Change Carriages at the Next Stop

It was the 17:40 regional, the carriage a third full, and I had my usual spot: second car, left side, table seat, facing forward. I am particular about it; commuters are lizards, we thermoregulate by habit.

Somewhere past the freight terminal approach, a restlessness started in me that had no content. I checked my phone: nothing. Checked my bag: all there. The restlessness sharpened into something with a direction — backwards. It was the strangest sensation, like being very gently but insistently pulled by the sternum toward the rear of the train. By the time we braked for the terminal stop, it had words, or nearly: not this carriage.

I am English about embarrassment; moving seats mid-journey over a hunch felt borderline deranged. I gathered my things with the elaborate casualness of a man pretending he wants the toilet, walked one carriage back, and sat down feeling like a fool. The pull switched off. Off, like a thermostat satisfied.

At the freight terminal the train waits two minutes under the gantry cranes while they change drivers. Ninety seconds into that wait there was a bang from ahead of us — not huge, industrial, wrong — and then shouting. A crane repositioning a container had suffered a cable failure; the container swung on its remaining hitch and its corner casting came through the roofline of the second carriage. Through it — punched into the interior above the left-side table seats, facing forward.

Nobody was under it. The carriage was a third full and that exact bay was empty, because its occupant was one car back, pretending to have needed the toilet.

The investigators called it a one-in-millions failure. I have their leaflet about compensation somewhere. I never claimed. It felt obscene to invoice anyone for a seat I was pulled out of by something that has never once sent me its bill.