Drink turned them into needy children, or aggressive children. The young man in the flat below his – Ryan was his name – seemed quiet and stable for days on end, and then he’d turn into pure paranoid menace. The booze hardened some, and softened others, and left everyone so ashamed they had to drink again.

Amy was a drunk, really, which meant they would have been married drunks.

But the man who had sold him his ticket did absolutely not need his love. He was only doing his job, and was probably as capable of being vain and difficult as anyone else – why turn him into a saint? What if he went home to humiliate his wife, and make her miserable? What if it was worse, and he was tormenting a child? Michael groaned, for he couldn’t stop the vision. The man was suddenly in his stepson’s room, and he was demanding something too horrible to contemplate. He’d paid for a new school uniform, and the boy owed him – or was it a girl? Let it be a girl, and it was her trip to France, or state-of-the-art phone – and at the end of a long day in the ticket office it was payback time, behind closed doors. Michael tried to stop thinking, but on it went like a film and his eyes saw the images even when they were closed. The girl turned back into a boy, and it was himself, and the man was holding his head gently, stroking his hair.

‘Try it. Just try it.’

Lunchtime, and the other boys screaming in the playground. The blinds were down, and the little bolt drawn for privacy. Caesar’s Gallic Wars was there on the desk, and the hand was applying just a little more pressure. Michael’s hand was shaking, and he couldn’t get his brand-new ticket into the slot, for he was hot in his blazer. He could not write to the station man, because any letter from Michael would give him an affirmation and a confidence that might prolong the suffering, even if he looked so kind. You never could tell, for kind-looking men did bad things. They showed love, only to slip it in and do the business.

‘Let’s talk at lunchtime – bring the translation.’

The barrier gates snapped open, and he was through.

What had his mother told him, years ago? As a little girl she’d been ‘touched up’ by the lodger – and she’d told her own mother, Michael’s gran.

‘He touched me up, in his room.’

‘Don’t go into his room, then.’

That’s what she’d said, and there was an unchallengeable logic to the advice. ‘Don’t go into his room. Walk away.’

Michael found a bench.