So when James’s suicide text slid onto the screen, it was displaced within sixty seconds by four notifications, and disappeared. A year ago, this would not have happened, even with all the noise on Karl’s phone, because anyone on Karl’s ‘favourite contacts’ list was fast-tracked by another app; their messages would stick at the top of his inbox. This allowed him to make sure that his mum, for example, could always reach him when he was out and about. But Karl had had to remove James from the favourites list when he removed him from the job, because James’s pleading texts had made him feel bad. Karl wasn’t in the business of feeling bad; he’d felt awful quite enough when he was growing up – when he lay awake sobbing at night, when he came back with his school report shaking in case it wasn’t good enough.

That was the past. The present was about good vibes. The vibes from James, since he had to leave the company, were not surprisingly less than good. And so the two of them hadn’t been in touch for a few months now, and that record continued as Karl continued towards Newcastle, and James’s train – for the time being, on a similar route – proceeded towards what would be his last ever appointment.

10

EVERYWHERE, 01:45

It was a strange time of night to send a text to one hundred and fifty people, and it was – as James had acknowledged himself – a bit of a strange thing to do full stop. One consequence was that a peculiarly mixed cross-section of his contacts became the first to learn of his suicidal intentions. While someone as pivotal to James’s recent life as Karl remained ignorant of the message, it reached a number of people who had no idea what to do with the information.

The message was read, for example, by a former passenger of James’s, who owed him £50 she would never pay back. She was in a hospital in Birmingham, stuck in the frustrating stage of labour before anything really happened except widely spaced spurts of discomfort. It was read by Michaela’s former accountant, who gave it little thought because she was about to make love to an artisan ketchup and mustard entrepreneur. It was seen by one of James’s former colleagues at the start-up, known at the time as Exploits because of his CV of drunken disgrace, which included throwing a curry off a bridge into traffic and making a near-successful attempt to kidnap rocker Jon Bon Jovi. Heavy drinking had served Exploits very much less well in his thirties than twenties. He now slept on a friend’s sofa in Cumbria, was unemployed, and had gone back to being called Ricky. He glanced for a second at the message, took in none of it, and dropped the phone back over the side of the sofa, where it had been before it disturbed him.