Outside the train which was dragging the three friends back home, the sky had bruised to purple. Churches, little villages, supermarkets were presented briefly and then whisked away again, all of them given a momentary exoticism by the rose-tint of the dying holiday. There was wistfulness in their laughter, because none of them knew when they’d get away like this again, but the blush of the booze was still warm for all of them; the return to real life seemed far off, still, though England was only a few hours away. Anyway, real life was working out pretty well. ‘Information is the money of the new century,’ Karl – half-cut – had heard himself say. Michaela repeated it in a squeaky voice, deliberately foolish and much too loud: she just had no internal volume control, always spoke like someone wearing a pair of headphones. There’d been a sharp knock on the door and in came the guard, an Italian man they’d first met on the platform, with a maroon jacket and a completely bald skull which reminded James of a skeleton in a doctor’s surgery.

‘You make too much noise,’ said the guard, ‘people are sleep here, if you keep to make the noise you have to leave train.’

‘We don’t want any bother, mate,’ Karl had said, knowing that he sounded – as usual – like a minor gangster in a Guy Ritchie film, someone owing a small sum of money to a main character.

‘But it is some botherrr,’ replied the guard, echoing and distorting the English word in a way that suggested he didn’t entirely understand it, but liked the sound of it. ‘It is bother if you wake people.’

‘Why don’t you have a drink with us,’ Karl suggested, brandishing a can like the one James was holding now, five years on; and to Karl’s own amazement the guard had taken it and drunk almost half of it. In hushed tones the three travellers paid tribute to their new friend, who ended up staying for almost half an hour. Karl called him a ‘cast-iron legend’. He made unsustainable promises to invite him to the wedding James and Michaela would have one day. He thought about how lucky he was to know somebody like James. James had got him into the driving job in the first place, not to mention bailing him out financially several times in the past.