As the train thunders past the side of it almost brushes Caleb’s nose. All that hard metal, rushing – and Caleb, so soft and human, flesh and bone, his hair blasted back by the draught, his pale face brutally exposed, eyes wide, nostrils flared and reddened: it is a shocked face, unclothed by expression and so vulnerable, so dear in all its nakedness, and that is when I realise: I love him. I have fallen in love with a real human being, alive and corporeal, and I would do anything to protect him. I don’t care that he will never know me if he lives. I want him to leave me here alone, as long as he will be okay, that’s fine. I would never have him hurt just so that I could have him. That isn’t what love is.

The train is vanished now. There is nothing but empty space around him, just the air, the cold night air, as if the freight train never existed, as if death itself did not exist.

Caleb sways, almost imperceptibly, then stands rock still, as if frozen in shock at the irreversibility of what he almost did. This very minute, the one he is experiencing now, could have been the first minute in which he was no longer in the world. He turns away from the edge, towards the stairs. He traipses back along the platform, past the waiting room, past the disapproving woman, who doesn’t even look at him. I feel as exhausted as he looks. It is as if I have been pouring all my thoughts, my energies, into dissuading him or – if I am honest – into the internal battle between whether I dissuaded him or not. Was it me that stopped him? I know I can’t move physical objects but can I enter minds without knowing it? Do I have that power, now?

His face looks as ravaged as before, just more tired. I don’t think it was me. He doesn’t look like a man who has had an epiphany – just a man who couldn’t quite go through with it.

He walks along the covered walkway. A woman pushing a double buggy gives him a weary smile. One of her small charges – twin boys – is asleep. The other is arching his back against the curve of the buggy seat, straining the straps, and howling, face bulging with the desire to be free. The woman pushing the buggy looks at Caleb and has that smiling expression that women have when their children are behaving badly, I know, but what can you do? Her expression drops as Caleb fails to respond.