Was it the Gloucester station waiting room where they had no chairs? He’d noticed the sign, which was actually a drawing of a vacant seat, and stepped inside to rest. Six people were standing up, and the room was bare.

‘Excuse me,’ he’d said – at the ticket office. ‘What’s happened to the chairs?’

‘Sorry, sir? I’m not with you.’

‘In the waiting room. There’s nowhere to sit.’

‘Oh! No. They were vandalised, so they’ve been taken out.’

‘But there’s nowhere to sit.’

‘I know, sir. It’s a problem.’

‘People are tired. They want to sit down.’

The woman had simply looked at him.

‘If the seats are being vandalised,’ he wanted to say, ‘you repair them. You put staff in to protect them, or CCTV – you can’t give in to vandals, because if you do – they’ve won. It’s not important,’ he wanted to say. ‘In the great scheme of things, it’s trivial. But it’s as if we’re not worth anything any more, and we don’t deserve comfort. Civilisation is a myth – we’re going backwards.’

The woman handed Michael a customer feedback form, and he said thank you.

When he stepped onto the platform he was almost weeping, for he knew now that he would miss his connection – but he wanted a last cup of coffee, in a mug. He didn’t want to drink out of a paper cup, and he knew the café in Gloucester used proper crockery. He deserved china. Why should he drink from paper? He refused to do that when this was his last hot drink, and why should he be sad about it? He had time, and he had to drink more whisky to make himself drunk. Crewe was only two hours away – or two hours and six minutes, to be precise, via Birmingham. Even he could get to Crewe, and if he missed whatever London service he’d been aiming to meet, so what? The trains were hourly, he was sure of it – he’d looked it up and worked it all out, so… ‘Please,’ he said to himself. ‘Stop crying.’

There was a receptacle for litter, and he paused beside it to unload the orange peel, and wipe his weak, foolish eyes. He glanced up to see a camera, and wondered for a moment if anyone was watching him here. Was there anybody at the monitor?

‘There’s a man with watery eyes,’ they’d say.

The bag that held the rubbish was transparent, so you couldn’t conceal whatever it was you were throwing away. The bomb-planting terrorist would lift the lid and realise he had been thwarted. Where could he hide his bomb now? He would slink back, shamefaced, to his bomb-making friends. ‘It’s impossible,’ he’d say. ‘We have been out-witted.’