The wood was damp, cold, unpleasant to the touch, but he wanted to sit down – he was unfit, he thought to himself, and not for the first time. He’d been in good shape once, when he was younger, and it wasn’t just from working with his dad on the building site. He’d been a runner, back when he had the enthusiasm to get somewhere quickly and the right kind of competition beside him. That was how he thought about Eva these days, not about her face or warmth or even her smell – though her smell was something he missed deeply, achingly, when he woke – but as a sort of presence who had been there when he was better at life. Who’d made him better at life. No, he wasn’t that pathetic – he’d been good on his own, too. She’d liked something about him.

He patted down his pockets, looking for anything to sit on to avoid the damp from the bench seeping into his trousers, but his pockets were empty apart from his keys, phone, and equally empty wallet. There wasn’t even a tissue to wipe it down. He shrugged off his jacket despite the cold and laid it over the slats, then sat down heavily.

He tried to get back the irritation that had spurred him on to walk in the first place – the stolen bike, was it? Or the girl, Rosie, with her oblivious confidence? But it was no use. His annoyance had dissipated already, and been replaced with a loneliness that seemed to linger, on some days, in his lungs. And then it popped into his head, that ridiculous thing with the gate yesterday. He didn’t know why he hadn’t just walked around to the front, but he couldn’t do it – couldn’t backtrack, couldn’t turn after having made the initial mistake. Then he’d fallen. They were watching him; he’d heard their laughter. But he’d got up from the ground quickly. At least he had that.

He’d been a good reporter once. Been able to hear the words that people left unspoken in their sentences. Eva said he made it too personal sometimes, but he thought that journalism had to be personal – if you don’t care about what you write, with personal intent, then what is the point? Though he was struggling to find any interest in Rosie and Kaz. They had no need for his article; perhaps that was the problem. In fact, the world had no need of him to write it at all. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t important. It was filing yet another page on a computer screen. And paying the bills. Bloody insurance. Bloody FullLife. It had never been more imperative to have a job, and his was sinking.