I stared out of the window into the dark, at the glimmer of the train-tracks disappearing into the gloom above us like snail trails.

‘And also, Maggie, I just wanted to know how much you –’ He ground to a halt again. It was most unlike him to be lost for words.

I looked around for my cigarettes. ‘What?’

‘How much you remember.’

‘How much I remember about what?’ I looked at Alex now, and he held my gaze for a moment before dropping his. His yellow eyes were tired and ringed with black; he’d always struggled with insomnia.

‘Of the accident, you mean?’ It made my heart beat faster just to think of it. ‘It’s all a bit fuzzy.’

I finally unearthed my fags from a pile of paperwork. My hand was trembling as I tried to light one.

‘Right. I’m sorry. I really meant, though, of what happened – before.’

I chewed my lip. One of these days I’d chew right through. It was all a blur, that day, the few weeks before, a muddy midnight-blue tangle of tears and recriminations and shouting at each other in desperation and fury and absolute sorrow. We’d been in Cornwall together, I knew that, trying to sort things out, trying to find a solution once and for all, and then – then I couldn’t remember much at all about before or after. Then I was on the coach to London. Alone. So much of that period was still shadowed that the doctors talked grandly of ‘traumatic amnesia’ – but I was sure, oh I knew I must have blocked it.

‘What happened with us, you mean?’ Perhaps the memories were necessarily vague – but I knew it was only a matter of time before they surfaced. ‘I’m still struggling to remember.’

‘I just wondered, you know, that night when – my mum’s birthday –’ He looked a bit sick.

‘Oh God, I still can’t see it clearly.’ I finally lit the cigarette. ‘I try and piece it together, but it’s all so bloody vague.’

Immediately before the accident was clear: a lot of swearing in a service-station car park just outside Bristol. Alex, covered in engine oil, kicking the driver’s door in fury. Yet another heated argument. Silent tears sliding unchecked in the darkness. A cab. Sitting alone in a fluorescent-lit coach station with orange plastic chairs. ‘I know we had a row and that’s why I got on the coach.’ I considered him for a moment, took a lungful of smoke. ‘I just can’t remember why we were there in the first place.’ I exhaled slowly.

Alex looked almost relieved for a second as he turned to put his coffee cup down. ‘Why are you smoking again, Maggie? I thought you’d given up.’

I shook my head impatiently. ‘Why do you want to know all this now, Alex? About the accident. Did you do something terrible before it?’