I was minutes away from the motorway junction when the Beethoven symphony on the car radio was invaded by a local station, and the choral contention that all men were brothers gave way to a phone-in. The subject was the homeless, quite a few of whom had gathered at a site one contributor called the uptown cross. They were in there, so let them stay, another caller urged. They left their muck in there, so they should clean it up, a woman declared – it wasn’t up to no one else. They were stuck in there, though, another female caller countered, and they deserved some compassion. I was distracted by the phrases that felt close to a repetition of a single bunch of syllables, and concentrating on the traffic helped less than I would have liked. I was boxed in by caravans bound for the Lakes or further north to Scotland, and a bid to overtake trapped me in the outer lane. I needed to return to the inner lane well ahead of the exit for Monks Cross, and as I veered into it between a pair of speeding motor homes, a caller complained that some people were talking about the homeless at the site as though they weren’t human. It was up to Ned Cross to put them right, she told him, or was his name Ted Ross? Perhaps I’d misheard the entire sentence while I tried to focus on driving and ignore the face that was spying on me from the rear window of the motor home ahead. It kept ducking out of sight and inching up the glass – no doubt a child who’d found a game to fend off boredom – and my impression that the face was growing larger every time it reappeared must mean it was coming closer to the window. I held back from looking as long as I could, and when I glanced up it dropped out of sight like an unstringed puppet before I had a chance to make it out. Now here was the motorway exit, and I hadn’t even thought to indicate. I signalled my departure and swung down the ramp, and as the motor home raced onwards overhead I could have fancied I glimpsed the face falling from the window to slither down the dusty metal. It was light from a headlamp, I told myself.

The slope led down to a skein of six roads, some of which passed beneath the motorway. The ramp and the motorway, along with the opposite incline, were supported by so many hulking concrete columns that the area underneath resembled a cage. The nearest road was shut in by warehouses as windowless as walls of rock. Although I couldn’t see beyond them, I suspected I’d reached what locals called the uptown cross, since Monks Cross was the junction itself.