He didn’t sleep much on the train. Too noisy, and too hot. He reached his destination as the dawn was coming up. The sun was shrouded in a blur of mist, dull as a sixpence, with no heat in it yet. He stood in the middle of the busy station with his suitcase in his hand, dazed and disoriented. He didn’t feel at all well. For his dinner in the dining car the night before he had eaten some sort of fish mixed in with rice, and it hadn’t agreed with him. Sometime in the small hours the rumblings in his stomach had woken him. He was in a sweat, and shivering. When he got to the lav at the end of the swaying corridor, there was someone in it. He stood outside the door, barefoot, with his trousers and jacket on over his pyjamas, afraid that if he went back to the compartment someone else would come along and get in ahead of him. He was in a bad way by now. His guts were heaving, and he didn’t like to think of the stuff inside him, and he wasn’t at all sure which end of him it was going to come out of first.

At last he heard the lavatory flushing, and a fat old totty in a silk dressing gown emerged. She glared at him as he dived past her. He kicked the door shut behind him with his heel.

He sat down on the still-warm seat, breathing through his mouth so as not to smell the pong the old bitch had left behind her. She must have eaten the same thing he had.

His bowels opened. Oh, suffering Christ!

Now, here in the dawn light in the station, he tried to get himself sorted, trying not to think about fish and greasy rice and fat old women. He couldn’t move, he was that distracted. He cursed himself for not having booked himself into a hotel beforehand. Where was he going to stay? He looked around to see if there might be a desk or a kiosk with someone behind it who could telephone some place and get him a room. But there was only a café and a newspaper stand and a bar that was open already, with a few old guys in shirtsleeves sitting on cane chairs at little round metal tables drinking little cups of coffee and some kind of spirit, it looked like, from tiny glasses. Maybe he should sit down too, and order a shot of the same stuff. It might settle his stomach. But no, he couldn’t face it.