‘Stop fucking talking about what I need to do,’ said Karl. This woman was a psychopath, giving orders to someone she’d never met before; talking like someone had made her the Pope just because she lived with James. He blew out a hard breath, his mouth making an O. Right at this moment he would swap lives with anyone he could see. With one of the lorry drivers sleeping in their sad little encampment of vehicles in one corner of the car park. With any of the tail-lights streaking past, even with the handful of deadbeats feeding coins into the arcade machines. ‘I’ll do my best, all right? I’ll … I have to get to Newcastle and then I’ll get onto it. Tell me when you find him, yeah?’

‘All right, Karl, mate,’ he said out loud to himself – the way he’d used to sometimes, under his breath, when he was a teenager and his father was crashing around downstairs. Talking to himself had made him bolder, forced him to put on a front like you would for someone you wanted to impress. ‘All right. We’re going to nip in there.’ The rain-hardened brick of the service station, the overfamiliar logos of the food and coffee superpowers. ‘Then, we get on the road and we fucking cheese it all the way to Newcastle, we do a hundred and ten until we’re on that bridge and we can hear the fucking Likely Lads theme tune, we—’

A car horn blasted, ripping apart the near-silence. Karl jumped, swore. It was his own car. The bloke had literally clambered over into the driver’s seat and had a go on the horn. Was he off his box? You couldn’t do that! You couldn’t just sound the horn in a fucking car park! Karl had pretty much had enough of everyone queuing up round the block to bust his balls. And yet he couldn’t get funny with the DJ either. He couldn’t afford to piss him off, either. He needed these people, their custom. The whole great money-making edifice, painstakingly built by Karl, seemed to be swaying in front of him. He strode back to the car.

‘Sorry about that,’ he muttered, ‘emergency.’

‘Was it an emergency?’ asked the DJ. He had undone the seatbelt, was sitting arms folded in the back seat. He was looking at Karl as if Karl had caused him some indefensible disturbance; as if Karl was a neighbour who’d been letting off fireworks in the garden. ‘It looked like you were just on the phone, mate.’

‘I’m sorry. There’s a situation going on.’

‘Right, well, the thing is, dude: if you remember, I wanted to stay asleep,’ said the DJ.

‘I know,’ said Karl, ‘but we’re nearly there, it’s probably about forty-five minutes—’