He Cut My Trolley Ticket in Half in Front of the Whole Auction Ring
He put his shoulder into me and tore my trolley ticket in half in front of three hundred buyers, and every one of them looked at my rubber boots and decided he was right.
Mair Rees is the porter at Caerwalter Mart. Fifty-eight years old, dark green stock coat worn thin at the elbow, a biro behind her ear, and the auction licence in her own name since her signature went on the bottom of that page two years ago. If the board decides this was her fault, she loses the licence, the sale day, and nineteen years of work nobody ever thanked her for.
She signed every lot sheet at the foot before the ring opened that morning, the way she always does, because the signature at the foot is what makes the sale legal.
Glyn Prosser came in at half past nine in his tan waxed coat with his leather catalogue under his arm and told the pen girl to hand her clipboard to a real auctioneer.
She kept her hand on it.
He took the trolley ticket out of her fingers with his right hand, turned his left shoulder into her chest, and drove her back against the steel ring rail. The ticket tore in two across the metal and both halves flicked down into the sawdust. A thin red line came up on her cheekbone where the rail edge caught it.
Three hundred buyers watched a porter get put in her place by the man who used to own this ring.
She stayed standing.
She said one flat line, picked up her clipboard, and walked to the rostrum without hurrying. Nobody in that ring had ever seen a pen girl walk up those steps.
Delyth Morgan was behind him the whole time with the pen 42 sheet on her clipboard. She had been told never to contradict Mr Prosser. She carried it anyway.
Here is the thing about Glyn Prosser that three hundred buyers did not know as they laughed into their catalogues. He has not held a licence to sell at this mart for fourteen months. His number lapsed after a lot went through with a withheld vet record. Mair signed the lapse on the board's instruction and kept it off the noticeboard to spare him.
That was the first page.
The second page is why the regular sale was cancelled that morning and every buyer's herd was standing in the pens waiting on a vet clearance they had never been told about — because the sale he fought all week to run was the emergency TB movement sale she requisitioned before he arrived.
Mair laid the lot sheet flat on the gavel block, and beside the printed line "LICENCE LAPSED" his own licence number sat struck through in black biro, with Delyth's small initials in the corner.
She read the number aloud.
👉 Who was standing at the rostrum beside Mair that morning, and why were three hundred buyers never warned about the emergency sale? Find out how the emergency TB movement sale was called and what happened to Prosser's badge at the gate — the next post tells it, in the comments below.
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