Cross City line, a summer evening 1996. I board a train to Lichfield at New St, in my football kit having played that eve. It's a slam door 310, and I am sole occupant of the coach, choosing to sit in the middle. At Duddeston an oddly dressed individual boards. I use the term individual, as it was clearly a bloke, but wearing a dress, with make up (poorly applied), a huge overcoat (it was warm), about 5 different bags including a handbag, and most bizarrely, a clearly fake pregnant bump.
'She' boards at the end of the coach, looks up and down, and walks up to sit in the bay across the aisle from me. We are alone. My spidey sense tingles.
On the approach to Aston, 'She' very carefully opens 'her' handbag, withdraws a hairbrush, and deliberately drops it on the aisle floor between us. 'She' thinks I'm not looking, but I've read too many spy novels and am carefully watching the scene unfold: whilst pretending to look out of the window, I'm watching 'her' in the reflection.
The noise of the dropped hairbrush is obvious, so I turn to look. My fellow passenger is now making a big show of trying to pick it up, but the various bags and fake pregnant bump are making it very difficult. A chivalrous gentleman would obviously leap to 'her' aid to pick up the brush and return it.
I look at my fellow passenger going through the charade of trying to pick up the brush. I deliberately, and slowly, look at the brush. I return to look at my fellow passenger still trying to overcome the bags and bump. My assessment is that this is some sort of test. So I decide to put the test the other direction, and want to see how long the struggle continues before 'she' has to ask for help.
What seems like half an hour passes (but it could barely have been 30 seconds), and then 'she' speaks in a voice that Terry Jones in 'Life of Brian' would have been proud of. "Excuse me, please could you get my brush". I oblige as we pull into Gravelly Hill. My fellow passenger alights there, seemingly embarrassed at having had to speak. I then spend the next few hours/days/months wondering if it really happened.
Epilogue
Three years later, I was recounting this tale to a new colleague in a London pub. He tells me I had told him before. Impossible I say, that being our first social outing. He thinks a bit, and calls over another colleague, who listens to the tale, and then says that exactly the same thing had happened to him, 2 years previously, between Stockport and Manchester.