I have tested the limits of all this. There is an actual border. I am so restless, so bored, that I have taken to doing the occasional patrol, once every few days, like a lonesome cow in a field wandering round and round alongside but never touching the electric fence.

I have also taken it for granted that despite my ability to free-float around Peterborough Station, it just isn’t possible for me to get on the 12.18 to Whittlesea or the 16.46 to Welwyn Garden City. I have never actually attempted to board a train out of here. Somehow, that one seems unthinkably transgressive – it doesn’t follow the rules of what I know I can do. And so I end up back where I started, on the station concourse, watching people coming and going, staring over the road. It is another sunny winter’s day. Crescent Bridge is lit up blue. At the Great Northern Hotel, right opposite the station entrance, the pumpkins have been removed from the steps and the orange gauze unwound from the iron railings. It is only November but just visible through the window of the bar there is a plastic Father Christmas, life-size, that stands next to a plastic tree, tucked into the corner beneath the widescreen television that shows football matches. Father Christmas is grinning, plump-cheeked, and wearing round, steel-framed glasses. He is holding out a plastic present. Some of the habits and rituals of the living seem pretty strange to me now.

*

My class and I had a discussion about Purgatory once, whether it was a kind of holding pen for people who weren’t good enough to go to Heaven but not bad enough to go to Hell, or whether it was just where you got stuck if you weren’t ready to leave the earth yet, if you had unresolved business amongst the living. I tried to talk to them about medieval ideas of punishment and redemption, how a certain amount of prayer from loved ones left behind could spring you. The discussion got quite animated at one point but when I brought up Dante they got bored and Anna at the back put her forehead on her desk and let both arms drop either side, which was Zohra’s cue to poke her upper arm with a pencil and Anna’s to snarl, ‘Fuck off, that hurt. Miss, that hurt.’

Then I said, ‘Who has read or seen The Tempest?’ and they all groaned. I turned and wrote on the whiteboard, Hell is empty, and all the devils are here. It was one of the few times I managed to get a collective smile out of them. Even Suranne, even Ludmilla smiled.

*