The team. Last one to be picked, and first to be let go. He couldn’t vault the horse, and he couldn’t even dive off a platform in front of something as huge as a train, or sort himself out at Crewe – so Mina paid him, deducting money for an insurance scheme he hadn’t known about. And it just didn’t matter – for the world is a beautiful place, and the woods and fields spread to the horizon getting ready for sunset, so you must not let yourself be dragged down by small-minded people. The whisky was so full of old oak, and you had to rise above calamity as you crept back into your flat and listened to someone else’s TV through the floor and the sound of their hacking cough. You could try, couldn’t you? You could reach out, perhaps, and offer cough medicine, forcing a friendship out of that. One day he hadn’t turned up at the DIY store, and the next day he was late.

Then he went in and sat for too long in the rest area.

Then he took too long to stack the fence-posts.

Then he ignored someone.

It was the only way he could fight back, and meanwhile he had gone for a Health MOT and dismantled a wedding, and could they have married, really? It had seemed like just another fantasy, which is why he drifted into it and had finally woken up.

The station they’d arrived at was busy, and the carriage started to fill up even as he wondered if he’d got the sequence of events wrong, and perhaps the fence-post incident had been before his long stint in the rest area, for he was too close to tears. A young girl sat next to him, and when he went to speak she thought better of it – perhaps she had spotted a more comfortable seat, or she smelled liquor… Michael doubted that, because his juice carton was back in his bag, and he’d just started another mint. Now he was somewhere else, and there was a great big mosque that looked grand, gold and new.

Another child peered at him through the gap in the seats in front, and someone nearby spoke at length to a person in the office querying a detail about a drawing which Michael had no choice but to try to follow, because it seemed to involve the distance from the eaves of the roof to the top step and whether or not the distance could be legally decreased. Perhaps phone reception was bad, because the man spoke with exceptional clarity:

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Take a look at BS1319. 1.3.1… What? No, what does it say? No, look at what’s in parentheses…’