She Demanded My Seat Because Her Son "Gets Sick Facing Backwards"

Train. Booked seat, forward-facing, table, four hours, and I had paid extra for it, because I have long legs and a short temper.

A woman arrived with a boy who was clearly nineteen — a big lad, headphones, that specific hunch of a young man who knows what is about to happen and cannot stop it.

She said her son gets sick facing backwards and asked me to move.

I said no. Not rudely. I said I had booked this seat and I would rather stay in it, and I went back to my book.

She then did what these people always do, which is escalate to an audience. She told the carriage that her son has a "condition". She told the carriage that I was a young man — I am forty-one and I took that as a compliment — with no respect. She told the carriage that "in her day" people gave up seats.

Her son said, quietly, "Mum. Please."

She told him to be quiet.

The guard came. She explained. The guard, who was maybe twenty-five and had the calm of a man who does this eleven times a day, checked her tickets.

They were not for that carriage. They were not for that train. They were for the train two hours later, and they were unreserved, and she knew it, and you could see the exact half-second where she knew that he knew.

She said the app had "done something".

He offered to sell her two seats at the on-board price. She said that was extortion. He said he understood, and stood there, pleasantly, doing nothing, for about ninety seconds, which is a very long time.

She paid.

They sat two rows down, backwards. The boy faced backwards for four hours and was not sick, because of course he was not.

At the terminus, as we filed off, he stopped by my seat and said, "Sorry about my mum."

That is the whole story. I did not win anything. He apologised for his mother in a train aisle at twenty past four in the afternoon, and I have thought about him ever since, and I hope he moved out.