The Toll Ticket From a Bridge That Fell

The toll plaza I work nights at is modern — electronic gates, number-plate cameras, contactless everything, the paper-ticket era long gone. Which is why the ticket the driver handed me at about 3 a.m. stopped my whole night.

A car pulled into my manned lane — itself unusual at 3 a.m., most people use the automatic gates — an older model, immaculate, and the driver, an older man, wound down his window and handed me, instead of a card or coins, a paper toll ticket. Faded, genuine, the perforated old kind, printed with the name of the crossing and a date, and I stood there holding it because the crossing named on the ticket was the OLD bridge. The original bridge. The one that came before this motorway, that spanned the estuary here until it collapsed — a structural failure, in the night, with cars on it, people lost, the disaster that closed the old crossing forever and eventually led to the new road I now take tolls on. It collapsed the year I was born. It has not existed, has not taken a toll, has not printed a ticket, in my entire lifetime.

He handed me a ticket from it, faded but real, dated to a year I've only ever seen in the story of the disaster.

I must have stood too long staring at it, because he smiled, kindly, patiently, the smile of a regular waiting for a slow clerk, and he said, 'That's still valid, isn't it? I never got to use it.' Never got to use it. A toll ticket from a bridge that fell in the night with cars on it, that he'd bought, apparently, to cross — and never got to use.