A minor jolt, a stumble of the train, was enough to make the phone’s screen light up again – like someone flinching in sleep. James flinched with it. No, it couldn’t be a new message or a call. Flight mode was still on. But people would still be sending messages, trying to contact him. Four hours ago, the flight mode had felt like barbed wire around the phone. Now it felt slight and porous; it felt as if all the stacked-up messages would come crashing through at any minute, like police hammering on a creaking door.

He took a gulp from the final can and slammed it down on the little ledge with an angry energy he wasn’t expecting. The can, as if surprised itself, fizzed out a little fountain of beer, which ran down the sides and pooled on the ledge.

It would almost be better to read the messages, to take the filter away. He could take it; he wasn’t going to get blown off course now. I’m in my right mind. It was just as he’d said in the text. He knew what he was doing. He’d been thinking about it ever since that man screamed at him in the station. This wasn’t a whim, and he wasn’t going to back down from it. He sat up. He stood up. No, of course it wouldn’t be better to read the messages. That was a mad thought.

Just need to get out of here for a bit. Get some air.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Air’. What was he going to do: float out of the window, go for a little jog? But anything would be less stifling than being in here. He’d been an idiot to think he’d be able to sleep all the way. What drowsiness the beers had initially lent him was gone now; he felt more alert than at any time on the journey, and the only watermark of the booze was the swilling of it around his pipes, a bodily lethargy. Alert to what, though? To the creaking and clattering, the train’s hard breathing up the hills, and what now seemed the achingly slow passing of the minutes.

Need to go out.