It felt gauche, the way he’d asked, but there was something in the process of asking that he liked, in the brief reconnection with somebody he used to be.

Gina made a sort of swishing motion with her hands, as if birds or insects were flying all around her. ‘I mean. Short version. A guy left me completely in the lurch, never married, he took my money, I owe money to everyone in the country …’

‘I’ll let you off mine,’ James mumbled.

She smiled. ‘Thank you. So, apart from you. Yeah. Live on my own. No real – you know, hard to see how things can get better.’

‘And the long version?’

‘The long version’s the same but with more swearing,’ she said.

He laughed, perhaps a little louder than he intended. There was a creak and a mutter from behind one of the doors, and shuffling; it sounded as if someone might come out. The train, meanwhile, was gliding into the station. It felt at its smoothest, its happiest, when it was stopping somewhere. The floodlights were flickering over the track, as if they hadn’t been given clear instructions on whether to keep going or not. It was that sort of time: between one thing and another. Gina slid open the glass panel at the top of the door.

‘Stuffy in here,’ she muttered, sounding very Welsh as she dropped the H; she said here like year. ‘Too hot in year, too cold outside.’

There were technicians, in orange hi-vis jackets, waiting to perform their surgery on the train. Hot drinks in polystyrene; the trail from a cigarette. He could hear them talking in dry monosyllables. This was the end of a shift for them, or perhaps the start.

‘It is stuffy,’ James said.

‘I should be … it’s been nice talking to you, though,’ said Gina. Before he could think of anything to say to that, she was gone, back into standard class, leaving the trolley parked where it was.

He stood in the gap where she had been. There was a little crunch and thud as the engineers began the brief task of unhooking one half of the train from the other. He didn’t want to go back into the cabin and sit there by himself, not immediately. His hand went instinctively for his pocket to pull out the phone. The mad thought came again: it would be better to know. He fumbled with the settings, removed the flight mode. Adrenalin swelled violently through him. As soon as its gag was taken off, the phone began to gush with the messages it had been forced to keep from him. The screen filled with text captions, which slid down to admit more, then more, the names piggybacking one another. There were numbers his phone didn’t even know. The collective effect of all the voices was like landing in cold water.