Sometimes, on the tube, she glanced across at other passengers hunched over their own phones, and wondered if they were on Sheep Wars, too – unwittingly part of a community, even as they all played the game alone. People always looked so serious, but you never knew what was in someone’s head. Steffi remembered once sitting next to a man who was studying his screen with one of the most intense expressions of concentration she’d ever seen. When she sneaked a look over his shoulder, it turned out he was watching a GIF in which someone had made Beyoncé appear to turn into a pizza. Watching the five-second film over and over and over again, like someone newly arrived on the planet, grasping fruitlessly for context. Quite often she thought that everyone except herself was insane. The thought was half-ironic – but only half.

On the escalator up to the street, Steffi’s gaze was still fixed on the little sheep as they danced around, taunting her. She knew that before too long she would work out how to ambush the car and finish this level. And then two contradictory things would happen. She would feel a little swell of satisfaction, followed almost immediately by disappointment that this was not a real-world achievement, something that anyone else alive would care about. Steffi was not a zombie gamer, an addict, in the truest sense. She was aware that there should be more substance to life than working as a waitress in a restaurant whose online reviews were struggling to match up to its pretensions, and then spending every other moment engaged in the hunting of imaginary animals. It just wasn’t clear how to get out of this loop.

As she came out onto Pentonville Road Steffi glanced at her phone. Slightly surprisingly at this time of night, there were two new notifications. One was from Emil, the line chef, asking the staff’s WhatsApp group if anyone wanted to ‘get a drink somewhere Euston or whervr’. The proposal was backed up by emojis depicting glasses of wine, beer and champagne, as well as a dolphin; Emil was a profligate emoji user and rarely stayed on-topic. The other message was a text, from her flatmate and landlord James. In the instant before she read it, she registered that it was unusually long; she couldn’t remember him ever writing more than a few words before. Even after the bad night, the crying night, he had only messaged to say, ‘I am very sorry about all that’. She hadn’t even replied; too awkward to know how.

She read the text, read twice through the words ‘end my life’. She stopped dead outside a kebab shop, where a huge skewer of meat was rotating in the window and a couple of customers waited at the counter.

‘What the fuck,’ said Steffi out loud, to the nearly empty street, ‘what the actual fuck.’