Two Irishmen, a woman from Ukraine, and a lost mobile phone

The station concourse was packed with travellers, most of us gathered under a moribund information board that was resolutely refusing to divulge which platform the mainline train would be leaving from, despite a departure time 10 minutes hence.

Unlike the static, uncommunicative board, a bony and voluble young woman with straw-blond hair was ricocheting around the station, sending a frisson of self-conscious discomfort through the stalled passengers. Flailing around the coffee kiosks, stumbling among the wheelie bags and benches full of solid middle-aged couples in sandals and raincoats, their tinfoil-packed sandwiches on their laps, she was clearly distressed.

Tears streamed down her ashen face as she floundered around the family groups who were keeping impatient offspring entertained with tablets and mobile phones. Though apparently beseeching someone to help her, she remained, or so it seemed, entirely oblivious of her surroundings. Her intercession was to herself alone or to some split-off fragment of self that might have comforted her.

Unseen behind the high-backed seats separating us, I couldn’t help but overhear the father and son’s conversation

I’d seen the young woman on this concourse before, witnessed then her pilgrimage from pillar to post. I’d seen the station attendants’ bored indifference before, felt my own indecision and fear of getting involved before, was familiar with my own rationalisations that someone else would help her deal with her anguish. When the information board sprang to life, I was grateful to leave her behind and join the surge towards platform 5.

Maureen Dowd: Trump’s line about being martyred always seemed risible but I guess it works with some people

---

Breda O'Brien: Are the mistakes of Junior Cycle reform about to be repeated in the Leaving Cert?

---

Kevin Barry: ‘I didn’t publish a book till I was 37. I thought I must have been an awful f*cking waster’

---

Can we finally say goodbye to shaming women for letting their hair go grey?

---

On the train, I got out my laptop and started working, though my concentration was fitful.

[ Hilary Fannin: The handful of kilos I routinely decide to shift have been mates of mine for years ]

I’d seen two passengers take their seats just in front of mine, a casually well-dressed father and his adult son, whose mutual familial ease was evident in their conversation and demeanour. The father, a calm and judicious-seeming individual, had, it emerged, left his mobile phone on the Luas on his way to the station. The son, a competent and equally sanguine man in early middle age, was calling the missing phone to ascertain its whereabouts.

Unseen behind the high-backed seats separating us, I couldn’t help but overhear the ensuing conversation.

The father’s mobile had been found and answered by a woman on the Luas. She was clearly trying to be helpful in repatriating device to owner, but she had no English. The son asked her what languages she spoke. Was she Russian, he wondered. No, she wasn’t Russian.

With the help of text messages and Google Translate, it eventually transpired that the woman in possession of the gentleman’s phone was Ukrainian and that she was staying in the 750-bedroom Citywest Hotel, which the Government is leasing to house refugees from the war in her country.

The son politely inquired where the hotel was. Saggart, came the reply, the last stop on the Luas. This was not a place well known to father or son. Other calls were made, and a conversation in Spanish ensued between the linguistically talented son and someone from his family who, it was decided, would drive to the hotel later that evening to retrieve the missing phone.

The incident was an inconvenience, maybe, but certainly not a tragedy.

If this were fiction I’d begin with the moment the woman found their phone and ignited that sketchy possibility of connection. If this were fiction it’d be her story I’d follow to the end of the line

The father asked again where exactly the hotel was, and his son reiterated that it was at the end of the line. Both agreed that the finder should be compensated for any unnecessary expense incurred. Then, problem resolved, they chatted a little about sport and politics. Their stop soon arrived and they left the train to make their onward connection.

As they passed my seat I resisted an impulse to interfere in the minor drama I’d just heard being played out. Perhaps because of a lingering sense of shame about ignoring the woman on the station concourse, I wanted to suggest that whoever was picking up the lost phone might bring something, a token of gratitude, a gift, to acknowledge the random link, however tenuous, between lives normally so disconnected, the lives of loser and finder.

I didn’t intervene, however. I was an observer, not the author of this story.

Watching father and son alight from the train, it was tempting to guess at comfortable, well-maintained lives, in which hard work and good humour were well rewarded. I found it more difficult, however, to imagine the woman on the Luas, whose life must have been cut from under her. I wondered what she was doing now, what she was thinking about.

If this were fiction I’d begin with the moment she found the phone and ignited that sketchy possibility of connection. If this were fiction it’d be her story I’d follow to the end of the line.

[ Read more Hilary Fannin here ]