“Ticket’s gone up again,” Peter said, not looking up. “Another four hundred quid.”
The next morning, Peter arrived at the ticket office five minutes before his usual train. The queue snaked past the plastic ficus tree that hadn’t been green since 2019. When he reached the window, the clerk—a young woman with tired eyes and a name badge reading Fatima —didn’t ask for his destination. She already knew.
This morning, the smear was joined by a new message: Annual Season Ticket Renewal Notice – 7.2% Increase. rail season ticket prices
For the first hour, he did nothing. He watched the suburbs thin into fields, then thicken into a town he’d never heard of. At Redhill, a teenage girl got on with a violin case. She sat opposite and practiced fingering silently on the velvet lining. Peter remembered he used to play clarinet. He’d stopped when the commute began, because there was no room in a season ticket for a life.
The train lurched. A man in a cheap suit spilled coffee onto Peter’s shoe. Neither of them apologised. That was the unspoken rule of the 7:46: apology required acknowledgment, and acknowledgment required seeing each other as human. “Ticket’s gone up again,” Peter said, not looking up
“Terrible.”
She nodded, needles already clicking. “Good. The ticket was never the problem, you know. The price was just the excuse you needed to admit you hated the journey.” When he reached the window, the clerk—a young
“No,” Peter said. “I want to know the price of a single.”