Officer Pebble and the Last Ticket

Officer Prudence Pebble worked for the Office of Brave Deeds, in the Kindness Citations Section, and she had the shiniest boots on Market Street. Every Saturday morning she put on her navy coat, straightened her cap and checked her ticket book. There were twenty blank tickets inside, and she could only write them for one thing. "Good deeds," she told her reflection. "By the book."

Now and then a visitor saw her coming, with her notebook and her very straight back, and worried they had parked in the wrong place. That was why her tickets were pale yellow, like butter, with Kindness Citation printed across the top in friendly round letters.

At ten o'clock, outside the bakery, she spotted her first case. A man was trying to carry a cello through the door, but the cello was wider than the door. A boy on a scooter held the door open while the man tried the cello sideways, then upside down, then sideways again. The boy held on for four whole minutes without a single sigh.

When the cello finally popped through, Officer Pebble stepped forward and wrote a ticket. Citation for holding a door. Duration: four minutes. Penalty: none. Instructions: carry on.

She clipped it to the boy's scooter. He looked at it, and then at her, and went pink right to the tips of his ears.

At eleven o'clock, on the bridge, a grandmother found a small red mitten lying on the pavement. She picked it up, brushed off the grit and pushed it gently onto the tip of the railing, so its owner would see it waving on the way back. Officer Pebble wrote her a ticket for helping a mitten find its way home. "Well, I never," said the grandmother, and tucked it into her purse next to her bus pass.

At twelve o'clock, a man in a striped scarf began holding open the door of the post office. He held it for a long time. Nobody came. He looked at Officer Pebble hopefully. "Strictly by the book, sir," she said kindly, "holding a door when nobody is coming is called standing."

The man laughed. Then a lady came round the corner with a pushchair and two bags of shopping, and he held the door for her properly, and got his ticket after all.

All afternoon, the yellow tickets went out. One went to a girl who shared her raisins. One went to a dog walker who stopped to let a very slow snail cross the path. One went to a baby who waved at everybody, which Officer Pebble decided counted. By four o'clock her feet ached, a drizzle had started, and there was only one ticket left in her book.

She stood under the bakery awning and looked up at the grey sky. Her cap was damp and her nose was cold. Then something yellow appeared over her head. It was an umbrella, held up very high by a small girl in a raincoat with frogs on it. "You were getting wet," said the girl, whose name was Juniper.

Officer Pebble wrote Juniper's name on her last ticket, very neatly. Citation for sharing an umbrella with an officer. Juniper read it twice and then frowned. "But who gives you a ticket?" she asked. "Nobody," said Officer Pebble, "because that's not how the book works."

Juniper borrowed a pencil from the bakery counter and found a paper bag. She leaned it on her knee and wrote slowly, with her tongue poking out. Then she handed it over. In wobbly letters, it said: Ticket for Officer Pebble, for noticing all the kind things all day. Penalty: a hot bath.

That evening, Officer Pebble took off her shiny boots and set them side by side by the door. She ran a hot bath, just as the ticket said, because rules are rules. Then she pinned the paper bag to her fridge with a magnet shaped like a lemon, where she could see it while the kettle boiled.

She drank her cocoa slowly, in her dressing gown, with her warm feet up on a cushion. Outside, the drizzle tapped gently on the window, and Market Street was quiet and dark. Her ticket book lay closed on the table, ready for next Saturday. Officer Pebble yawned, switched off the lamp, and went up to bed.