Billy was singing to himself looking out of the window. He stopped singing, and smiled up at Sam. ‘He said was he getting old or were truck drivers getting younger? He was meaning me.’ Billy giggled again. ‘Imagine thinking a nine-year-old kid was a truck driver. Just ’cause I was looking through the cassettes.’ He laughed again, and then got back to the busy task of singing to himself.

Sam felt sick. What the hell was wrong with him? That shit-kicking train driver had thrown him off balance by not returning Billy’s wave. Why did Sam have to look for prejudice where there was none? He was going to have to learn to trust.

Silver was a nice town. It was full of nice people. Sam thought he should maybe write that out a hundred times when he got like this. Stop him getting so cranky.

Yeah. It was full of really nice people.

He turned the radio on.

‘… not too hard, not too soft, just light. This is Daniel, Elton John …’

Truth. Silver was a nice town. Regular population eight thousand, twice that when the seasonal tourists poured in.

In summer they came in camper vans, bringing the main street to a standstill while the passengers peered at maps and pointed, and the drivers constantly wheeled round in their seats, either shouting at kids in the back or looking for somewhere to park like predators stalking game. They were a pain in the butt.

They turned the town into a zoo.

Winter, right now, was better. Skiers travelled by car or on tour buses, and somehow they weren’t so cheesy, didn’t wear so many shiny leisure suits, didn’t picnic in dumb places.

But then the winter trade was altogether different. Even the Japanese who skied all season, wearing identical white ski-suits like Elvis’s last days in Vegas, were different from the packs that roamed Silver in the summer. The summer Japanese were on tours, herded around by fierce guides, photographing pretty much anything their diminutive leader pointed at. The winter ones came in couples. They had more money to spend, stayed in the big Canadian Pacific hotels on the edge of town, and no one minded them a bit.

Winter also brought the ski bums, the Australian and American kids who worked just enough to buy a lift pass and ski the season away. They packed out the staff accommodation shacks hidden well out of sight of the tourists in the backstreets, revealing their residence by the stinking T-shirts and ski-suits they hung out their windows to air.