At the very least, you had to admit social media were useful for a job like the one that had landed on her tonight. She wrote, on Emil’s phone, a paragraph explaining the situation. ‘I’m James Chiltern’s flatmate. He is in danger as some of you might know from the text. We need to get the message all over the internet because someone must have seen him, stroke, be able to help. You can message me direct and I am setting up a page to post anything that helps.’ She read it back as Emil sat down next to her with the beers, touching her arm lightly to welcome himself back. She wasn’t 100 per cent sure about the apostrophe in ‘Chiltern’s’, and she wasn’t sure she had used ‘stroke’ correctly, but those things were less pressing than whether James was still alive. As Emil watched – still at a respectful distance, but in a way she felt continually aware of – she went through James’s Facebook profile one friend at a time, starting with those who seemed to be the most important (his old boss, his sister), cut-and-pasting the message to them. She began an ‘event’ – a weird way to describe an anti-suicide mission, like it was an anniversary party at Bella Italia, but also the quickest way. She invited them all to join it.

The pot began to bubble even before she’d finished heating it up. ‘Look,’ she said to Emil, who – with little to contribute except the hardware – had made his way methodically through the beer already. ‘Two replies. Not useful. Just people saying how can they help. But it shows you what we can do.’

Emil nodded, a little glumly, thinking of other things they could be doing. Steffi sipped her beer and waited at her post. Above them and around them, unseen fibres thrummed; conversations began, echoed, spread, fuelling one another, the combined goodwill making an invisible shape in the air, a force. But nobody among these nocturnal correspondents had seen James, yet. Nobody knew where he was. If he was all right. If he still existed, other than as a thumbnail picture, a portly smiling man in a striped jumper, an idea of a person.

In the bar, Emil stared at the thumbnail, at this man who was commanding almost all of Steffi’s attention, with something that was definitely approaching envy. And Steffi, too, looked at the photo and thought she saw more in it than the face she was used to glimpsing in the kitchen or outside the bathroom. Maybe it was the beginning of fatigue – it could jangle your emotions like coat-hangers. Once, after a double shift, she was so tired she’d cried at ‘Three Times a Lady’. But it was as if the image was more real than her actual, living and breathing memories of her flatmate, and the feeling that she wanted him to come out of this alive – that was real, too.

18