The Last Train

I turned up to work early yesterday morning. By early, I mean 6am. When the world is still in the pitch black of night, ice is trying to form on the car windscreen and if you see anyone about, he or she is most likely to be a fox. The chap scheduled to work the early turn wouldn’t be in, so someone was needed to go and open up. That someone happened to be me. It was a very strange shift. Surreal. Sad, even.

It’s the little things you notice that make you think. First thing we do when going into the office is to sign on in the week’s log book. Name, date, time. The chap who should have been in had his signature right at the top, scrawled in on Monday morning. A few hours after signing in on Monday, he called me on the phone to see if I could come in a bit early. He wasn’t well and was going to go home. I said I would. I’d seen him on Friday and he’d looked awful then. He had shivers and felt drained. Perhaps you’re thinking now, what I was thinking then. Given the current circumstances, he probably shouldn’t have been coming in for about a week.

On Tuesday I got another call, from management. Yes, he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Of course he had. By the time he’d gone sick, it couldn’t have been anything else. Management wanted the offices deep cleaned. I went in on Wednesday morning to let the cleaner in. He sprayed everything with some magic virus killing stuff. I did my shift. I went home. Mrs P and I went for our daily walk. We sat down to eat dinner. I moved my fork to my mouth. And my phone rang, a colleague and good friend was calling. It was becoming a bit of a week for phone calls. I answered and heard a very choked up voice on the other end of the line. “He’s dead.”

My departed colleague was part of the fabric of that station. He’d joined the railways 44 years ago, straight from school. He was mid 60s and otherwise fit and healthy. He cycled to work most days. And, plague permitting, he still played football. He was a staunch leftie and a great union rep. He was a genuinely good guy. I relied on him hugely when I first joined. Most people relied on him hugely on a permanent basis. He was looking forward to retirement with his wife. He was just waiting for the right moment.

He has a story to tell, but this isn’t it. It likely won’t ever be written down. But he just joined a lot of folk who get reported each day as a number on the covid scoreboard. That’s all we know of them, but of course they are more than numbers. Every number has a story behind it. A story that’s a lifetime in the making.

So there I am yesterday morning. Pottering about. Getting things done. Noticing all the little things. He will be missed, but there’s so much that remains behind. His green coffee cup is on the cup stand, where he left it on Monday. I finished my work and signed out, where he would have been signing out if things had been different. I looked again at his entry on Monday. You truly never know what each new week has in store, do you?

Stay safe.