An equally sad man sat at the table next to us, presiding over the evidence of a mountainous lunch, the tin-foil carry-home bag in front of him a still-smoking ossuary of chook remains. He took a vague interest in our presence, deriving some comfort, I thought, from our inflammation and fatigue. We seemed to suit the way he felt. Before we fell into conversation he put his face through a variety of wry expressions, smiling and sometimes even mumbling to himself. He was heavy and hapless, his belly hanging like a sack of dead flesh over his blue workman’s shorts. He looked central European but spoke his broken Australian with a curious lilt, as if he’d lived for a while in Ireland or Cornwall. He was a seasonal worker, a truck driver who hired himself out as and where there was a need for him. He travelled a million miles a year, he told us, following seasonal demand. But he had contracted a back complaint, which he felt bound to confess to any prospective employer. An expression of slightly crazed honesty passed across his smooth features. ‘I must tell,’ he said. He didn’t really know what had brought him to Derby and didn’t have any strong conviction that Derby would have anything to offer him. In the meantime he lived on his own – a single man in a tent – sitting by the hour in this chicken bar, sucking stuffing off his fingers, smiling mirthlessly to himself, and waiting for employment.

‘In a good week,’ he told us, ‘I can make a thousand dollars.’ But that was whittled down to no more than a hundred after tax and what he called ‘lifestyle expenses’. His work had taken him all over the world, where he had seen things that had bemused him. As for example, the turn around of raw materials. He couldn’t understand how or why a thing gets taken out of the ground, exported, changed into another thing, and is then returned to its place of origin at a vastly inflated price, much misery having been caused along the way to the people who have moved and changed it. This wasn’t a matter of merely passing perplexity to him; he seemed to have taken all the cruel futility of the process into himself and to have fed upon it. We’d have been quite wrong to suppose he was looking for discussion. Behind his pretend bemusement there was in fact a starry certainty. So when Ros tried to soothe him by wondering if it wouldn’t help to see capitalism as a great washing machine, the tumble action being a more encouraging and domestic metaphor than his senseless whirligig of commodities, she was wasting her time. ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ he said. ‘I’ve no way of ascertaining that.’