He had spent a good hour leaning on the railing of the motorway bridge and would probably be there still had it not begun to pour with rain. Often when driving he had seen people perched above main roads like melancholy birds of prey. The sight of them engaged in this sad and usually solitary activity had always intrigued and sometimes worried him. You could imagine almost anything about them – perhaps they were about to throw themselves off, or their bicycle, since they usually had one propped beside them. What were they looking at? He had vowed to see for himself and was glad to have finally done it. With the roar of engines and the petrol fumes, it was perhaps not as peaceful as, say, watching leaves and twigs being carried along by a river, but it was undoubtedly more exciting. Your head rapidly emptied of thought and the flow of cars put you in a sort of meditative stupor, gradually making you giddy. It must be even better by night, with the headlights. Chloé was wrong. It wasn’t he who was distant but everyone else, all these people speeding towards him out of nowhere only to disappear again in a matter of seconds, swallowed by the shadowy mouth of the bridge.

He was soaked to the skin when he got home. Since he had no reason to go out again, he put on his still-warm pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers. With nothing to do, he decided just to be. He took up his usual spot on the sofa but felt strangely ill at ease. After five minutes, he moved into an identical position in an armchair. That was not right either. He tried a chair, and another, and another, and finally perched on an uncomfortable footstool housing Chloé’s sewing kit. He had never sat here before. The living room looked different from this angle. Though he recognised the furniture, ornaments and pictures on the walls, they looked like copies – very good ones, but imitations all the same. The light coming through the window had changed too, turning the sofa a very slightly different shape and colour. It was as if the whole room were in flux.

Mindlessly, he picked up the magnifying glass Chloé used to count embroidery stitches and inspected the palm of his hand. In the absence of a future he saw a fragment of his past, a small V-shaped scar caused by cutting his hand on a broken window at the age of seven. Then he studied the stripes of his pyjamas, stretched taut over his knees, followed by the cracked leather soles of his slippers. To think people went to the trouble of climbing mountains to look down on the world, when a magnifying glass did the same thing.