The Memory Fare: read the first chapter

Part One: The FareChapter One · The Lost and Found

The lost property office at Ashwick Central opened at seven, and Cora Marsh was usually through the door by ten past, which Desmond had stopped remarking on somewhere in the third year.

He had the kettle going. He always had the kettle going. The office was a long room behind Platform Four with a counter at the front and a forest of steel shelving behind it, and it smelled the way such places smell — wet wool, old paper, the sweetish rot of a packed lunch somebody had abandoned in a rucksack in 2019 and which Desmond, on principle, refused to throw away until the statutory period expired.

"Nothing since Tuesday," he said, without looking up. "Two umbrellas and a bass guitar."

"I'll look anyway."

"I know you will."

She signed the visitor book. Her own name, six years of it, running down the page in a column like a debt. Desmond had offered, twice, to stop making her sign. She had declined both times. The signing was part of it. If she stopped signing she would be a woman who came to a railway station to browse, and she was not that. She was a woman conducting a search, and searches had paperwork.

The shelves were organised by month of surrender. She started, as always, at the far end and worked forward, because June had gone missing in September and Cora's superstition — she knew it was a superstition, she had known for years — was that anything of June's would surface in a September.

Bags. That was most of it. Holdalls with the handles gone soft, wheeled cases with airline stickers layered like sediment, a canvas satchel with a lump in the bottom that turned out to be a bag of sugar. She went along the row with her hand out, touching each one at the tag, the way you might read a wall.

She had a system, and the system was this: she was not looking for June. She had understood quite early that looking for June was a thing that would kill her, in the way that looking directly at the sun is a thing that will take your eyes. So she looked for June's handwriting instead.

It was distinctive. It had been distinctive since her daughter was eleven and had decided, with the total conviction available only to eleven-year-olds, that she would write her lower-case g with a straight tail rather than a loop. Cora had thought it was a phase. It had lasted. By seventeen June wrote a g like a small hook that had given up, and it was the single most reliable thing about her, and Cora had spent six years walking past strangers' luggage looking for a letter of the alphabet.

She reached the end of the September shelf.

She turned into the aisle marked JUNE — the month, the shelving convention, a joke so cruel and so accidental that she had needed most of a year to be able to walk down it without stopping — and went along it with her hand out.

Tag. Tag. Tag. Laminated card. Tag.

Her hand stopped.

It was a small bag. Grey, the fabric gone bald at the corners, a strap repaired with a length of blue climbing cord. Cora knew the cord. Cora had bought the cord, from a shop on Meacham Street with a bell over the door, on a Saturday, for two pounds forty, because June had come home with the strap hanging off and had said it's fine, I'll just carry it, in the voice she used when she wanted an argument.

The tag was cardboard. The station issued them in bulk.

On it, in biro, in a hand she would have known in the dark, was written:

J. MARSH — NOT LOST

She did not, at first, do anything at all.

There is a thing that happens in the body before the mind catches up, and it happened to her then: a coldness that started behind the sternum and went outward, the whole room tipping very slightly, like the floor of a boat. The shelving stayed where it was. The sugar-lump satchel stayed where it was. Somewhere on the other side of the wall a train came in and the announcement made its flat apology about the delay.

Then her mind caught up, and what it produced was not joy. It was procedure.

Take a photograph. Do not touch the bag with your bare hands. Do not open it. Find the log entry. Establish the date.

She took the photograph. Her hands were steady, which she noticed with a kind of contempt.

"Desmond."

Something in her voice brought him out from behind the counter faster than she had ever seen him move.

---

The log was a ledger, because Ashwick Central had a ledger and had never seen a compelling argument for anything else. Desmond ran his finger down the column of surrender dates and stopped.

"That's not right," he said.

"Read it to me."

"Cora—"

"Read it to me, Desmond."

He read it to her. The bag had been surrendered nineteen days ago. On a Thursday. At 12:04 in the afternoon.

Six years, one month and nine days after her daughter had walked out of a house on Bellweather Road with a grey bag on her shoulder and had not come back.

Cora put her hand flat on the counter, because the counter was there.

"Who brought it in?"

"Doesn't say. Doesn't have to. If it's found on a service it comes in from the crew, and the crew log the service, not the—" He stopped. He looked at the ledger. He looked at it for long enough that Cora came round the counter to look at it with him, which was against about four rules and neither of them mentioned it.

In the column headed SERVICE, in Desmond's own handwriting, was written: 11:47.

"There isn't an 11:47," Desmond said.

"There's an 11:47 to Carrow."

"That's the 11:41. There's the 11:41 to Carrow and the 11:53 to Bewdon Parkway and there is not, and there has never been, in the nine years I have worked in this building, an 11:47 to anywhere." He was not being pedantic. Desmond was pedantic about most things and this was not that; his voice had gone careful, the way a man's voice goes when he is describing something he watched happen and did not understand. "And I don't remember writing that."

"It's your hand."

"I know it's my hand."

They stood there together over the ledger, the kettle clicking itself off behind them, and Cora Marsh felt something she had not felt in six years and had assumed, correctly, that she would not survive feeling. She felt it anyway. It came up through her like water finding a crack.

"Desmond," she said. "I need to look inside the bag."

---

There was nothing in it that would have meant anything to anybody else.

A hair tie, black, stretched out. Half a packet of chewing gum. A biro with the end chewed flat. A paperback with the cover folded back on itself, which was a thing Cora had asked her daughter not to do roughly four hundred times, and a receipt used as a bookmark, and the receipt was from a shop that did not exist, in a town that Cora could not find, dated eleven days into a month that had not happened yet.

And a notebook.

It was a cheap one, the sort sold in newsagents, with a cover the colour of a swimming pool. Cora opened it and the first page was blank and the second page was blank and the third page said, in a small hooked hand with a straight-tailed g:

I'm going to write everything down because it takes them. If you're reading this and you don't know who I am, keep reading. If you're reading this and you do know who I am, get off at the next stop and go home.

Mum. I mean you. Go home.

The rest of the notebook — sixty-odd pages of it — was filled edge to edge with June's writing, and Cora could not read a word of it. Not because it was in code. Because it was in English, in her daughter's hand, and every time she got to the end of a sentence she could not have said what the beginning of it had been.

She tried nine times. On the ninth she gave up and sat down on the floor of the lost property office at Ashwick Central with her back against the shelving and the notebook open on her knees, and Desmond, who had raised two daughters and buried a wife and had never once in nine years asked her a question about any of it, put a cup of tea down on the floor beside her where she could reach it, and went and stood at the far end of the room with his back turned, so that she could make whatever sound she needed to make.

She made it.

Then she stopped, and wiped her face with the heel of her hand, and drank the tea, all of it, because she was going to need it.

"Desmond," she said. "What time is it now?"

He checked. "Twenty past nine."

Cora Marsh got up off the floor.

"Then I've got two hours and twenty-seven minutes," she said.

End of Chapter One · The Lost and Found. The Memory Fare © Simran Mehta. Reproduced here by the author.