He Called Me the Cleaner in Front of the Whole Bluebell Line
"Get the cleaner off this train," Norman said, and then his shoulder was against mine.
Jean Fairhurst wears a navy high-vis and a grey headscarf over a checked shirt, and she signs every duty roster on the Bluebell Line. Norman Bryce wears brown tweed with leather elbow patches and an enamel board badge, and he decided from the coat what I was worth.
Bank holiday gala morning, hard sun on the platform, the 11:40 breathing steam at the buffers. Norman comes through the barrier first, tells a family in front of him which seats to take, then looks at my vest and asks the platform who let the agency staff on.
I asked him for his pass. He called me the cleaner twice, so the family would hear it cleanly.
I said, "Say that again for the guard."
He said, "You don't sign anything here."
Then he moved. His right shoulder drove into mine and pinned me back against the guard's van door. The steel bucket swung out of my hand, tipped, and the water went over the platform edge and slapped flat across the sleepers below. My headscarf slipped loose. The door handle caught my left wrist and opened a red graze on it.
Nobody on the platform moved. A trainee guard named Ceri half stepped forward and froze, because three volunteers had told her never to contradict Mr Bryce. She knew why the regulars put the station clock behind them and didn't look up when it struck eleven. She knew, and she stood still.
I didn't let go of what was in my other hand. The roster I'd pinned inside the van at half past six that morning, blue biro down the columns, my signature at the foot.
Norman was still bellowing for someone to remove me when I straightened the vest and walked to the van door.
"I'll read it out, then," I said.
He was talking about the thirty years he'd given this railway. He was talking about the board, and about how a woman with a bucket doesn't settle who boards a train.
I brought the roster out flat and level, both hands, so the number faced the platform.
"Read his number," I said to Ceri.
She read it: B-1147. Halfway down the page, written beside "PASS WITHDRAWN — 02/02".
You'll think you know what that means. A man past his time, a pass he forgot to hand in, a hard woman making an example of an old volunteer on a bank holiday.
That isn't what it means.
February the second is on that page in my handwriting because I'm the one who signed the revocation. I'm the operating manager of this line. Norman Bryce overrode a signalman's decision six months ago, six months of gala trains he shouldn't have been anywhere near, and I kept it off the volunteers' noticeboard because the board asked me to spare him the public shame of it.
Ceri's mouth opened and nothing came out. She kept glancing at the clipboard inside the van and couldn't finish a sentence, and now I knew why the regulars had been doing the same all morning.
Norman stared at the sheet for a long four seconds. Then he went for the guard's van door anyway, because the 11:40 was standing there with steam up and his old badge on his lapel, and no piece of paper was going to tell him he couldn't ride his own railway.
I handed the roster to Ceri and called the signalman to confirm the revocation over the platform telephone. The whistle went. The carriage door closed on the reach of his hand.
He stood half turned away, walking stick on the boards, head bowed toward the carriage he was never getting on.
And I walked the length of the train, because it wasn't a gala running that morning. The gala was cancelled. The whole day's timetable was re-routed under my signature, the 11:40 was commandeered, and Norman had forbidden me to inform the volunteers what it was carrying.
"Whose train is this?" he called after me.
I didn't answer him. Not with a platform full of people listening, not with the family he'd moved out of their own seats standing behind me.
Ceri handed me back the roster with her thumb pressed on the pass number as if it might walk off the paper. Her hands weren't steady. Mine were.
At the far end of the train, through the third carriage window, a folded blanket moved. Then a second. Six of them, asleep in the seats Norman had spent the morning handing out to strangers.
Six people out of the flooded village at the end of the line, the only service of the day, and every volunteer on that platform had been carrying them home while Norman argued about a coat.
He never asked why the timetable on the noticeboard didn't match the one he was holding. He never asked why the gala bunting was down. He only asked what right I had.
That's where it stops for now: me at the carriage window with the roster in my hand, reading a name off the passenger manifest I'd signed that morning, with Norman on the platform behind me asking who's in the third carriage, and Ceri watching my face to see whether I'll answer him.
I turned the page so the name faced the glass.
His walking stick came down on the boards. Once. Twice. Then nothing, which was worse.
You've seen him shut off from the train he loves, and you've seen the pass number with my signature under it. You haven't seen who those six people were, or why the board let me keep it from him for six months, or what the village wrote to the railway after the water went down.
That's the part I'm posting next, and it's the part that changes which of us you think was the villain on that platform.
Who was on the train Jean commandeered that morning — and why was nobody allowed to tell Norman? The next post names them, and the reason the board told her to keep quiet, at the link below.
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