The Night Ferry

Carlos had been traveling for almost three weeks when he boarded the night ferry from Dublin to Holyhead. He was a student from Valencia, and he had spent the summer working in a hostel near the river, saving every euro for a final trip around Wales before going home. The only thing he carried apart from his backpack was his grandmother's old suitcase: brown leather, a broken handle tied with string, and her initials, R.M., painted on the side in faded white letters.

The ferry left a little after two in the morning. Carlos found a seat in a quiet corner of the lounge, put the suitcase on the floor between his feet and promised himself he would stay awake. He had been reading for about twenty minutes when the gentle rolling of the ship and the hum of the engines finally won. His book slid onto his chest, and he fell into a deep sleep.

When he woke up, gray light was coming through the windows and the loudspeakers were announcing that the ship would arrive in Holyhead in thirty minutes. Carlos stretched, looked down and felt his stomach drop. The suitcase had gone. He searched under the seats, behind the coffee machine and in the corridor outside, but there was no sign of it anywhere.

"Lost something, son?" asked an old man in a navy jumper who had been sitting at the next table. He introduced himself as Gareth. He had worked on ferries across the Irish Sea for forty years, he explained, and since he had retired he took this crossing once a month to visit his sister in Dublin. "I don't sleep much on boats anymore," he said. "Old habit. Tell me exactly what it looked like."

Carlos described it, and Gareth closed his eyes for a moment, as if he were rewinding a film. "Right," he said. "Around four o'clock, a group of lads came back from the bar. They had been singing for most of the night and they were looking for somewhere to lie down. They moved a lot of bags to make space on the benches. I remember thinking they were treating other people's things very carelessly."

"So they took it?" Carlos asked. Gareth shook his head. "No. They pushed your case along the floor towards the window. But about an hour later, a woman with a little boy came past. She had been walking up and down for ages because the child couldn't sleep. She stopped, looked at the case for a long time, then picked it up and carried it towards the cabins at the back."

Carlos was confused. Why would a stranger want a battered old suitcase with a broken handle? There was nothing valuable inside it, only clothes, a few books and a jar of his grandmother's homemade quince jam that he had been saving for his landlady in Dublin and had then forgotten to give her.

They did not have to wait long for an answer. As the ship slowed down to enter the harbor, the woman appeared in the doorway of the lounge, holding the suitcase in one hand and her sleepy son in the other. She looked around nervously until Gareth raised his arm. "I'm so sorry," she said to Carlos. "I thought it was mine. My mother had one exactly like it. I've been looking for my own for an hour, and I've just found it in our cabin. Then I noticed the initials."

Carlos laughed with relief. It turned out that her suitcase also had initials on it, and her mother had bought it, many years before, in a small shop in Valencia while she was on holiday. It was very possible, they agreed, that both cases had come from the same shelf.

On the train from Holyhead, Carlos sent his grandmother a long message telling her the whole story. Her reply arrived an hour later: "That shop belonged to my cousin. I always said that suitcase would bring you good luck."