Along the invisible train tracks in the sky raced the fragments of appeal sent up endlessly by James’s would-be rescuers. Please help if you. Any information is. There must be someone who knows. The messages were full of emotion, full of love, some of it panicky and hyperbolic, some of it surprising even to the people who expressed it. A very small measure of it, at any time over the past couple of years, and perhaps the object would not be walking to the edge now. But nobody could have known that until it came to this point; that was what they would tell themselves.

Their virtual conversation buzzed in the air like helicopters and, far below, the train pulled into Waverley station.

33

EDINBURGH WAVERLEY STATION, 07:22
BERLIN, 08:22
MELBOURNE, 18:22

‘Soon be arriving, sir!’ ‘Breakfast here! Coffee, bacon roll, orange juice!’ He’d heard Gina’s voice, strident and brassy again, all the way up the corridor as she knocked on the doors with the plastic trays. He’d heard the train waking up; the rugby fans had stirred into raucous voice. They banged on each other’s doors like schoolboys away from home for the first time. ‘I hardly got my eyes shut before she was saying get up!’ he heard a man yell, so close to his door that he might be shouting it right into James’s face. Not getting the response he wanted, the guy gave the remark a second airing. ‘Eh – Rhys. I said: hardly got my eyes shut …’ James listened to their heavy footsteps going up and down outside. It was hard to believe all these people had been on the train all along, even though he’d seen them board. Apart from Gina, it had been as if he was completely alone.

And even those little meetings with her felt as if they couldn’t have happened, now. The brief, thin train-night had been whipped away like a cloth. He straightened up the puny bedsheet and tied up the plastic bag, which he could dispose of in the station. No mess. No work for whoever came in. He hoped it didn’t smell of sweat in here. He’d done his best. It would be so good to get away from all the smells and noises and the other unfortunate things a body did. There was the knock at the door; his was the last cabin she came to. They were only a few minutes outside the station: without even opening the blind he could feel the tightening of the city around the train, the rows of houses pressing in. He opened the door. Gina was holding out the tray.