With an uncharacteristically quick motion, James bounded up from the bed, causing the mattress springs to complain once more; they didn’t seem to like it when he arrived or when he left. Well, that was nothing new. Without looking at it, he scooped up the phone and buried it back in the trouser pocket, where it belonged. He hauled himself to the door and out into the corridor, out to the long narrow window. Outside the sky was toying with the new day’s light, trying it on, unconvinced. His last day. The thought wasn’t troubling at all; there was no more heft to it than any other thought. He felt better already, just being out of there. We could go for a wander up the train, he thought.

Past the other cabins, the little doors like hospital wards. Each one with a life behind it, of which James knew nothing. Another corner of the internet, another invisible player of the computer game. Nobody would have walked past his door, after all, and imagined a man about to commit suicide. Past the restaurant car, closed for the night, the bar shut up. Such an Orient Express idea, so romantic, the ‘restaurant car’. Paper tablecloths, proper cutlery; an attempt at a little world. James felt a sort of atavistic yearning, not a feeling but the memory of a feeling, a fondness for something that had gone. Through a set of sliding doors and into the seating compartments.

This was where you slept if you couldn’t afford a cabin, or hadn’t booked one in time. People were crashed out across pairs of seats, like transit passengers marooned at an airport. A man with thin hair was sitting, arms folded, suit jacket with only the top button undone, as if a business lunch might break out right here in the small hours. A woman was bobbing up and down in the aisle with a restless baby girl, shushing, patting, trying to lull her as she clawed miserably at her mother’s face in search of something she couldn’t name yet. The woman had skin like Michaela’s, large emotive eyes like hers, lips like hers. James tried to imagine how tiring it must have been: to have been here this whole length of time, but with a creature pleading for help all that time. What would make someone take the overnight train with a baby?