‘You miss the men,’ Stacey says, sympathetically. ‘Nice boys from your part of the world, I’ve always said that. Good with their hands, practical. Anyway he isn’t English, although he’s English now, I think.’ I guess Stacey is referring to Dalmar and I think about the yearning I felt for him. He’s bulky in a comforting kind of way, a bit of fat as well as muscle, polite and unthreatening, and a certain sort of reserve to him. She has a point.

Dalmar never talks about his private life to the other staff members – he never talks to the women on the station at all. Even to Tom, who will chat for hours on a night shift about his wife’s mother and how much he hates her two whippets, Dalmar never says a thing about his own situation. I hope Dalmar has love in his life, somewhere.

I wish I could talk to Stacey and Milada. I would love nothing better than to perch on the counter top and say to them, ‘Hey, did you see the young guy in the grey suit, the fair-haired one? Something about him, I reckon, something a bit wounded. You feel you could make things right for him, and he would be a completely different person.’ They would tease me about my Florence Nightingale complex and we would all have a bit of a laugh.

Instead, I listen to Stacey’s voice rattling on, as, unable to communicate, I drift backwards away from them. Her voice is much louder than Milada’s. I hear how she pronounces her co-worker’s name, Mi-lar-da. It’s actually Mi-lada – I’ve heard Milada correcting Stacey twice before, to no effect, but this time she stops herself, turns her head and says, ‘Oh sorry, love, Mi-lada … I’ll try and remember.’

Milada replies, ‘It is okay, it is quite nice to hear. Italians say Milarda too.’ She gives a small, secret smile as she says this and I am guessing she is thinking of one Italian in particular, rather than Italians in general, but she isn’t going to share this Italian with Stacey because he means something to her. He is not to be talked about like the weather.

*

On the concourse, there are three people, two women and a man, all staring upwards at the electronic display, all of them waiting for answers, but whether they are each waiting for their own answer or all there for the same one, it’s impossible to tell.

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