Something is going on here. He doesn’t look like a man who has just ducked out of his working day because he’s a bit lazy. He wouldn’t have put the suit on when he got up and come all the way to the station this morning if he was like that. Something impeded him when he got here, some invisible force field preventing him from entering the station, similar to the one that is preventing me from leaving it. He arrived, got as far as the cafe and concourse, the no-man’s-land between the station and the rest of the world, then he baulked.

Caleb bursts into tears.

They are male tears, it goes without saying – and the bursting is very male too. It is only because I am looking right at him that I observe it happening – the man sitting on the table behind him probably thinks he has just sneezed. It happens as an exhalation, a huffing out of air, quite loud, and he drops his face into his hands as if they are a paper bag he can hide inside. I only know he is crying because his shoulders go up and down in tiny movements and I see a tear – an actual tear – flow down to his chin.

What has produced this? It is so sudden and uncontrolled it can only be a sorrow he has been holding tight inside – such an exhalation has a pent-up force, like the bursting of a taut balloon. So, the attempt to go to work was genuine and he just couldn’t face it.

Grown men crying: why is that so affecting? I think of Dalmar’s grief earlier in the week, how it filled me with a desire to comfort him – it is a desire you could mistake for love, if you weren’t careful, such is the yearning it creates, and I’m feeling something similar towards this young man. His shoulders stop moving almost straight away. He removes his hands and snatches up the paper napkin on the table – the plastic stirrer gives a tiny clatter as it lands – and he wipes at his face furiously, the whole of it, the nose, the suddenly reddened cheeks. He turns his gaze sideways, looking out through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the pavement where people loaf around waiting to be picked up or having a sneaky fag. The three men and the woman outside all have their backs to him, so he can gaze out without his expression being seen. I can see it though. This is a young man in deep trouble, so unhappy he is unable to go to work, and for all his fakery on the phone just now, he knows himself well enough to understand it might last into next week.