If Abshir had intervened, or Dalmar, they would have been next over the side – they would have almost certainly given their lives for nothing. Or the ensuing fight would have overturned the unseaworthy vessel and everyone would have drowned, including the woman and the weeping boy sitting opposite. But that is not what Dalmar is thinking as he crouches on the floor of his room with his knuckles crashed against his temples, brought to his knees by a woman’s kindness and her tea and her custard creams – he is thinking that he is a terrible human being who let a woman drown, and it doesn’t matter how many Somalis have extended the hand of friendship since he came to this grey, freezing, poky little island of a country – it doesn’t matter how many invitations he gets to the mosque or how many women want to comfort him when they see the damaged look in his eyes – what is wrong with these women? What do they get out of this constantly being understanding? Do they just enjoy feeling really good about themselves? It is all immaterial, in any case, because Dalmar, although he has never been a Believer in the way he was raised to be and the way he knows he ought to be, believes enough to feel that it is in our lifetime we are punished for wrongdoing, or failing to prevent wrongdoing. Who knows, maybe if he hadn’t gone off sick the night that young woman died, maybe he would have been able to prevent that? That was another moment when he failed. Those moments of failure: we are punished by being stuck in those moments for as long as we live, trapped inside them, unable to forget the pictures; the men on their feet, the look that Abshir turned on him after he had pulled him back down. And then the woman’s head, bobbing in the waves, a black dot becoming more and more distant … and it was a man’s head that he had seen on the tracks at Peterborough Railway Station, just resting there between the tracks, looking up. Only a few minutes earlier, he had been drinking tea with Tom in the DTL office on Platform One and thinking about training in Customer Services and thinking, for the first time, that he could move forward in this country now, leave everything else behind, because Tom was friendly and helpful and didn’t care where he came from or what he had done – and that was why the man had been sent to remind Dalmar what a terrible person he was. That is how you are punished, with pictures. That is why you should never look.

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