At lunchtime he would eat the cheese sandwiches he’d brought, watching people swarm around the German sausage stalls and coffee huts that formed a mini-market at the front of the station. The food people took away from these stands looked and smelled tastier than what James was making for himself, but there would be the shame, there would be the calories flickering across the dial in his brain that could not be turned off, and he didn’t have the energy to think about it. He always saved half a sandwich for the homeless guy, who would then ask James for £12 to get into a shelter. Sometimes he gave him the £12, not seeing why not. After work he’d go to the bar with the businessmen and the now ironic artwork. He’d walk home in the temporary consolation grip of whisky and try to watch something on TV. He would lie squirming in bed, unable to sleep, getting up to pace the kitchen floorboards and move things pointlessly between cupboards, thinking about the fact that tomorrow would be just the same.

The frosted-up pavements, mulched leaves, grey nimbostratus low over his head like a metal beam: it was the perfect stage set for this new loneliness. But James hated the word ‘lonely’, how juvenile it sounded in his own head. What do you want? he would ask himself, staring into the mirror in the morning, careful not to say anything out loud and disturb Steffi, but wanting to shout it, to wake himself up from whatever this was. What do you expect to happen?

A few weeks before Christmas came a Wednesday morning rush hour with an unusually high concentration of travellers. The cheap office chair clinging at him; he felt as if he’d been in it for ten hours already. A cup of tea from the machine, half-drunk. James had just directed a twenty-something couple, in striped scarves and unofficial wizard merchandise, to the spot where all the Harry Potter fans went, the magic platform. ‘You get even more of these freaks at Christmas,’ he overheard Waqar saying. And James thought briefly about the unwelcome prospect of Christmas: going home to spend it with Mum and Lee, the heavy jollity of adults pulling crackers. Sal was staying in Australia with Dec. James imagined the cold of the house, the dead weight of time after lunch. The questions: so, what have you been up to? The whisper of Dad in the empty seat at the table, in the Boxing Day walk they wouldn’t have on the Downs, because Lee preferred them to ‘go for a spin’ in his rubbish, cigarettey old car. The knowledge that Dad would be disappointed in him, if he could see him. Wouldn’t feel he had paid out on the promise he had made, to all those years Dad had put in.