Soon after we leave Tiverton the woman beside me says, ‘Excuse me a moment, darling,’ and I get up to let her out. I’m not looking, but I see what happens next out of the corner of my eye. There’s a flurry in a clear part of the aisle and when I look properly I see that she’s doing a cartwheel there. Just turning a perfect cartwheel in the aisle of the train, her feet briefly stretching up to the ceiling, her toes pointed, the standing commuters edging out of range of her socked feet. I look down. There are her boots, on the floor of the train.

Of course. Of course I end up next to the nutter.

I look at her knitting on the flap-down table. It’s so soft. I wonder if it’s going to be something for a baby, and that makes me think of Ariel, and of Gus’s girls. Then I turn back to her. She’s walking towards me, laughing.

There’s something odd about this woman. A look in her eyes.

A few people are saying, ‘Well!’ and ‘Did you see that?’ but the overwhelming majority are ignoring her because they’re train commuters and I guess that’s what they do.

I stand up again to let her back to her window seat.

‘Different, huh?’ she says, and I nod. ‘I do it every morning. They never tell me not to because they’re so uptight and British. It’s fun. Sometimes I stand on a table and recite poems, to mix it up. You should do something.’

‘I can do this,’ I say, and I pull the shoelace out of my trainer and eat it. She nods, unsurprised.

‘I’m Lara,’ she says.

I take her hand. We look at each other.

I see it in her face.

It’s the same thing I see in the mirror. It’s a weariness, a simulacrum of life. A resignation. You can run down a train carriage, turning cartwheels all you like, but if you know that you’re going to die, that you’ve already died, that every day will go blank at the same point, and you’ll have to wake up and do it all over again forever, then a train cartwheel doesn’t count for anything. Neither does eating a shoelace.

I fill my head with the blue of the sky and look at Lara again. There it is. The blue is pouring out of her.

‘Do you and I have something in common, darling?’ she says quietly.

‘I think maybe we do.’ I look again at her knitting. I wonder why she does it. I can’t imagine that any baby is ever going to wear that jumper.