Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Timetable I Must Not Quote
A retired clerk carries in his head the working of a service that no board, ledger, or enquiry desk will own, and strangers keep coming to him for it.
- perspective: first
I have a timetable in my head that the railway has never owned. That is the whole of my difficulty, and a little more than the whole of my difficulty, because I did not put it there the way a man puts a timetable in his head, who copies it out and hums it and lets it be wrong until the next edition. Mine was put in at first hand, in the spring of 1971, from a leaflet that was handed out on the up platform for one morning only, and I was nineteen, and I read it standing, twice, and by the second reading I could no longer not know it. The title was the ordinary title, Suburban Directory, the winter it was not, with the line I know best of any line in print: Sundays excepted.
I have written to the depot twice about the leaflet. Both letters were answered kindly, and the kind answers said the same thing in the same typeface: no such directory was printed, no such impression held, and would I care for the current one. I would not. The current one is a fine fat book, and my leaflet lives wherever ninety-one readings and fifty years keep a thing. The depot will be pleased to hear that the two agree entirely — the boards and the leaflet, the printed services — except in one particular, and the particular is the 07:33 to Isworth.
The 07:33 is in my head the way the others are, four callings, a platform, a footnote: Sundays excepted. It is on no board and in no working timetable and at no enquiry desk, and the depot has now said so twice, kindly, in the same typeface. It runs.
It runs for other people. That is what I know and cannot file, and it has come to me only by the strangers, who are the second part, and the part I must not quote.
They find me at the north bench. I sit there mornings since I retired from the showrooms, with my tea, and I have not once in eleven years had to lift a hand or beckon. They come in the first week of the month, in drizzle if the month is honest, and they carry a paper of their own, folded, and they stand a yard off and ask — always the same form, the Isworth form: Is this where the 07:33 goes from? I quoted for years. I gave platform and callings and the couple of minutes the timetable allows at the junction, and I gave the footnote, because the leaflet teaches the footnote, and they thanked me like men being paid twice.
Then they go and wait, and the board does what boards do in the leaflet's absence: the 07:33 shows as cancelled, the tannoy regrets it, and the regret is repeated, and the strangers stand on. The clock takes its minute and gives it back. At 07:37 the board stops saying anything at all and the platform fills with the 07:44 as if the 07:33 had been a space measured out for it. I have seen the strangers look along the platform at me after, not accusing — revising. The enquiry window says what the depot says: no such service. And so the people I quote fail to catch it, every one, and the failure is double, because first they fail to catch a train and then they are told the train was a thing I said.
I have not quoted in fifteen months. The strangers still come, the first week, in the drizzle, and stand a yard off, and now I shake my head at the enquiry window and keep my hands round my tea, and the not-quoting costs me more than anything I have given away free in my life. Nights I recite it, leaflet order, silently, lips an inch apart. Sundays excepted. Sundays excepted. The notebook I copied it into in 1971 is in the drawer under the gas bills, in my nineteen-year-old hand, and it is the only copy, and I have not looked at it since the spring.
Here is the thing I have not written to the depot about, the third letter I am always drafting and never sending. None of them has ever asked me for the return. The leaflet carries the 19:03 back from Isworth under its own heading, two headings on, callings and platform and the footnote, and in eleven years of strangers not one of them, thank you aside, has asked after it. They ask out and only out, the first week of the month, in the drizzle. If the 07:33 is kept on for them out of a timetable that does not exist — kept by whom, for what outward purpose — then it is the 19:03 that I cannot finish thinking about, because Isworth is fourteen minutes' run, and there is all evening in both directions, and nobody has ever chosen to fill the one that comes back.