As he walked back to the car, finger working to unearth more and more of his inbox in long swipes, stealthy fear began to fill Karl. It was like turning on the news hours into their reportage of some tragedy, trying to piece together what was already known to many other people. He remembered the morning of the tube bombings in London, hungover and uncomprehending, people on the telly huddled outside stations, reporters saying things like ‘difficult to guess exactly how many casualties’. Wondering if it was one of his mum’s days to get the tube to work. It was a cold, churning feeling, then and now. He slid into the driver’s seat, his bowels suddenly heavy, and found at last the message from James himself.

I’ve decided to end my life.

‘No, no,’ said Karl, softly. ‘Oh, no, no.’

He pressed the screen to call James, but with no expectation of hearing anything other than what he did: the same recorded message that had fended everyone else off. ‘The person you are calling …’ Before it had even finished, he pressed the red button. He sat nauseous in the leather seat, the driver door still slightly open, listening in a daze to the cars whizzing past.

A train went chattering by, a whirl of movement and purpose, and Karl thought of the holiday with Michaela and James. He remembered lecturing Michaela on artificial intelligence. She had dropped her phone twice during the trip – once while running on a cobbled street in Aix-en-Provence – and the screen was cut into spiderwebs. ‘One day they’ll take it personally,’ Karl told her, ‘one day they’ll be intelligent enough to design a giant phone, pick you up and drop you on your face on the pavement.’ Michaela reached down from the bunk and started to arm-wrestle him, an arm-wrestle nobody could win. Karl had worried secretly, when James met Michaela, that he might be excluded from the relationship that emerged. But instead, they’d become a three-person gang.