Maybe it messes with your body, your brain, he thought again. But this was all nothing but guesswork. He knew nothing about what it was like to be a conductor on a train. For all he knew, perhaps they did sleep on the train, for a couple of hours; maybe there was a team, one person relieving another. Maybe she had a cabin. Or maybe she just walked up and down endlessly among all the sleeping strangers, like the people on those trains that used to take the plague dead out of London. She could have worked in this job for twenty years, and be sick of it; or this could be her first week and she was overwhelmed. He couldn’t begin even speculatively to guess at what sort of crisis had provoked her to ask for his phone. A love problem? It was always the first guess, but she could be looking down the barrel of eviction, like Karl’s mum all those times, at the mercy of her bloodthirsty landlord, before he started to earn more from the company. It could be a money thing. It could be a family problem that it had fallen on her to solve; something that was too much for a single heart. Really it could be anything, or it could be nothing. She could have an unrequited crush on someone in Mexico whom she was ringing ten times a day; or she could be trying to find an organ donor for a cousin. None of it was within his reach to know, and none of it concerned him, any more.

Oh, the old James had stuck his nose in quite a lot, yes. It was how the driving started. A rain-lashed night, on the cusp of his thirties, the torrents driving diagonally into his face as he left the third-floor flat. He’d just finished an hour-long appointment helping a 74-year-old man called Gavin use his email. It had been their fourth session. It was rewarding work and he never charged the full amount; one time he didn’t even bother to take payment.