Found Before Lost

Item 4471: umbrella, gentleman’s, black, golf type, one spoke bent. Found: shelf C. Date found: Tuesday. Claimed: Wednesday, by a Mr Ashworth, who said he had left it on the 11:30 to Liverpool Street that morning.

I wrote that down twice before I saw what was wrong with it.

I have worked in the lost property office at Norwich station for twenty-two years. It is a room behind the ticket hall with no window, a radiator that works when it likes, and four tiers of grey metal shelving that hold, at any one time, about three hundred umbrellas, sixty phone chargers, a lot of single gloves, and something odd. There is always something odd. A box of live crabs, once. A wedding dress in a Waitrose bag. A false leg, which nobody ever came for, and which Kevin from the barriers named Douglas.

People leave things on trains, and the cleaners bring them to me in a blue plastic crate, and I give each one a number and a label and a line in the book, and either somebody comes for it or, after three months, it goes to the charity shop on Prince of Wales Road. That is the job. I like it. It is the only job I have ever had where the problem is always solved by waiting.

Mr Ashworth’s umbrella was on shelf C on Tuesday afternoon. I know because I labelled it. He lost it on Wednesday morning.

I did not say anything to Mr Ashworth. One doesn’t.

* * *

After that I started watching the crate. And I started writing the time down, not just the date, which the book does not ask for and which my manager, Darren, thinks is a waste of ink.

A child’s knitted rabbit, blue, one ear chewed: labelled Monday 4.15 p.m. Claimed Tuesday by a tearful mother who said her daughter had dropped it on the Sheringham train at lunchtime.

A laptop in a grey sleeve. A Kindle. A tin of Quality Street with a hamster in it, alive, which I fed. All of them a day early. Sometimes two.

I tested it, because I was a cashier at the Co-op before this and I don’t believe anything I haven’t counted. On a Thursday a brown leather wallet came in, with a driving licence for a Mr R. Pilgrim of Wymondham. I looked him up and rang his landline, which you can still do in Wymondham, and told him that he should be very careful with his wallet tomorrow, particularly on trains.

He asked me how I had got his number. I said it was in the wallet. He said his wallet was in his pocket. There was a pause while he checked. Then he said it was still in his pocket, and what kind of scam was this, and he would be reporting me to Greater Anglia.

He came in on Friday at ten to five, red in the face, having left it on the 2.05 from Cambridge. He did not remember the call, or decided not to. He signed for it without looking at me.

I stopped warning people after that. It does no good. They lose the thing anyway, and they look at you as if you had taken it.

* * *

Then, in March, I opened the crate and there were my glasses.

Tortoiseshell, reading, plus two and a half, with the left arm mended at the hinge with a dab of clear nail varnish because I am too mean to buy new ones. I put my hand up to my face. Mine were on my face. I took them off and held the two pairs side by side under the desk lamp, and they were the same pair. Same scratch on the right lens. Same varnish.

I labelled them. Item 5102. I did not know what else to do.

The next day, on the bus home, I took my glasses off to rub my eyes and put them on the seat beside me and got off at my stop without them. I didn’t notice until I was at my own front door. Then I went in to work in the morning and there they were on shelf B, and I signed for them myself, in my own book, which Darren said was irregular.

After that my keys. My front door key and the back door key and the little one for the shed, on the Cromer lifeboat keyring my sister sent from her holiday in 2009. They came in on a Monday. I lost them on Tuesday, I still don’t know where. I let myself in with the spare from under the pot.

You get used to it. That’s the dreadful thing. You get used to anything in a room with no window.

* * *

This morning there was a ring in the crate.

Plain gold. Rather thin. Worn flat on one side from fifty years of a man who did not take it off to garden or to change the oil in the Escort. Inside, if you hold it to the lamp, G. & D. 1974, very faint now.

Dennis died in November, three years ago. I have worn his ring ever since on the middle finger of my right hand, because it is too big for any other, and I turn it when I am thinking, so I was turning it when I saw the one in the crate, and both of them were there. One on my hand, warm. One in the crate, cold, on top of a child’s swimming bag.

I have labelled it. Item 5388. Found: shelf A, 8.40 a.m.

I put it on the shelf and sat down. I have taken off my coat but not my scarf. Darren is on a course in Ipswich. The radiator is doing nothing. And I am sitting at my desk with my hand flat in front of me where I can see it, wearing Dennis’s ring, waiting to find out how I am going to lose it. Whether I shall wash my hands in the staff toilet and forget it on the sink. Whether my fingers will simply get thinner. Whether I’ll take it off to rub a sore knuckle and set it down for a second on the counter, the way I did with the glasses, as if it were something that could wait.

It is ten past eleven. Kevin has just put his head round the door with the crate from the 10.53, the Lowestoft train.

On the top, on its own, is a small brown handbag. Leather, scuffed at the corners, with a brass clasp that sticks and has to be pressed down on the left. Dennis bought it for me in Jarrold’s for our thirtieth.

I haven’t touched it yet. I know what’s in it. My purse, my bus pass, half a packet of Polos, the photograph of him at Wells in the striped jumper.

And the label. I can already see the label, tucked under the strap, in the blue biro we keep on a string by the book. It’s in my writing.