Nothing about this girl screamed ‘spy’, but then again, I guess that’s the point isn’t it? She did get my attention though, when I first saw her on the platform that morning, but that’s only because she was a fairly attractive young girl and I generally gravitate towards attractive girls to sit near on the train and not smelly/loud/obnoxious men. But besides her beauty and somewhat eccentric jewelry, there was nothing extraordinary about her. Completely normal.
I ended up sitting in the seat behind her on the train. (I swear, I’m not a total creep, I only looked her over a couple of times, made note of her odd choker-style necklace draped around her slender neck and then I set to reading a newspaper that I found on the seat next to mine.) She was reading too, although I could not see what.
We were about five stops away from the station we both departed from, when something unexpected happened in the otherwise quiet train car. Out of nowhere, this girl freaked out.
“HEY!” she bellowed. “HEY!”
I looked up from my paper and saw that the colour of her face had turned red. I followed her angry eyes to the far end of the train car where a Japanese man was sitting with his family. He was holding a camcorder and panning it around the train. His kids were on their knees in the seats beside and behind him, watching the viewfinder of the camera as he filmed.
“HEY!” she yelled louder.
Then she stood up and marched down to the man. Her thin-heeled shoes nailed the ground with each heavy step and her black, poofy mini-skirt swayed from side to side as she stormed down the aisle toward him.
“You can’t just film people without their permission,” she yelled halfway down the aisle.
By now, the whole train was watching her and most of us looked very confused. She approached the man and leaned down into his face. She held the steel rail beside his seat for balance. From where I was, I could not hear what she was saying but I could see she was reprimanding him. The children stopped laughing and the man looked genuinely scared and confused. She pointed at his camera and mimicked the act of filming around the train. Then, she made him delete the footage. I could tell because she was leaning over his shoulder for a while, looking at the viewfinder while he pushed some buttons. After awhile, she seemed satisfied and stormed back towards my end of the train. When she was close, I heard her mutter to herself “I don’t like people taking my picture.”
She slumped back into her seat and I watched her intently. I wanted to tell her that actually, no, he didn’t really need to ask her for permission and that she had blown the whole thing way out of proportion and likely ruined his vacation. But I decided that she was too unstable and I should probably keep my mouth shut.
If that whole episode wasn’t strange enough, the next thing she did certainly was. She unzipped the little handbag she had with her and pulled out a palm-sized notepad and a purple pencil crayon. She flipped through the notepad frantically until she came to an empty page, the she started to scrawl a message onto the paper. She wrote the words fast and on an angle from the top left corner to the bottom right. She pushed hard at first but by the end of the second word it was a frantic and barely visible scribble. I was close enough to her however to read the note: “LOST MISSION”
The train pulled up to the next stop and the girl got up from her seat and exited through the sliding doors. I watched her as she moved briskly through the throngs of people waiting to board the train and then she disappeared down the stairs. I glanced back down at the Japanese man. He had put his camera away and was slinking in his chair with his hands hanging in front of him between his legs. He looked embarassed.
