It had earned eleven-year-old Michael his first ever straight A grade, but he couldn’t remember the next line. Now he was old, and he leaned forward carefully to open the bag. There were some easy-peel tangerines inside, packed into the front pocket in their net. He took one out, and it took less than thirty seconds to reveal the fruit, then sixty seconds to eat it. As a child, he remembered the peeling of an orange taking for ever, because skins were tight and there was always a layer of white stuff that needed removing. Now they were simple and they were seedless, too. They were ridiculously cheap, discounted at the supermarket he passed on his way to this particular station.

He is a lucky man, people might think, if they noticed him on the bench. He eats his orange, without a care in the world – no work for him today, and why not? Perhaps he’s part-time, or even retired? Is that possible? He is going on some nice excursion, perhaps, this man of leisure… he is meeting a friend for coffee further up the line. Could he even be a grandfather? Yes, he’s old enough – but he’s probably an uncle joining a nephew and niece, with tickets to the zoo. The zoo? No, the space museum, or the science park, or the place people play Laser Quest, next door to the vast, warehouse-like space they’d opened full of trampolines.

So many people, it seemed, wanted to bounce up and down.

Michael sat, wondering if he looked like a grandfather, and he wondered who would have his watch, which he’d left by his phone. Both sat on the envelope: phone and watch, and his charger too. He’d made his bed. He’d even emptied the glass of water, and left it in the kitchen. What would happen to the things he kept in the fridge?

Ryan might have them, as he lived below. More likely, they’d be thrown away along with his paperbacks, his underwear, and his extra-thick jersey. Even his supermarket loyalty card would be wasted, and yet he’d accumulated so many points. Surely they could be transferred to someone?

Ryan downstairs – or nobody at all. But someone would have to take the duvet cover off the duvet, launder it and then fold it on a hanger so it could sit in the linen section of the charity shop, so that another someone, coming in, might pause and – if they only knew – recognise the clothing on the rack just behind. The jersey, the cap, the half-dozen shirts. The blue bedroom slippers! And they might, just for a moment, remember the man they’d seen walking to and from the railway station, and glimpse his ghost. Here were his remains on the two-for-the-price-of-one rail, raising money for Save the Children. God save the children: Michael was helping children, even after Crewe.