‘You don’t want me to leave you alone, you don’t want to be left alone.’ She thrust a finger out at him. She was perfectly still and calm, like a statue, like a menhir. James felt himself trembling. He was freezing. He felt as if he had known her a long time. ‘You need help, and you can get help. You can get help.’

‘You don’t know anything about me,’ he said.

‘You got your mother on here, begging you,’ said Gina, flinging her arms in the direction of the phone, which even now had started to break-dance on the pavement. A couple of people were starting to look. A Japanese couple, binoculars around their necks like old-world adventurers; the mother gently redirected their young son as he stopped and pointed. ‘You got your friends, you got people you don’t even know about. Offering you a job and whatnot. Wanting you to come home. Wanting to help you. You don’t know you’re fucking born. We don’t all have that help. You can start again. We can’t all do that.’

‘I can’t start again,’ said James. She was ten paces away. He disliked her tone, the attack, it was baffling to be spoken to like this. He could feel her muscles clenching and flexing; he could hear her synapses chattering as she tried to haul him back, and he felt that he knew something about being a human, but this was all a trick; it was what they did to you if you were weak. It was a last attempt to break him down. ‘It’ll all still be the same,’ he said. ‘They can say these things now because they’re panicking. But they wouldn’t – I wouldn’t be any more important. When it all settled down. I’d have the same problems.’

‘How do you know? How can you ever know that?’ Gina was almost shouting at him. ‘Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone and look at it.’

The big hands of the clock: eight, just after eight. James felt dizzy. The phone was skipping about on the pavement like a creature trapped in a jar. James looked down at it, wanting to pick it up and throw it away all over again, for good this time, over the side of the bridge. He was weakening. He could feel in his bones the weight of the night, the time spent awake, and all these nights spent awake since things broke down. He wanted to be gathered up into silence. He didn’t want to be saved.

‘You should see it all on the internet.’ She flung her hands up again, gesturing at all the unknown group activity above them, at all the other players.