Dalmar doesn’t want kindness. He just wants to sit on the stairs. In his effort to not-think about the man, he has been thinking about something else that he wants to not-think about: the boat journey, the heave of the sea, the inarticulate sound the woman made. As the boat drifted away, her cries could still be heard, her head a receding circle, eventually just a dot, then gone. But Dalmar thought he could still hear the cries all the way across the sea, above the slapping sound the water made against the boat’s flimsy hull, even when the big ship pulled up alongside and they were hauled onto it. Even as they sailed on, in the big ship, the immense churn of engines shuddering the deck beneath his feet and the woman long out of sight. People cry for life, every inch of their being yearns for it. It is the human condition, to be desperate for it, to cling to it with both hands even as it slips between your fingers.

A white woman in a suit with a mac on top mounts the stairs, looking down at Dalmar as she passes, giving him the smallest glance, as if she is wondering – fleetingly – what a security guard is doing sitting there, when presumably he has work to do. For twelve years Dalmar has done his best to be invisible in this country but in that moment he doesn’t care how many passengers see him sitting down on a step or how many look right through him, which is what they usually do. He is thinking of the senselessness, the waste, of all the people he has known over the years who would have done anything to stay alive; the woman, her cries, even when the dot of her head was lost from sight against the rise and fall of the waves. Why would anyone give life up voluntarily? The sin of it. The waste.

Dalmar’s broad shoulders give a great heave. He is dry crying. The tears in him were used up many years ago, but the sadness he feels inside still lifts his chest and drops it, tightens his throat. He closes his eyes and lifts one hand and pinches at the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger, in order to stem the tears that would flow if they could. He is glad he left the office before this happened. The waste.

*