Percy lived a busy, driven life. Percy rushed from his lessons to the changing room, and then off to school-supper before he dropped exhausted into his boarding-school dormitory bed, too tired for the pillow fights he’d outgrown. The expensive flat would be left to him in his loving grandparents’ will, and he would marry, and have a baby of his own. The grandparents would die happy, and Percy would wear his grandfather’s watch, which Michael could see on the man’s wrist. It was a wind-up model, of course, and every time Percy wound it he would think of the sweet, strong old man who had given it to him, and how wonderful their times on the boat had been as young Percy learned to navigate by the stars and steer the craft deftly into harbour. Percy wouldn’t be the kind of man to walk out into the thin, scruffy copse of trees at the back of his flat with a rope. Never would Percy find himself blinded by tears, hissing, ‘Do it!’

‘What?’

‘Hang yourself, you crippled bastard! You’ve mended the fucking blind, so get it over with – do it!’

No, no – and no again. Michael screwed the cap onto his fruit-juice carton, and put it in his bag with the glass and the half-sucked mint. He decided not to say goodbye, because the couple were so ostentatiously concentrating – one with the tablet and the other with a Kindle. He stood, put his bag over his shoulder, and set off to the doors at the end of the carriage, away from the chirping, giggling phone. He walked through two more, and found a pair of empty seats in the third – but he walked on into the little vestibule again. If he could open a door, he could throw himself out: but the doors were locked, and you couldn’t even get the windows down. The toilet was out of order, so he couldn’t drown himself – though of course it probably wasn’t out of order at all. It was simply too expensive to maintain, or they didn’t want it vandalised.

‘We would unlock the toilets, sir, but people keep using them.’

Michael smiled again, because that’s what someone had said to him once, on a station called Fratton. ‘We have to keep the facilities locked, sir. They get smashed up if we don’t.’ We would provide seats, but we’re worried people might sit on them. We would put the heating on, but you might get comfortable and never leave: better to be cold, with the wind racing through the freezing, doorless shelter. That’s the world: live in it.

They were approaching Preston.