. He stood, one whole journey, in the vestibule with his hand on the rail, seat 51 open behind him for the whole of the line. The count at the bend came short again, the same seat, over the same nothing. Fifty-one was standing empty to the eye. Fifty-one was standing taken in the ledger. He did not go back and look at the seat. He has been unable to say, since, whether not going to look was discipline or whether there was no version of the morning in which he could have looked.
It was that journey, standing, that the first apology came out of him. Not to a person — there was nobody in the carriage at the river but himself, and the diagram man three carriages off, ticking fifty-one taken in pencil and going on toward the back of the train. He said, into the draught from the doors, very quietly, to nobody and to the seat both: Sorry — I'll be out of your way in a minute.
He says it still. Every morning, whether he sits or whether he stands, at the bend where the light lies flat. He has shortened it, at some point, to Sorry, and shortened that, on the worst morning, to a movement of the mouth, and the movement is missed by none of the arithmetic he trusts. What he has never done is ask the question the apology was constructed to keep from arriving. The decent version of the morning holds that the label is a misprint and the sum picks up a phantom, and there is nothing at 51 to be out of the way of; that version will carry him through a whole shift and a whole supper and to sleep most nights. He is no longer able to hold it through the journey. There is the other version: that the ledger is served, right down the columns, and the seat is taken — and if the seat is taken, then one morning he must turn and ask to be quiet in his own place, and he does not know what he will do if the asking is answered.