I might have liked not to recollect all this. I could easily have fancied that the rush of traffic overhead had begun to shape the Latin syllables, especially once the swish and echo of wheels seemed to grow louder with each pass. As I made to retreat from the onslaught of sound, I saw I was surrounded by graffiti. They were confined to the inner sides of the pillars, and the distorted faces peering out of tangles of unrecognisable symbols might all have been bids to depict the same swollen contemptuous face. I didn’t want to find it reminiscent of any I’d recently seen, and was even less eager to see anything similar begin to protrude from a sleeping bag or a heap of blankets. I was still under the motorway when it fell abruptly silent. There must be a gap in the traffic, but the pause felt like a held breath, and it let me hear a voice I knew. “There it is, Bell.”

Roy was somewhere near my car. I was afraid he’d noticed it until Bella said “Look for cracks. They’re how we’ll get to the earth.”

More than one column hid me from her and my son, but I didn’t know how much longer they would. I retreated under the far ramp to lurk behind a pillar. The noise from the motorway was no less overwhelming here, and sounded increasingly repetitive – a prolonged utterance of “Crux” followed by “Inverso” shaped by the wheels of the next vehicle. Surely it was common enough to imagine that wordless noises contained words, and they were distracting me from listening for Roy and Bella. I had so little sense of where my son and his companion might be that I risked a glance around the column. They were approaching beneath the other ramp, examining the concrete floor, and I hid before I could be seen. I heard no more from them until Roy spoke, sounding close to awe, which I didn’t like at all. “Are those his face?”

“They will be,” Bella said.

“And there’s his name.”

“You’ll hear that. Him and his kind, they try to cling to life however they can.”

Her comment revived the syllables up above, which I’d been managing to ignore. As I strove to concentrate on her and Roy he said “Look, there’s a crack by that thing like a cross.”

“That’s what it’s meant to be, a cross. Here, hold my bag.”

Unseen vehicles raced past, trailing syllables, and then Roy protested “Be careful, Bell. Do you want me to try?”

“Don’t underrate me, Roy. I’m getting my strength back.”