He really had pretended it wasn’t happening, and slow, sweet Monica hadn’t asked or probed. After his resignation-dismissal he had continued to leave for work, except he had gone to the park instead. He had taken the bus to the playing fields. Then, he had done two circuits of the perimeter by which time she would have left the house – but she wasn’t living with him. He and Monica had never lived together, so he was misremembering. Who had he been pretending for? Not Monica, not Amy – so had it really been himself? He tricked himself into thinking he was still going to work, and hadn’t been let go, just as he was tricking himself now – for it suddenly seemed he wasn’t ever going to kill himself either, having tried and failed in both Bromsgrove and Crewe. He should have grabbed the steam-train enthusiast and frogmarched him down the tracks. He could have tripped him over and knelt on his chest, and that would have stopped him talking about nothing. He would have coughed out his dentures, the poor man.

‘No, mister! No!’

They would have been cremated together, for half Michael’s head would have lain against the old man’s severed shoulder: a jigsaw for the morticians, making them truly inseparable. If only he’d met the 15.41 – and he was about to be sick.

It would be over now, and Percy’s grandfather would never have had to move his coat, or say, ‘Do you mind if we don’t chat any more?’

Do you mind if we don’t chat any more?

Michael swallowed, and smiled at the thought, realising that he still didn’t have the courage to do anything other than chat. He would find it, though – the courage. It might be at the very bottom of the juice carton, and it might mean crazy, bendy legs that could hardly carry him – but he would find it, and dance down the railway line.

The train had slowed, and there was another one next to it travelling just a little bit faster. They were racing, and everyone was carefully not looking at each other.

So many people, treasuring their lives! And he would wake up wondering what his was for and how he had come to have no purpose. How he had come to be so unconnected, for all the strings and strands had stretched until they’d broken and the most meaningful and important thing he had done in the last week was to help Vivienne in the flat opposite with a broken blind – a misaligned toggle, in fact. He smiled at this thought, too – and then laughed. The other train was winning, and he nearly said, ‘Come on! Faster!’