Late Shift

The 23:52 from Leeds was the train nobody chose. It was the train you ended up on.

Ellie Marsh knew every one of its moods. On Fridays it smelled of chips and spilled cider and somebody always sang. On Sundays it carried soldiers back to Catterick and students back to nowhere in particular. On a wet Tuesday in November it carried almost nobody at all, and that was how she liked it.

She found a seat facing backwards, which she preferred, because she had spent twelve and a half hours on Ward 14 facing forwards. Forwards was where the call bells were. Forwards was Mr Okafor in bay three asking for his wife, who had been dead since the summer, and Mrs Lumb pulling at her cannula, and the agency nurse who didn't know where anything was, and the doctor who said just quickly before every request that would take forty minutes. Backwards was the window, and the dark, and her own tired reflection sliding over the lights of Kirkstall.

She did not take her coat off. She put her bag on her knees and her hands on the bag, and she let the train rock her.

There were four other people in the carriage.

A teenage boy two rows ahead, hood up, headphones in, the tinny ghost of a drum track leaking out of them. A woman across the aisle in a camel coat and expensive trainers, laptop open, typing fast, frowning at the screen like it owed her money. Near the doors, an old man in a flat cap and a proper tweed jacket, the kind nobody under eighty wore any more, sitting very upright with a walking stick between his knees. And at the far end, somebody asleep under a newspaper, only their boots showing.

Ellie closed her eyes.

Shipley. Bingley. Keighley. Skipton. She said the stations in her head like a rosary. Forty-one minutes. At Skipton she would walk the fifteen minutes up Raikes Road to the flat, and she would not turn the heating on because the meter was low, and she would eat cereal standing up, and she would lie in bed and not sleep and think about the letter.

The letter was in her bag, under her hands. She had written it on her break, on the back of an incident form, in green biro because it was the only pen that worked.

Dear Sue, please accept this as my formal notice—

She hadn't got further than that. She didn't know what came after. I'm sorry. I'm tired. I used to love this. I don't know who I'd be if I stopped. None of it was the kind of thing you put in a letter to a ward manager.

The train slowed for Shipley. Nobody got on. Nobody got off. The doors sighed shut.

Somewhere past Bingley, she slept.

She woke because the rocking had stopped.

It was a particular kind of stillness, the stillness of a train that has not reached a station. No platform lights through the window. No announcement. Just the hum of the heaters and the dark pressed flat against the glass.

The woman in the camel coat had stopped typing. The boy had taken one headphone out.

"Signal," said the woman, to nobody. "It'll be a signal."

Ellie checked her phone. 00:31. They should have been at Skipton ten minutes ago. No bars. Not even the one flickering bar you usually got, even out here.

"Where are we?" she said.

"No idea." The woman shut her laptop with a sigh. "Somewhere with no 4G, apparently. Typical."

The boy pulled his hood down. He was younger than Ellie had thought, fifteen maybe, with a soft, worried face that his hood had been hiding. "We've been stopped ages," he said. "Like, ten minutes."

From near the doors, the old man said, very quietly: "Eleven."

They all looked at him.

He was not looking at them. He was looking out of the window, at the dark, and his hands were tight on the head of his walking stick. He had the stillness of someone listening hard for a sound he did not want to hear.

"Sorry," Ellie said. "Did you say eleven?"

"Eleven minutes," he said. "It always waits eleven minutes."

And then, outside the window, a light came on.