Just before the train pulled out and north, a woman shoved herself down into the seat opposite. Arms and legs flustered, big showy movements to take off her jacket, cram her bag under the table. She looked about herself irritably, hard face, trampy make-up, thin lips drawn. A bad light coming off her and the iron-rich smell of blood between them in the hot carriage; time of the month and wants everyone to know it, Ida thought, raising her magazine up higher, a feeble barrier between them. She’d bought the magazine for this very purpose. Peeping over, Ida saw the woman had taken out a book and wasn’t reading it, a notepad and wasn’t writing in it. She fiddled with a phone and stared out the window, all of her gestures screaming for attention.

Ida knew this type. Her own sister, God rest her, had been this type. The sort of person who sucked in all the light, recast everyone else as the spear carriers in her own personal drama. May had given nothing and nothing and nothing for seventy-two years; at her funeral people had whispered that Ida was an unfeeling bitch, or just in shock, sitting up there in the front row and not crying a drop. It was relief, that’s what it was, and it was none of their business what else.

This woman wanted Ida. She had some long story to tell, fat with indignation, full of people who had done her wrong, and she needed Ida to sit there, clucking and patting her shoulder, agreeing that every outrage was terrible, terrible. Then they’d get to Oxenholme and Ida would get off the train and the woman would have forgotten her face before the doors had even closed. Ida didn’t need this story. She didn’t need anything from this woman at all, and she was old and ugly enough now to know that you could resist these people, when they clamoured for you, even in emotional distress, and not feel guilty afterwards. Ida had her smart new suitcase packed and her hair done, and she was off for a spa weekend she’d got a great deal on in the back of the Express. She would get off the train, and she would not think of the woman again, even if it meant rereading the same gruesome stories of incest, celebrity divorce and freakish cysts the size of footballs for the whole three-hour journey. That magazine was not coming down.