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Mark Watson

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Mark Watson 2020

Jacket Photographs: Cover illustration © Benjamin Harte/Arcangel Images

Cover design by Claire Ward and Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Mark Watson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008346966

Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780008346980

Version: 2020-09-15

Dedication

For Coop,

who changed my story for good.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: The Text

Chapter 1: 8 March 2019: 23:55

Chapter 2: 9 March 2019: London–Edinburgh Train, 00:02

Chapter 3: 9 March 2019: London–Edinburgh Train, 00:06

Chapter 4: Melbourne, 11:25

Chapter 5: Berlin, 01:27

Chapter 6: London, 00:30

Chapter 7: London–Edinburgh Train, 00:49

Chapter 8: Bristol, 01:01

Chapter 9: M1 Near Luton, 01:23

Chapter 10: Everywhere, 01:45

Part Two: The Contacts

Chapter 11: London–Edinburgh Train, 02:05

Chapter 12: Melbourne, 13:05

Chapter 13: London, 02:32

Chapter 14: Berlin, 03:32 M1 Near Leicester, 02:32

Chapter 15: London, 02:48

Chapter 16: London–Edinburgh Train, 02:52

Part Three: The Mission

Chapter 17: Everywhere, 03:15

Chapter 18: Melbourne, 14:25

Chapter 19: Bristol, 03:38

Chapter 20: London–Edinburgh Train, 03:50

Chapter 21: Berlin, 05:02

Chapter 22: A1(M) Sefton Park Services, 04:34

Chapter 23: London–Edinburgh Train, 04:57

Chapter 24: London, 05:35

Chapter 25: Melbourne, 16:35

Chapter 26: Bristol, 05:47

Chapter 27: Newcastle, 06:02

Chapter 28: London–Edinburgh Train, 06:30 Berlin, 07:30

Chapter 29: Melbourne, 17:55

Chapter 30: London, 07:04

Chapter 31: A1 Near Dunbar, 07:15

Chapter 32: Everywhere, 07:20

Chapter 33: Edinburgh Waverley Station, 07:22 Berlin, 08:22 Melbourne, 18:22

Chapter 34: Edinburgh, 08:01

Epilogue: Edinburgh, 20:45

Author Note

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Mark Watson

About the Publisher

PART ONE

1
8 MARCH 2019
23:55

I’ve decided to end my life. I know this will come as a shock to some of you and I’m sorry if it upsets anyone. Sorry, also, if a text message is a strange way to find out. I am not sending this for you to try to change my mind; I know what I’m doing, and I’m fine. I just wanted the chance to say goodbye and to thank you for the things we have shared. James x

2
9 MARCH 2019
LONDON–EDINBURGH TRAIN, 00:02

Texting 158 people at once was a strange feeling – stranger than James had expected. The task of drafting the message hadn’t been difficult at all. In fact, it had been cathartic to write it. It was as if he didn’t fully believe he was capable of taking this dramatic action until he’d committed it to the screen. It was the difference between making a mental vow and saying it out loud. And now, telling every single one of his contacts: that was the final step. You didn’t tell 158 people you were doing something and then duck out of it. This was sealing the deal.

Most people would probably have a more tech-efficient way of spreading the news. WhatsApp, perhaps.

Even as recently as five years ago, well after he’d left the tech world, James would still have found it difficult to imagine not having a Facebook account. But then, he would also have found it difficult to imagine not having a girlfriend, or best mate, a healthy relationship with his sister, a purpose. He’d come off Facebook, and everything else like that, as soon as Michaela left.

This was his final act of sharing, you could say. It was a bit of a clumsy way to do it, he reflected, reading the message which was about to be dispatched to his entire phone book one more time. The ‘James x’ looked ridiculous to James’s own eyes. He never normally signed off with an ‘x’. He’d been left behind by the age of over-familiarity between virtual strangers. Only recently, before he got sacked, a passenger he was picking up – a total stranger – had sent him a GIF of a goat eating a chocolate bar whole, with the caption ‘SWEEEEET!’ Again, at one time James would have found that funny, responded with something similar. But when you were lonely, fake displays of friendship made things feel lonelier still. And fake was all he had, now. A brief smile exchanged at the table with his flatmate, a friendly nod on the way into work. They weren’t enough. You couldn’t be almost forty and be living off these crumbs of affection. And now he wasn’t going to, any more.

They can have the ‘x’, he muttered to himself, with a private little smile. He felt the lightest he’d been for a long time: light both in the head and in this flabby body he’d come to despise. Neither brain nor body mattered so much, now that he was almost done with them. They can have the ‘x’ just this once.

He could feel his heart skip against his ribs as his finger slid onto the screen. This was it. There was no recalling this message; it would be out there immediately. Everyone knew how unforgiving it was, the instant-contact world they all lived in. Michaela had once written the sentence ‘my tits feel like they’ve been through a mangle’ and sent it by mistake to a colleague. He could remember how she described the realization, the dizzying rush of stomach into mouth. James almost smiled again at the memory of his ex, but this time the smile died, and he took a deep breath and pressed send.

The moment itself was curiously undramatic. It wasn’t even one single ‘moment’, as James had imagined it when he’d looked ahead to this night – which he had naturally done a lot. Some of the numbers in the phone book were out of date, some phones were switched off this late; exclamation marks immediately started appearing on the screen. It was not immediately obvious who had got the message and who would remain ignorant of his plan until he was already gone. But he wasn’t about to find out. The phone was going onto flight mode and would stay that way.

Of course, nobody could find him here – he had planned it well. Nobody could physically stop him; that had been a given as soon as they pulled out of the station. All the same, he didn’t want to be bothered, over the next few hours, by people’s responses. This wasn’t a proposal: it was a done deal. Flight mode was a good compromise. He didn’t want it off altogether, because the phone was his only timepiece, for a start. It would be reassuring to keep an eye on the time. To know how close he was to half past seven in the morning, when it was going to happen. The phone would be by his side, but surrounded by a force-field. Nobody could touch him, now.

A little aeroplane icon popped up at the top of the screen to confirm that it was no longer possible for any of James’s contacts to speak to him. This time, the moment was as rewarding as it should be, did feel as significant as it should. Admittedly, it wasn’t quite the end of his interaction with the rest of humanity. It was possible he’d have to speak a few words here and there before 7.30 a.m. But no real conversations. Those were done with. No more opportunities to mess up, to disappoint others, or himself. It was done.

James rummaged in his plastic bag, bringing it up onto the narrow bed with him. For his final meal on this mobile Death Row he had brought two pork pies, a six-pack of beers and a packet of plain chocolate digestives. What a spread, he could hear his sister Sally saying, in the mock Famous Five voices they used to adopt in their early twenties: the youthful person’s mockery of the only-just-past. He removed the biscuits from the bag. Tearing off the yellow strip to open the packet, stuffing the first biscuit into his mouth, provoked the usual rush of guilt and shame. It was a conscious effort to remind himself that those feelings were obsolete now, that he was free, he could eat whatever he wanted. Do whatever he wanted, for the whole of this ghostly night that was left to him.

It had surprised him a little, how slow the adjustment was. The way that, even though he had made his decision weeks ago, the body and mind kept on with their business. That was what life was like, he supposed. An amazing amount of it was lived almost automatically, and could be for many years, unless one found the courage to change it – or do what he was doing now, escape it.

James’s actions this afternoon wouldn’t have looked to an outsider like those of a man about to kill himself. He’d approached it like any other day off work. He’d cleared up the crumbs of cheese left from his mid-afternoon snack, polished the kitchen surfaces, hoovered, straightened the jumble of shoes by the front door and hung up his flatmate’s jacket, which was lying in the hall. Before leaving the flat for the last time, he had gone into the bathroom and made sure the shower dial was turned tight to the top, because the shower had a habit of spewing water out of its pipes at unpredictable times – noisily and sometimes for several minutes, as if it had an invisible user standing under it. Admittedly, these actions hadn’t been for James’s own benefit – it made no sense to talk about ‘benefit’ when he wasn’t going to be alive this time tomorrow. But there was his flatmate, Steffi, to consider.

‘Flatmate’ was a generous way of describing their relationship, as was the case with all the people who had moved in and out in the three years since Michaela left. The two of them weren’t close; they’d barely had a detailed exchange until that recent night, still mortifying to think about, when she’d seen him crying. James generally came home from work at the station at around seven, and usually Steffi was already out, waiting tables, by then. Their main transactions revolved around the Amazon packages which Steffi was always receiving early in the morning, and which James collected for her because he knew she would still be asleep. Sometimes he thought he had more conversations with the delivery man – who always said the same thing, ‘just a signature here please, chief’ – than with Steffi herself. But he certainly didn’t want her to think badly of him now he was gone. That was why, as well as making sure the flat was nice, he had left her an email with detailed instructions: how to contact Michaela, who was still the landlady, and what to say to anyone who got in touch.

Steffi (there was no denying it) would be inconvenienced a little by what he was about to do. It was bad news logistically if the other person in your flat killed himself. But she was a capable, practical woman – he knew that much about her. She’d be fine.

Everybody would be fine. In a few cases their lives would be better, in fact, as a result of this. If James hadn’t believed that, he would not have made this decision. He helped himself to a second biscuit, turning it upside down as usual to enjoy the hit of the chocolate coating a couple of seconds more quickly.

‘God, that’s nice,’ he found himself muttering, and grinned at the oddness of the situation. It was so freeing to have made this decision. I feel alive, he thought, somewhat ironically.

A third biscuit. Eighty-six more illegal calories. He could still remember the figure from the weight-loss app that used to patrol his and Michaela’s diets like a prison guard. Eighty-six calories, astoundingly, in a single biscuit. But it wasn’t illegal any more. There could be eight million calories in a biscuit, he thought, and it wouldn’t matter. Nothing was a problem any more. He visualized for a second an insanely large biscuit, himself eating his way through it, and almost smiled again as he realized where the thought came from: Sally had once helped him get off to sleep with a made-up story in which he was trapped inside a giant peach, like his Roald Dahl namesake. But the thought of her gave him a pang of sorrow – they would never be young and full of in-jokes and cynicism again, never be brother and sister again – and he forced it away. There was no room for that stuff now.

He yanked a cord to pull the blind, revealing a grubby little square of window. It was midnight: indistinct shapes went by in the darkness. James thought about all the texts, the messages-in-bottles, shuttling invisibly through the night sky. Some of the recipients would be asleep by now, wouldn’t see the news for hours yet, perhaps not until he’d done it. Others would half-read the message through sleep, or glance at it but fail to absorb it.

But a few people would already have read it, and some perhaps were trying to contact him right now, hammering in vain on the screen-door he had pulled shut across his phone. James wasn’t so detached from his life that he couldn’t see that. If Michaela and Karl saw the message, they would certainly try to get in touch. Their brains would shine a beam on everything good about James, everything (as his message said) they had shared. The mad escapades of years gone by, like the time they raced around all the Monopoly squares in London; or that night they spent grovelling around on hands and knees to capture a frog that had found its way into the flat during a storm. Michaela would remember how he always brought her a morning coffee although – in his own words – he felt like an absolute dingbat trying to say ‘matcha latte’ to the youthful, band-T-shirt-wearing baristas who probably discussed him after he’d gone. Karl would remember watching middle-of-the-night foreign films after a shift, joining the action an hour late, debating who the killer might be only to discover at the end that it hadn’t been a murder mystery in the first place. Both of them would remember the fun things, the filtered memories, and the hysteria of the moment would make them forget that they were the ones who’d helped to cast him into this grim place.

Even people with less invested in James, which was almost everyone else amongst his contacts, would be concerned. Humans were naturally programmed to think that way, for their own protection. They’d say that he ‘wasn’t in his right mind’, that he was a ‘danger to himself’. They would convince themselves that this was a tragedy which needed averting, from which they could emerge as a hero. They would be reacting, in other words, not to James’s actual situation, but to the drama. So their reactions would be fished out of the first-aid kit everyone had for dramas. And they would be wrong. It was a long time since he’d felt so decidedly in his right mind: so calm and in control. As for being a danger to himself – no, it was the opposite. He’d been a danger to himself when he was alive, when he was still trying to make out that he could cope with what that required. He was safe now.

He put the phone down on the sad little ledge that passed for a bedside table here. It was odd how small the phone looked, all of a sudden – a trick of the mind, perhaps, now that it had been stripped of its powers. It was an object again, inert like a brick, rather than an ever-watchful second brain. It might as well be a toy.

3
9 MARCH 2019
LONDON–EDINBURGH TRAIN, 00:06

James had a momentary flashback to his first encounter with an iPhone. It was 2007 and he’d just moved in with Karl and two other coders. Karl had brought the phone home from an Apple event which they’d all been invited to because, at that time, their start-up had been regarded as a pacesetter.

‘Look at it, man,’ Karl had said, holding it out like a bar of gold on the kitchen table. ‘You just touch the screen, like this. Not you.’ He playfully swatted James’s hand away. ‘Compulsory hand-wash before you even go near it, fam. This thing cost an arm and a leg. Look at it. You flick through – beautiful, isn’t it. Your conversations, it shows you like this. You’ve got all your apps, you’ve got all your music on it, like an iPod. It’s like a computer but the size of a phone. These things are the future, man, for sure. Ten years’ time, they’ll own us.’

‘How did you …’ James almost stepped back from the question, feeling it was the sort of thing his mother would ask – much too square for conversation with Karl. Karl wasn’t much like the programmers James had met while getting his degree, or in the past couple of years touring as a freelancer around the IT departments of companies which had only just upgraded their equipment from abacuses. Karl had pecs like Argos catalogues, his black skin was covered in tattoos of objects that James thought you could probably do violence with, he was keen on romantic adventures which always backfired. On their first week in the flat together, a woman had turned up in their kitchen shouting that Karl would be ‘judged by history’, and yet half an hour later they’d been having sex so loudly that James had to try to drown it out with a documentary about someone he didn’t recognize touring India’s railways. Yes, Karl was a lot cooler than James. Still, sometimes the cool found it useful to have the less cool around. James considered himself difficult to beat when it came to knowing the rules of board games and how long to put things in a microwave for.

‘How did I afford it?’ Karl raised his eyebrows. ‘Is that what you were going to ask?’

‘Sorry if it’s a rude question.’

‘It’s a fair question, fam. Because it actually brings us on to something I wanted to ask you about. This is a bit difficult. I got the phone by making use of my credit card, right. But that does bring me close to the credit limit, which I didn’t realize, so I’m going to have to ask you a favour.’

James smiled. It was promising, having this man who hardly knew him, ask a favour. James felt he was at his best when helping out, being a steady pair of hands, as his school report described him – something which Sally criticized as faint praise (‘you’re better than that’) but which James himself was pleased with. ‘How close to the credit limit, and is the favour helping you with the rent this month?’

‘Close to the point of being, arguably, over it,’ said Karl, ‘and yes, although I feel like a dick, I’m going to have to ask you if you could pay a bit of it on my behalf.’

‘How big a bit?’

‘A very big bit,’ Karl conceded, ‘by which I mean, all of it.’ James laughed out loud, and Karl brandished the phone by way of explanation. ‘Again, yes, I probably shouldn’t have bought it, but: look at this, right. This app is a fishpond and you can send fish to people who have the same phone. We need to copy this idea. This is what everyone is going to want.’

‘Imaginary fish?’

‘Connection. Networks. The world is one massive team, fam. We don’t know the half of it yet.’

The James of then nodded, agreeing as he always did, thinking sheepishly that although this was almost certainly true, he himself didn’t need much of a network beyond what he already had: his family, a couple of friends, and now Karl himself. The James of now, ten years on, winced at the crack of the ring-pull, which sounded rather dramatic in this enclosed space: as if he was trying to make some sort of point by opening the can. When in actual fact he wasn’t trying to express anything at all. He, ‘James’, was nothing any more – that was the idea. He was passive here, with the creaking and moaning of the train’s body around him. Everything could just carry on without him. This wasn’t an act of aggression, just withdrawal.

He swigged from the can, feeling the metallic taste crawl across the back of his tongue. The moment of sensory engagement brought James back into being himself, and he looked at the gagged phone and thought how strange it was that you could go, so quickly, from that to this. From being protected, feeling that you had a place in the world, to this: sitting on a sleeper train, with a bag of beers, knowing you were going to commit suicide shortly after the sun came up.

‘Suicide’. He wrinkled his nose. It was a very attention-seeking word. And notion. James remembered the way he’d once had to stop the car because the radio reported that a friend of James’s celebrity passenger, Hamish, had ‘taken his own life’ in Los Angeles. Hamish had sat, thumping the window over and over again, while James reached back and offered him a hand, an intimacy he would never normally risk with a customer. ‘Suicide’ was for people like that: depressed millionaires, or rock stars. It wasn’t for people like James, people who went to work every day, feeling progressively more invisible, feeling fat and hot and useless. Nobody was going to sob in the back seat when they heard about James. No, ‘suicide’ was an overblown word for what this was. ‘Taking his own life’, likewise. Taking it from whom? You couldn’t steal from your own bank account, could you?

It was more like resigning, as you would from any job which you had proved unequal to. I resign from life, muttered James to himself, with a half-smile. It was almost fun, this. The sensation of a load released. And it didn’t really matter, in the end, what name you gave to what he was about to do. After it, there would just be a full stop, and relief.

4
MELBOURNE, 11:25
SALLY CHILTERN

Twenty minutes until the interview, Sally’s ever-eager phone reminded her. Twenty minutes till the Age journalist showed up. That was fine. She’d be at the office in ten. After that, the phone could say what the hell it liked, because it wouldn’t be with Sal any more. She would have given it to her personal assistant, Meghan, who would deal with anything that came up – any calls, emails – while Sal was busy. As usual, Sal’s husband Dec had all her appointments in his diary, and he knew not to send dirty messages outside what they called the Filth Windows, or FWs. He was much more into rude texting than Sal was, but she did miss it a little bit when the phone wasn’t with her. In all other ways, though, not having it for a couple of hours was a blessing. It was great having Meghan to shear through the weeds that grew ceaselessly in her inbox. Invitations to speak unpaid, for Christ’s sake, like she was still 21. ‘There’s no budget, but the girls would be so thrilled to have you and we’ll feed you well!’ Emails from struggling restaurants, her name dumped in the subject line in a hollow attempt at chumminess. ‘Sal, we haven’t seen you in a while!’ You had to turn down the background buzz, sometimes. Background buzz. I like that. I could use that in something.

It was definitely a thing you heard more and more about, the effect carrying a phone everywhere had upon humans. She’d heard on a podcast that scientists were already recording a change, for the worse, in global sleep patterns – even among people who switched their phones off for the night. Just the presence of the devices created a sort of subconscious twitchiness, an unease. It was a product of the slavishness which the world had wandered into; of the mental pattern established by checking a single device hundreds of times in a day. Asleep or awake, the brain reached insatiably for the phone.

Still, it was amazing what they could do, you had to admit it. Right now, Sal could see from the screen that it was twenty-five degrees – beautiful early autumn weather, although she had never got used to thinking of the seasons the wrong way around. She could see, if she opened the relevant apps, the stock markets, a range of sports scores. Neither finance nor sport was a big interest of hers, but she found it useful to have a bluffer’s knowledge of both, as she did with a huge range of subjects. If she flipped on to WhatsApp she could follow the excited chatter of three of her mates who were organizing a trip down to Lorne for Easter. The chief organizer was unemployed, so the build-up to this three-day holiday had become her major undertaking in life: she’d set up the chat group as early as Christmas and it had now produced more than a thousand messages in total. Sal rolled her eyes indulgently at the latest dispatch. Still so pumped for April, girls! What was Bridget going to do when it was all over? She’d jump in the river.

You didn’t need a phone, of course, to see that it was a glorious day. The sky, over the dashing art-deco façades of Bourke and Collins streets, was a confident blue, Australian blue. Weekend shoppers were out; in rooftop bars, weekend drinking had begun already. Some people would find it weird going into the office, doing promo, building up to a big speech, on a Saturday. Melbourne, even more than other cities, reminded you at every turn it was fun time: crowds flocking to the stadium, rowing boats slicing their way upriver. But Sal didn’t mind it at all.

She’d always liked the feeling, in fact, of working when others weren’t. As a high-flying teenager she used to help James off to sleep by making up an adventure – do you fight the monster or hide, the same as his computer games but without the computer – and then, when he was snoring, return to her desk, her midnight essay. Being active while others slept: it had felt like a superpower of some kind. Even now, she hadn’t entirely lost the buzz that came from being many hours ahead of Britain, something she was able to discuss on a weekly basis because Mum never seemed to tire of it. Now, what time is it there? Breakfast? Goodness!

Near the top of Bourke, Sal paused, as she occasionally did, to enjoy the sight of all the bustle. Melbourne often reminded her of those Richard Scarry books they’d had as kids. Of course, it wasn’t always that smooth. On almost this exact spot just before Christmas, a tram driver had had a bust-up with his wife, let his mind wander, hit someone who was checking the cricket score on her phone. She survived, but the streets around Sal’s workplace briefly went crazy. Police tape everywhere, one of the city’s central arteries clogged up, two hundred people made late for work or doctor’s appointments or dates. In one of her columns, Sally had used it as a salutary example. There was nothing an individual could do about the potential for mayhem that existed when humans tried to carry out their plans at the same time as one another. So you had to outsmart it, leave more time, plan well. Expect things to go wrong.

It was lucky she’d survived, or Sal would probably have felt bad using her as an anecdote.

Already in her mind’s eye, Sal could see the peninsula which she and Dec were driving down to next weekend. A spa, a wine tasting. Dec would undoubtedly overdo it at the winery and be all over her before they even got back to the room, which had a hot tub and a ‘romantic terrace’. He was a bit route-one sometimes, Dec, but at least he still fancied her, which was more than was true of some people’s husbands. One of the girls in the WhatsApp group was the only person in Australia not to know that her man was gay and regularly getting spanked by a sommelier. Sal was planning an intervention next week. Everyone agreed she was the one to do it. The trouble with being a business expert was that people seemed to think you could sort out pretty much any other type of business, too. Just like the way that, because she’d written a bestseller on time management, people thought it was hilarious if she was ten seconds late anywhere.

‘See the footy last night?’ asked Arnie, the concierge, rising very slowly to usher her to the lift. Although Sal had been working in this building for three years, a recent security overhaul meant that you now had to be bleeped into the lifts with an ID card which he alone, in the building and perhaps the universe, possessed. She had a suspicion that the ‘overhaul’ had been effected purely to give Arnie some duties to carry out, but if so, he hadn’t exactly risen to them. As always, he shuffled across the hall as if it didn’t really matter whether Sal got upstairs today or tomorrow.

‘Bombers were a shambles,’ said Sal, glancing at the phone. Two minutes. Perfect. ‘Thought they were meant to be good this year.’

‘Believe it when I see it,’ said Arnie, with a low laugh, raising the magic card to the sensor.

Meghan was already at work, looking – as usual – like she’d slept in the office overnight. Hair unwashed and hanging listlessly at her shoulders; owlish, unflattering glasses. Meghan was one of these girls who could probably look great with even twenty minutes’ effort: she had great boobs, her skin had that smooth uncomplicated quality of someone who hadn’t been kicked too hard by life yet – but she would never go to that effort. And Sal was aware of the irony of thinking these thoughts, when half her life was spent steering people away from objectification, so she naturally never said a thing about it.

‘So just to flag up, you’ve got the ABC interview after lunch, and then a car is coming to pick you up for the rehearsal, and there’s that other interview, which is a phoner, which is about women heroes in the workplace?’

As usual, Meghan laid no particular stress on the final five words, exciting as they might have sounded to an outsider: Sally often thought that she could have the phrase ‘rescue drowning man’ in the diary and Meghan wouldn’t read them with any emotion. Tonally, the only thing that differentiated her from a robot assistant, like Alexa, was the modern tendency to slope upwards at the end of sentences, as if everything was a question.

‘OK,’ said Sal, ‘and then we head for the dinner at …’

‘At six-thirty, they want you there seven for the drinks reception, your actual speech is nine?’ said Meghan, not even glancing down at these details on the screen in front of her. ‘I’ll be with you obviously, but the cars are all booked. And Andrew, the guy you’re speaking to now? Just a heads-up that he’s arrived?’

‘Send him up.’ Sal slid the phone across the desk. She didn’t expect to see it again for a couple of hours, but then, very little of the day from now on would go as she had imagined.

*

‘… and why do you think we do obsess over running late? Shouldn’t we all be more chill about it? Do you worry people read your book and get judgey?’

Sure enough, straight for the cliché questions. It wasn’t a surprise; as soon as they shook hands, he’d made a quip about how he’d been scared to get coffee on the way here, in case he was late. Also: ‘chill’. ‘Chill’, as an adjective. The guy was in his forties, like her.

‘Well, it isn’t about “obsessing”. Time management is just one of the ways I try to help people focus on what’s most important. If you learn to prioritize, divide your priorities into simple lists of five, it’s—’

‘So this speech tonight, will you be nervous? Do you get stage fright?’

I mean for the love of God, thought Sal. It was one of her favourite inner cries.

‘Well, I’ve been giving speeches for quite a few years. Obviously, it does have its challenges, and part of what I try to do in my work is coach people who aren’t – sorry – who aren’t experienced in it.’

The hesitation had been provoked by the appearance of Meghan in the doorway, for the second time. With a slight angling of her head, Sal sent her away, as she had done ten minutes ago. Whatever it was, Meghan was experienced enough to sort it out, and Sal didn’t want to be in this room a minute longer than she needed to be. If she knocked the interview on the head by one, they’d have proper time for lunch, and she could go out and look at her speech notes and maybe even nip into Myer for foundation. Meghan’s eyes flickered behind the big round lenses, but she shut the door, noiselessly.

‘Tell me about Mind the Gap,’ said the journalist, at last, and Sal went gratefully into her bullet points. Women were still paid fourteen per cent less than men across Australia. So the point of this campaign … The journalist was nodding, making the occasional note, but it didn’t seem like much was going in. He was very likely wondering why he’d been nailed to do this on a Saturday lunchtime when he could be in a beer garden. Sal could see a doodle of a shark in the corner of the page. This was going to be one of those pieces that were super-light on content, heavy on what-I-did-with-my-weekend narrative. ‘Chiltern, unsurprisingly, calls me into the office at eleven-thirty on the dot.’ ‘Chiltern sips her green tea as she tells me that addressing an audience can sometimes be challenging.’

‘And that’s why – even though I do know it’s not the sexiest subject – I feel like for anyone with a woman in their life they care about, which is hopefully everyone … can I help you with something, Meghan?’

It was a jarring sentence to say out loud, an inversion of their natural relationship. Meghan wasn’t there so that Sal could help her with stuff. Sal wasn’t going to start being PA to her own PA. And yet here she was, in the doorway for the third time now, the hat-trick as Dec would say, glancing between the floor and Sal’s phone in her left hand. The overall effect of all this pantomime discretion far more distracting than if she’d just bloody come out and said whatever it was when she first walked in.

‘So, there’s a message you – I think you’d want to deal with it?’ said Meghan.

‘To do with what?’ It came out brusquer than Sal intended. But this wasn’t good. The journo was doodling, again, and Sal knew he was enjoying this, the human angle, the comic relief. He’d end up putting this in his piece, the prick. ‘Chiltern – famed for being in charge of her time – is visibly rattled when her assistant …’

Meghan hesitated.

‘Give me a clue at least, darl,’ said Sal, working hard to keep her tone humorous.

‘Your brother’s about to kill himself?’ said Meghan.

5
BERLIN, 01:27
MICHAELA ADLER

Michaela Adler’s phone was in her handbag. The incoming text lit the whole interior of the bag for a second, like a torch in a tent, but she didn’t read it straight away. I need to turn off some of my notifications, she told herself, once again. All her chat threads, Facebook, the pushy running app which still piped up every couple of days – ‘let’s go run! The best time is right now!’ Phillip didn’t like it when she was glancing at it all the time. Even though it was very often gallery business. And even though, as she liked to point out, ‘People do tend to do things by text sometimes, because it’s not 1995.’

Phillip was only four years older than her, just like James had been, but he enjoyed his caricature as a grumpy old man; played up to it with a certain glee. He feigned ignorance of Justin Bieber’s life and work, however many times the name came up; he went to the local government office to register to vote, even though you could do it in five minutes on the internet. He visited Facebook no more than once a week, which in this day and age meant you might as well be living on a desert island.

In this place, they probably were the oldest people. Phillip with his thick-rimmed Tom Ford specs slightly misted over in the warmth of the club. Michaela in a dress she would describe as pretty revealing, but which by the standards of the 18-year-olds here might as well be a spacesuit.

The place had been a power plant before the Wall came down. The mezzanine was lit by bare bulbs that poked out on wires between the exposed girders of the ceiling. Michaela and Phillip often came here for late drinks. The throb of music from the floor below always made them grateful they didn’t have to dance, didn’t have to ‘go out’, try to meet someone. When they finally did go home they would joke about how they’d outlasted all the teenagers, who came out full of talk but by one in the morning were slumped in alleys outside, texting, sobbing, vomiting.

Maybe this would have to stop if Michaela got pregnant. When she got pregnant. But this was a good consolation prize for now. There was time. Occasionally she did get scared that there wasn’t as much time as there should be. People on the internet told horror stories about what happened if you left it past 35. If you had to have treatments. But, as Phillip said, ‘Everything is horror stories on the internet. Remember when you googled the pain in your side, it looked for half an hour like cancer, but it turns out you just had a pain in your side.’

She’d never met anyone whose opinion she deferred to so automatically, wanted to defer to. When they came out of a film she waited to hear what he thought, and tinkered with her own review automatically. If there was a weird noise in the night, she would nudge him awake just so he could say it was nothing, it was just the building. None of this was very feminist, probably, but in all her previous relationships – including with James – she’d always been the one to take the lead. It was tiring, being that person. It had been a fun couple of years on the other side of it. Couple of years and counting.

Of course, she hadn’t been able to articulate all this to James when she left him for Phillip. The conversation, the horrible bombshell dropped over a dinner: it had all been a mess. Her explanation had been a mess – it’s not that he’s better than you, I just need to see what’s out there, I can’t live not knowing. Her face had been a mess, too – mascara all over it like a kid’s crayon strokes. He hadn’t known how to react because she hardly knew what she was saying. Her reasons for running away to Phillip had only become clear months after the event. In fact, they were still becoming clear now. But if she had to describe what she loved about him in one sentence, it would be something to do with this – with the way they never ran out of stuff to talk about; they just saw five new conversational doors with every one they walked through. It was like a feast where, the more you ate, the more dishes reappeared. Mum used to tell her a Dominican folk tale which went something like that, though she couldn’t remember the moral.

Tonight, they had been talking about a friend with an online gambling problem so bad that there was talk of a plan to confront him for his own good. He’d just lost €2,000 in five seconds by betting online on a netball match which he wasn’t even watching. They’d also touched briefly on the Brexit debacle. Whether it would ever be sorted out or, as Phillip put it in his wiry voice, ‘the same people will be arguing the shit out of it until we all die from the temperature anyway’. In the last few minutes they’d been discussing a new exhibition at the gallery called ‘Denim World’, which featured nothing but a hundred pairs of jeans, worn by people in a hundred different countries. As with most work of this kind, Michaela wasn’t really sure whether it was interesting, or absolute horseshit, but as usual she’d written a press release which went big on the former.

It was twenty minutes after James sent the text that his former girlfriend glanced down to see the phone light up again in the bag, as it kept doing at intervals if you ignored a text – as if to say excuse me, I thought we were a team. She pulled the phone out, still only half-curious.

The sight of James’s number was a real surprise. Any interactions between them these days – minor queries about the upkeep of the flat – were conducted by email, and with no discussion of anything other than the matter in hand. She’d even officially deleted his number, because of a commitment to Phillip that this would be a fresh start for both of them. All the same, she naturally recognized those last three digits: 997. There was the satisfaction of having been thought of, and a little intrigue. Then she read the words and went cold.

‘I’ll just, I need to …’ she said, rising a little too quickly. Phillip nodded, taking a final contented sip of his beer. As she headed down the spiral staircase, he was inspecting the brickwork, etched here and there with the names of old lovers.

The toilet stalls were all taken and there was a queue, and a soundscape familiar to Michaela even though it wasn’t her language: high, urgent chatter, amped-up Friday-night emotion, over the shadow of the music from outside. She propped herself against a sink and read the message again.

I’ve decided to end my life. I’m fine. The understatement of it was so like him, in a way. But the actual sentiments couldn’t be right, couldn’t be real. He couldn’t have written this – she checked – almost half an hour ago, almost half a fucking hour. She pictured his round, earnest face, the curly fringe he was always toying with, to no real effect. She jabbed at the green icon to call his number.

The person she had called was not available. What did that mean? Where was ‘the person’, she asked herself, adrenalin hammering its way down her neural pathways. Was the phone at the bottom of a ravine with him? Was it wedged in his pocket in some hotel room as he hung from …?

No, this was stupid. Michaela was good in these situations; at least she thought she was. She might not be well organized, she might once have called the police to break her into her house when the keys were in her bra all along, but she believed in herself when real crises arrived. She was a go-to for panicky friends; she could do CPR and sometimes fantasized about becoming a hero by carrying it out, normally on the film star Tom Hanks. She’d even put ‘crisis management’ as a skill on her job application to the gallery. During the interview it had, sure enough, come up. They asked her what she’d do if fire damaged an exhibit the night before opening. ‘It’s a stupid question,’ Phillip had scoffed, ‘how often do they think that comes up? Why not ask what happens if a dinosaur gets in?’

Anyway, this was likely not a real crisis. He didn’t mean it. It was some sort of a stunt, or a drunken gesture.

Michaela’s stomach told her she didn’t believe herself. James never really got drunk, and it was hard to think of someone less likely to attempt a ‘stunt’. James was not a stuntman; he was a ponderer. He’d once caused a Monopoly game to be abandoned by deliberating so long over a hotel purchase that their guests went home.

‘Do you think we ruined Kath’s night?’ Michaela had asked as they washed up together afterwards.

‘She ruined her own night,’ said James, as they fought a tug-of-war over the tea towel. ‘How can she be married to someone who puts houses down without any sort of strategy?’

And two years later, when she marvelled over his shoulder at a spreadsheet showing that their new company had made a monthly profit for the first time, despite all her night terrors, he turned and grinned. ‘See? There’s no better way of choosing a partner than Monopoly skill. Never mind looks or being slim, or. You know. Having good one-liners at a party. No: Monopoly, clean driving licence. It’s all you need.’

It didn’t seem possible that the same person who’d spoken those words was the person making dire threats by text, threats to himself. She pressed green to call again. The recorded message repeated itself. She brought the phone down hard on the dirty-white edge of the sink. The petulance of it surprised her. It crossed Michaela’s mind that she was more pissed than she’d thought. She eyed herself uneasily in the mirror and moved aside to let a Goth girl wash her hands.

There was no point in panicking, she told herself again. Her legs felt leaden, as if the staircase was ten times as long as it had been on the way down. The reason it went to voicemail was that someone else was already talking him down. Yes. That was it; that made sense. Karl would be on it. Or Sally. Michaela gritted her teeth at the memory of the sister. Well. Someone. Someone would be dealing with this.

Phillip had ordered more beers and was already well into his. James would never have done that. He would have ordered the drinks, yes, but he would never start without someone else. He could be at a banquet in the last days of the Roman Empire and he still wouldn’t have touched so much as a dormouse until everyone was served. It was something she liked about him, one of the things she noticed first. An old-fashioned gentleman, her mum had said.

‘What’s up?’ asked Phillip.

‘Nothing.’

‘Clearly it’s not nothing.’

She hated it almost as much as she liked it, the ease with which Phillip could read her.

‘I just had … I had a weird message. From … James.’

Phillip raised his thick eyebrows. There was no reproach in the look – more a sort of quizzical amusement – and you would have to know Phillip as well as she did to realize that he was slightly hurt.

‘I thought that you didn’t …’

‘I don’t have his number. Any more. I can’t stop him having mine, can I? It wasn’t even to me. It was to … well, it looks like everyone.’

Her boyfriend’s eyes went rapidly over the text. It was easy to forget that English wasn’t his first language. She’d worked hard even to get to her passable level of German, and almost everyone at the gallery spoke English with a proficiency which made that effort seem pointless. They sprinkled English phrases into their conversation: online. Hanging out. Sometimes when Michaela was around, they spoke in English to each other, as if it was such a minor adjustment it wasn’t even worth mentioning. Last week her boss Anneka had used the English phrase cognitive dissonance in a meeting, and nobody flinched; Michaela had had to google it in the toilet later.

Phillip looked up from the phone with an expression whose rancour was a nasty surprise to her. It was such a handsome face, though, that even scowling suited him. He looked like a king disappointed with his dinner.

‘That is absolutely a dick thing to do,’ said Phillip. ‘That’s not fine.’

‘I know, but …’

‘He needs to grow up instead of sending something like this for attention.’

‘But I’m … that’s why I’m worried. I don’t think that’s the sort of thing he’d do, at all. I’m worried he might mean it.’

‘He doesn’t mean it,’ said Phillip, handing back the phone.

‘He might mean it. He isn’t the type to … he’s not melodramatic at all.’

Phillip blinked. Again, he didn’t have to say anything. Why are you defending your ex? his face asked. Most people in his position would ask the same, she supposed. Michaela was even wondering it herself, and perhaps that was what James would want. So maybe it was true; maybe it was manipulative of him to be doing this. She wondered fleetingly what James looked like these days; whether he had put all the weight back on by now.

‘Well, do you want to call him?’ asked Phillip.

Michaela moistened her lips with her tongue. Her throat felt dry. Below, there was a gap in the music; then a thudding beat came in, louder than anything before, and there were faint whoops from the dance floor. She could see James in the doorway for a second, as she had left him in the doorway of the old flat, shoulders drooping, and head held between his big hands. Her feeling of guilt and relief as she walked away.

‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’ll be fine, I’m sure.’

6
LONDON, 00:30
STEFFI BERMAN

Now that the underground was running through the night at weekends, Steffi’s commute home from the restaurant was easy. Tonight had been a raucous one, a party of twenty businessmen loudly and repeatedly toasting someone who seemingly went by the nickname Billy Bollocks. One of the diners had called her ‘darling’ too many times, and for a moment Steffi had entertained a bizarre fantasy: of taking the red mullet off his plate, the whole fish, lifting it from its bed of rice, and putting it down the back of his neck. The mental image was so strong that Steffi laughed out loud, as if she’d seen it in a film rather than dreaming it up. The would-be fish victim had taken this for some sort of flirtation, as men of this kind often did when she laughed, smiled, or looked at them. But they had tipped quite heavily, drunkenly – at La Chimère they let you keep individual tips – so she was in good spirits as she walked to the tube.

If anything, in fact, the journey home almost wasn’t going to be long enough, given the entertainment Steffi had lined up. For the past couple of months her spare minutes had been mopped up ruthlessly by a phone app called ‘Sheep Wars’ – created by one of James’s successors in the game-tech business, though she had no idea her flatmate had ever worked in that field. Sheep Wars was so addictive that it was difficult to remember a time when she hadn’t played it at every opportunity. You were a wolf and your mission was to eat as many sheep as you could; if you caught enough of them, you went on to the next level. In the early rounds the game was boringly easy; the sheep were so slow and stupid that a 4-year-old could capture them. Steffi had been annoyed with Emil, the colleague who’d recommended it to her: did he think girls couldn’t play games? Or that she specifically was useless, just because of that one time she slipped on a bit of pulped avocado and smashed all the glasses?

But as the stages of the game went by, your prospective prey became faster, and more cunning. They armed themselves with weapons; they built fortresses. Last night she’d played it until 3 a.m., as usual, and to her amazement the sheep, who normally just shuffled around like real sheep, had escaped from her by jumping into a sports car and driving off laughing. This was level seventy-four and she hadn’t yet worked out how to respond to the sheep’s new cunning. Nobody online seemed to know how many levels there were; you couldn’t find anyone who claimed to have finished it. There was a theory, in fact, that the invisible creator was perpetually adding to the game; was a mad genius who had them all indefinitely enslaved.

Sometimes, on the tube, she glanced across at other passengers hunched over their own phones, and wondered if they were on Sheep Wars, too – unwittingly part of a community, even as they all played the game alone. People always looked so serious, but you never knew what was in someone’s head. Steffi remembered once sitting next to a man who was studying his screen with one of the most intense expressions of concentration she’d ever seen. When she sneaked a look over his shoulder, it turned out he was watching a GIF in which someone had made Beyoncé appear to turn into a pizza. Watching the five-second film over and over and over again, like someone newly arrived on the planet, grasping fruitlessly for context. Quite often she thought that everyone except herself was insane. The thought was half-ironic – but only half.

On the escalator up to the street, Steffi’s gaze was still fixed on the little sheep as they danced around, taunting her. She knew that before too long she would work out how to ambush the car and finish this level. And then two contradictory things would happen. She would feel a little swell of satisfaction, followed almost immediately by disappointment that this was not a real-world achievement, something that anyone else alive would care about. Steffi was not a zombie gamer, an addict, in the truest sense. She was aware that there should be more substance to life than working as a waitress in a restaurant whose online reviews were struggling to match up to its pretensions, and then spending every other moment engaged in the hunting of imaginary animals. It just wasn’t clear how to get out of this loop.

As she came out onto Pentonville Road Steffi glanced at her phone. Slightly surprisingly at this time of night, there were two new notifications. One was from Emil, the line chef, asking the staff’s WhatsApp group if anyone wanted to ‘get a drink somewhere Euston or whervr’. The proposal was backed up by emojis depicting glasses of wine, beer and champagne, as well as a dolphin; Emil was a profligate emoji user and rarely stayed on-topic. The other message was a text, from her flatmate and landlord James. In the instant before she read it, she registered that it was unusually long; she couldn’t remember him ever writing more than a few words before. Even after the bad night, the crying night, he had only messaged to say, ‘I am very sorry about all that’. She hadn’t even replied; too awkward to know how.

She read the text, read twice through the words ‘end my life’. She stopped dead outside a kebab shop, where a huge skewer of meat was rotating in the window and a couple of customers waited at the counter.

‘What the fuck,’ said Steffi out loud, to the nearly empty street, ‘what the actual fuck.’

She touched the screen to call James. It was hard even to remember the last time she’d called someone, actually called them on the phone like in the Seventies or something. With Mum it was always Skype on a Sunday. She was in constant contact with friends, but it was all instant messaging. Even with her best three or four buddies back in Holland, one of them actually phoning would mean something seismic was happening.

But now something was, or at least could be. There was a brief pause as the call tried to connect, and then the same recorded message that Michaela had heard minutes earlier. There was no option to leave a voice message and Steffi experienced a guilty twinge of relief that she wouldn’t have to.

What now, though?

Where are you? she wrote. Unlike Emil, she preferred – even in her second language – to text in proper words and sentences. Your screen looked ugly otherwise.

She stood looking at the screen in case the messaging dots popped up, in case there was an immediate reply. Within thirty seconds she knew in her heart that there wouldn’t be one. Well, she hardly even knew James, really, did she. Other people must know him. Someone else would know what to do.

But no one else was heading home to James. There was no escaping that. If he had done something to himself in the flat, Steffi was going to be the one to find him. The knowledge flipped her guts. Although she was only seven minutes away from the flat, it seemed impossible all of a sudden to imagine going in there, finding …

That wasn’t a thing that just happened, though, she told herself. Your flatmate did not spring something like that on you. Even if you kept to your own space like the two of them did, you couldn’t be living with a person and not know that they were on the verge of something so drastic, surely. Steffi thought about the suicides she’d seen in crime dramas, which she often bulk-watched when the insomnia was getting her down and her eyes wouldn’t focus on the sheep any more. Gun in the mouth, rope hanging from a beam. A politician blackmailed, a lover rejected. These characters had suffered some disaster, they’d lost their minds; there was nowhere else to go. That wasn’t James. Yes, he’d perhaps been down recently, but he was hardly a guy to ram a gun in his mouth. She’d seen him decide against going to the cinema because the weather app said there was a 60 per cent chance of rain.

A little rain was falling now, too; a drop landed squarely on the screen, distorting the green and grey boxes of text. She shivered. It wasn’t winter any more, but March in London didn’t exactly seem to be spring, either. Steffi swallowed hard a couple of times. I could do with a drink, she thought. A drink would be nice.

As she rounded the corner onto their street, the noise of the main road fell away as quickly as ever, and so did the big-city feeling. It would have been hard to guess now that it was a Friday night, or that they were so near a major transport hub. Some windows offered glimpses of warmth: a dinner party that had extended its run past midnight, a couple in front of a late movie. Steffi told herself that if James had done anything, there would be some activity, some visual sign of it. Police would already be here. Concerned neighbours would be hammering on the door, like they did on Netflix. But no, not necessarily. He’d sent the text under an hour ago. She could easily be the first actual witness.

She wet her lips with her tongue, went down the four stone steps, took a breath and put the key in the lock.

The place was as neat as ever, James’s hat and coat hanging where they always were, next to the denim jacket that she’d decided was too much like old-school Madonna, and which she hadn’t bothered to pick up from the floor because she was worried about being late for work. That was a good sign; it must be. You didn’t worry about tidying the hall the same day you went and did yourself in. But the odd calm of his message came into her head again. I know what I’m doing.

‘James?’ she called. ‘James? Hello?’

She was almost sure from the dead way her words landed that nobody was here. It didn’t diminish her sense, though, that she was in a TV show, one where a minor-key soundtrack was building subtly under her footsteps. She never liked coming back alone, really, not since the burglary at her old place in Clapham. One of the girls at La Chimère had been assaulted on her own doorstep the other week, violent crime was up in London; although not normally a jumpy person, Steffi had bought a ‘panic alarm’ and a small knife online in the past month. Knowing that James was almost always in – that he was almost certain to be in his room when she got back from work – had always been a little bonus about living here, although this was the first time she’d ever consciously had that thought.

His bedroom door was wide open, giving an unaccustomed glimpse of the bare floor, a neat little pile of books; so was the bathroom door. All clear in the kitchen. Steffi approached her own room with a trepidation she had never felt before. Christ, imagine if he’d done something in there. That really would be fucked-up. She’d have to move, again.

A lean on the handle, and the door was open a crack; she pushed it a little more, then all the way. Everything was where she’d left it. The clothes scattered across the floor like wreckage from an accident, the dormant laptop at the end of the bed. Wherever James was, he was not here.

On the kitchen table was a note.

Hi Steffi. Really sorry for any fuss. I’ve scheduled an email which you’ll get in the morning, re. the flat. You can stay, of course! It shouldn’t be too complicated. Good luck. James.

The fridge was still full of his stuff: the blocky cheeses he seemed to like; the full-cream milk she couldn’t stomach. A big green box of eggs. Again, it didn’t make sense. You didn’t buy eggs and then two days later overdose or something. ‘It shouldn’t be too complicated.’ Was he taking the piss? What was this?

She sloshed some gin into a wine glass, topped it up with partly flat tonic water. The phone lit up with a message and she jumped. No. It was just Emil again. He’d been drinking on his own since he sent the last one, he said, with six crying-face emojis, three winking ones, and a watermelon. He couldn’t believe nobody else was out, he added.

In a series of purposeful swigs, Steffi saw off the drink. She always drank quickly, not out of greed, she thought, but because her brain tended to see it – like everything – as a task she had to complete. She pushed the glass aside and messaged Emil.

You want to do something with me?

She saw him begin typing at once. She and Emil didn’t know each other especially well. His English was poor, nowhere near her level. He was small, with dark eyes and a fluent, almost mesmerizing kitchen technique. Sometimes as she came in with orders, she would watch him for a second, drizzling rings of pesto like green blood onto the ice-white plate, turning a mountain of herbs to confetti in seconds. It was very attractive watching someone do something with such ease. If you didn’t look at his face too hard. Anyway, it was only ever a moment; that was all you got, in the kitchen, before someone screamed at you.

Do what? Emil replied. He followed up with a fusillade of emojis which included a face deep in thought, a couple of drinks, a detective with a magnifying glass, a dancer, a guitar and the flag of Iceland.

Can you meet me Kings X station? Got some shit going on.

Emil accepted the cryptic invite with a line of girls in tutus. Steffi went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Her pupils were dilated; a bit of colour had risen in her normally pale face. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. She was surprised to have invited Emil into this; she was surprised to find herself in any sort of drama. But here it was, and she could hardly just pretend it wasn’t happening – that she hadn’t read the message. She’d get those jeans off the floor, go back out. And see where this took her.

She was worried for James, however passive their relationship. The guy couldn’t be well. He needed help. She was worried for herself, too, because never mind what he said: if he did turn out to be dead, her life was surely going to get all kinds of complicated. She felt the prickly edge of guilt that he had cried in front of her not long ago, and she had taken it as a mere bad night rather than a sign of something more significant.

But there was something else, as she looked in the mirror, some other emotion stirred up by the bizarre turn this night had taken in the past half-hour. Here, at last, was something that was not a game. Steffi felt bad admitting it to herself, but the feeling was a little like excitement.

7
LONDON–EDINBURGH TRAIN, 00:49

Branches, like gnarled old trolls’ nails, scratched at the train on its way past; small handfuls of rain were thrown at the windows. The train didn’t sound like it was enjoying it. It was surprising, James thought, how noisy sleeper trains were, given that you were meant to sleep on them.

He’d always loved buses, planes, trains. A train barrelling past, a plane swooping as close as a bird as he negotiated the M25 interchange with some important client: getting right over their heads, so they could see the underside of the fuselage, the little marks in the metal. As children, James and Sally had a whole series of books in which animals bustled around a town, putting out fires or teaching kindergarten classes of smaller animals. The junior-level computer games he wrote as a nerdy child were always about things like being an air-traffic controller (‘press A to reroute the flight; B to never compromise with terrorists’). Even when he first met Karl, he was working in idle moments on a game called ‘National Rail’, where you had to get around the country as fast as possible using real train routes – something Karl had found hilarious. ‘You’re making a game about something that isn’t even fun in real life? What’s next, Jamie, a game about getting your central heating fixed?’

Sure enough, it had never seen the light of day, just like James’s similar pet project ‘Bus Magnate’. But he never lost enthusiasm for the sight of a train zipping past, a plane soaring at its almost impossible angle into the sky. These sights meant people had places to go, places that might be better than here. Transport in action still gave him something of the warmth of those old Richard Scarry books, of their agreeable sense that there was a plan. Or had, at least, until recently. Until the sacking. Until he began to lose faith in the idea of plans altogether.

And yet he had been on a sleeper train only once before: with Karl and Michaela, on a trans-European holiday jaunt which was only a bit more than five years ago but might as well be fifty years, as the memory, along with all his others, receded into the darkness down the track. Even though James and his dad had gone to Edinburgh every year by tradition – right up until Mr Chiltern’s death – they’d never done an overnighter. Largely this was because of an intuition on James’s part that sleeper trains were something of a thin man’s game. That had been backed up by his experience tonight so far. The bed he was lying on was barely wide enough for a healthy-sized child. The word ‘cabin’ on the website had possessed a certain grandeur, evoking the QE2, that sort of thing; the reality was a room which, to a man of James’s dimensions, felt a little like a cell. His plan had been to put away two or three beers quickly and then fall asleep until the moment came, but it was already clear that might be more difficult than he’d imagined.

Still, the beer was helping; as the first can signed off, he could already feel its contents nudging the dimmer switch of his mood. It was quite a while since he’d really enjoyed a drink. When they got on the train at Euston – each passenger checked in by a vigorous, curly-haired Welsh woman who said things like, ‘We’ll be in at seven, but you can occupy until seven thirty’, there had been a large number of benign beer drinkers, in red scarves and rosettes, on the way to some sporting event that James wouldn’t know about at the best of times, and would certainly now miss as he would be dead. He’d eyed them for a second, listened to their oiled, jolly bantering, with what was almost regret. Might things have been different if he’d been more of a drinker – if he was a bit better at relaxing? For some people happiness, or at least a sort of hazy, zoned-out contentment, seemed that easy.

But, as he reminded himself now, he had been that person once. He’d had a gang, even if it was a smallish one, and largely drawn from friends Karl introduced him to. In his years working for the tech start-up, they used to go to the pub almost every night. Karl – because he was working on a web encyclopaedia, as part of the project – would entertain the group with his knowledge of various historical figures’ lives, and James – because he paid more attention to detail – would quietly correct that knowledge.

‘This woman, can’t remember the name; they reckon she was the one who came up with DNA, but being a bird, they took the Nobel Prize off her …’

‘Rosalind Franklin. Actually, she never got the prize.’

‘What’s his name, Neil Armstrong, the geezer that walked on the moon: do you know, he said the “one small step for man” bit slightly wrong; he messed it up because he’d got the yips being up there – fair play, really – and also did you know he once punched a bloke who claimed that they never went to the moon at all?’

‘That last bit was Buzz Aldrin, I think.’

The start-up, where Karl and James worked in their mid-twenties, had been creating a platform called OnLife: a portmanteau of ‘online’ and ‘life’, which Karl feared was a ‘dogshit name for something that’s supposed to be cool’. Karl had tried to point this out once to Jacob, the handsome dimpled blond whose company it was – but unfortunately, he had used exactly those words, and had been drunk, and Jacob was from some nebulous but severe American background which meant he disliked both swearing and drinking. Even if the name was always a bit tin-eared, though, the actual project had at one time seemed very exciting. It was based on the notion that the internet’s best things would not remain free for ever. Email couldn’t always be free; nor could massive resources like Wikipedia, nor connection tools like Facebook. One day, in Jacob’s view, there would be a single hybrid of all these entities – a single place you went to do, as he put it, ‘everything you want to do with a computer, and some stuff you don’t even know you want’. When this megalith came along, people would subscribe to it in their masses.

So James and Karl’s job had been to write code for a sort of web encyclopaedia which could also use algorithms to predict the sort of facts you probably wanted to search for. Other people in their office and flat-share were responsible for building other parts of this internet planet. A Taiwanese man called Yan – who never spoke a word of English to them – was creating a messaging service. Katarina, the only woman in the set-up, was coding a personal organizer which would allow your computer’s diary to sync with your mobile. There were twelve people employed by the company, and all of them were working on good ideas, ideas that would become very popular. But the overall conceit – that people would one day pay for what was currently free – proved a disastrous one. The consumer testing went badly. And even as Facebook’s share value was darting upwards like a spider climbing a wall, Jacob’s funders, whichever rich Californians were bankrolling his experiment, pulled out overnight. James was grumbling to himself over a line of code, something he’d wrestled with for three hours already, when Karl shuffled into the office, late as usual. He began a good-natured reproach – Karl averaged around half as much time actually working as James did – but Karl cut him off with an unusual edge to the humour in his tone.

‘I wouldn’t be sweating over that too much, Jamie, my man. I don’t think Jacob’s going to show up for the meeting.’

‘And what makes you say that?’

‘It’s a hunch,’ said Karl, ‘based on a couple of clues in the voicemail he’s just left me, which said he was about to get on a plane, our company didn’t exist any more as of this morning, he’d already got a job lined up for the Federal Reserve back home, and he was sorry but he didn’t think we’d ever meet again.’

All but James and Karl moved out of the flat after that, and by now James’s core friendship group was scattering too, on the various winds that always blew groups apart in their late twenties: marriages and children, New Zealand holidays that became permanent stays, nervous breakdowns triggering dramatic career changes, and so on. But even well into his thirties, now driving cars for a private hire firm and helping people fix their computers on the side, James would have said he was broadly happy, most of the time. There were still the nights out with Karl, when Karl came back from whatever monstrous job he was currently trying out. There were the Edinburgh trips; there were dates and little tentative romances. By now there were certain mental ulcers, too, rubbing away at him, flaring up. He was aware that he was a little heavier than he’d like, that a decade and a half of sitting down had left its mark on his body; he worried that it was getting late to meet the right person, that it was never going to happen simply by having pleasant chats with people in the back of his car. Once Michaela had entered his life, these problems, along with all other remaining ones, disappeared. But in time Michaela herself had then disappeared.

Despite being dumped by her, and thrown aside by Karl, James had never imagined himself as a person for whom unhappiness could be this thick and choking; a person who would go home at night and simply not know what to do with himself. He understood there would be crises, even in an unremarkable life, but it turned out there was something worse than the adrenalin of a crisis: the endless flat grey afternoon of depression. The terrible night he had cried in front of Steffi, three months ago, had been the first time he’d really understood how hollow he felt, and had been feeling, and would keep feeling. Even after googling ‘depression’ – an act which released a flood tide of pop-ups that said things like, It’s OK not to be OK and Take a mate for a pint, he would have thought it impossible that he would ever be desperate enough to call the Samaritans. Until the morning, midway through January, when he’d gone ahead and done it.

He’d woken at eleven on a Saturday, having slept badly, and the emptiness of the day ahead descended on him as if the plasterwork had come crashing down from the ceiling. He had no plans; nobody would want to see him. Everyone had kids, or they were in couples having brunch, or they were just mysteriously away as people so often seemed to be when you were yearning for them. His last online date had ended in a humiliation so complete that he couldn’t imagine opening the app again; it felt as if everyone else there could see him, pitied him. Thoughts like that were irrational; they were not the sort of thoughts James was used to having – not until he lost the job, if it was possible to identify a turning point. Since then, they’d been more and more common, and it was exhausting to carry them around.

He went into the hall, made sure Steffi was out. His body felt heavy, his legs reluctant to carry him even this couple of dozen steps. Her bedroom door was open – chaos inside, as usual, as if she’d had a fight with herself in there. In the bathroom, the shower was dripping. James went to turn it off, returned to his room, picked up his phone and typed the strange word into Google. S-a-m. The algorithm finished it off for him. The future Karl had once predicted was here, now; maybe the phone knew you were miserable just from the way you sat on the edge of the bed with it.

His fingers went over the numbers on the screen. 116 123. It felt too short for a phone number. Even as the dial tone sounded in his ears, James doubted that he was going to go through with this. He wasn’t even certain he expected it to be answered. Calling the Samaritans felt like something you did at midnight, not before lunchtime. But it was answered, almost straight away, and it was too late to go back. It was a woman’s voice. She asked what he wanted to talk about. James swallowed and clawed at his scalp and managed to say that he was very lonely, and that he’d been thinking about … not being here any more.

The Samaritan did a good job of sounding surprised and concerned, even though this must be how many of her calls began. In her kind, Home Counties voice – a voice he could imagine speaking authoritatively on Jane Austen, or the need for better cycle lanes – she gently steered him towards more concrete discussion. James found he was, if not enjoying it, at least pleased to be able to answer the questions. He’d once remarked to Michaela, during the cult for Scandinavian murder shows, that he quite liked the idea of being a witness. Being quizzed by the police, ‘helping their investigations’. She’d laughed. ‘How are you going to infiltrate a criminal gang?’ she asked. ‘You literally phoned the Revenue this morning to tell them you owed them more tax.’

‘When were you last in a relationship?’ asked the Samaritan.

‘About two and a half hours ago. I mean, years ago.’ He was annoyed with himself for the slip of the tongue. ‘Two and a half years ago. And that relationship was four years long. It was the only proper one I’ve had. If you see what I mean.’

‘With a woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you say a bit about her?’

‘Her name was Michaela.’ Straight away he thought he should have kept her anonymous. ‘We met doing a weight-loss course. We were both, er … Overweight. And then we set up our own health-and-fitness business, which was successful. But she left unexpectedly.’ Unexpectedly, he thought, even to Michaela. It was the way Michaela always did do things. He’d believed her when she said that she never planned it this way, she never meant to hurt him so badly.

‘She’s in Berlin now. With someone else.’

‘That must be difficult,’ said the Samaritan.

‘It is.’

A silence seemed about to fall, but the woman caught the conversation expertly and tossed it back into the air. ‘And do you have a support network?’

‘A …?’

‘People you can talk to, people you trust.’

‘It’s difficult.’ James scratched his scalp, fingered one of the untidy curls. He was more than due a haircut, he was starting to look like someone you’d move away from at a bus stop. But even this had been beyond him, the past couple of weeks. He remembered last time at the barber’s. The awful creak of the chair as he settled into it; the way he caught, in the mirror, the stylist eyeing his body in a way he was used to people eyeing it. Like a house that needed some work. He’d have to go to a different place next time. All this took time and mental energy. ‘My – er – main friend. Well, he became my boss. And recently sacked me. So we haven’t been – we haven’t spoken much since then.’

‘And close friends, family?’ asked the woman.

The word made James think immediately of being young. ‘Family’, like ‘Christmas’, was an idea that belonged to his past, not his current situation.

‘I was very close to my dad. My father. But he’s dead – he died.’ He’s dead had never stopped sounding brutal, winding him, in the saying or the hearing of it. ‘My sister and I, actually, were close too, but we had a disagreement.’ James felt that he wasn’t holding up his end of the conversation very well, even though that was a strange thing to think about a Samaritans call. His list of setbacks didn’t seem substantial enough to justify having called; having confessed to being in despair. He searched for a way of explaining why the thing he was trying to tunnel through felt thicker than the sum of these parts.

‘You know – Tony Hancock, when he … well, when he died,’ said James. ‘He just said too many things seemed to go wrong. Something like that.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know who that is,’ said his younger listener, ‘but I do understand the feeling, of course. And it can seem like that for a long time – but also, life can change very quickly for the better.’

The slight easing that James felt, after the chat, lasted about a week – maybe more. But it wore off like aspirin, a little at a time, and he didn’t feel he could call up again. They must have more urgent cases to deal with, and he didn’t want to become a regular; he wasn’t a hypochondriac bothering a GP. What he needed was someone to sit and talk to. What he needed was to have friends again. And that urge had led to his ‘opening up’ to Steffi, someone who wasn’t really a friend, and that had been a terrible misjudgement which embarrassed both of them.

Well. It was gone, now. James listened to the footsteps padding up and down in the corridor; the lilt of the Welsh woman’s peppy voice as she chatted to the sports fans. ‘Yes, be a good game, I should think! You should get some sleep though, mind!’ People he didn’t know; people who couldn’t affect him. Nothing could really affect him any more. It had been as easy as the single touch which slid flight mode into action.

Departing from his own life, he could look back on it like one of Karl’s pub biographies. This fella, can’t remember his name. Girlfriend leaves him for a geezer in Germany. Best mate gives him the sack. He gets the hump, jumps off a bridge. It was a comforting thought, James reflected, allowing himself to open the second beer. That everyone ended up being a minor curiosity, given time; all lives ended up as footnotes, often full of factual errors. He needn’t have seen himself all this time as a major character, every decision triggering grave consequences. Everything he’d done wrong would pack down into an anecdote for future Karls. Something to pass time between rounds at the bar; something very quickly forgotten.

8
BRISTOL, 01:01
JEAN CHILTERN (MUM)

It had to be Sally calling. At this time of night. It had to be one of the children, Sally or James. Or at least, more worryingly, it had to be about one of the children. But James would be fast asleep. No, it would be Sally in Australia, and that must mean something major was happening. All this went through Jean’s head in the ten seconds after she was woken by the phone. The thoughts didn’t arrange themselves one at a time; they coalesced into a pang of disquiet, something Jean felt before she was even really thinking. It had been years since the children were actually children, but the feeling was cold-stored in her core and could kick in again in a matter of seconds.

‘Wassit?’ muttered Lee.

‘Shush,’ she said, ‘it’s nothing, go back to sleep.’

Lee turned the other way and half-folded the pillow over his head. Jean felt for the light switch in the hall, found the banister with her left hand. These instincts, once more, were more or less automatic, hard-wired by years of maternal nightshifts. Sally with her nightmares about being buried alive; James, fretting over not being able to sleep. What a fine state of affairs, as they used to say, when Alan was still … With her free hand she picked up the trailing edge of her nightie, a recent purchase. Jean had picked it because, although practical, it would also be reasonably stylish if worn in front of strangers in an emergency, like a fire alarm at a hotel. This had happened years ago to Jean on a weekend break in Glasgow, and it continued to affect her nightwear choices.

The phone was on its table by the front door, in almost exactly the same spot Jean’s parents had had the phone in their own house. In the final few seconds before she reached the bottom stair, Jean had a momentary flashback to her father bemoaning its installation. What’s it going to be next? A brass band in the front room? He’d refused ever to use it; if the house was burning down, Jean’s mum used to joke, he’d probably write the fire brigade a letter. Imagine if he’d lived to see this world, where everyone carried a phone in their pocket, or bag. Well. Almost everyone. Not Jean. She was her father’s daughter, still.

‘Hello?’

‘Mum? I’m sorry to wake you up.’

So it was Sally. It wasn’t a policeman or someone from a hospital, as it had been on the awful night when Jean’s sister, Pam, had died – suddenly, incomprehensibly, even though she was still describing her leukaemia as a ‘nuisance’ and had bought them concert tickets for the next week. It was Sally, in Melbourne. And so perhaps after all this was going to be good news. Perhaps … Jean had almost stopped hoping for it. But women did wait a lot longer these days, didn’t they: they had careers first. Which Jean had mixed feelings about, but, well, the world changed, didn’t it?

‘There’s a situation with James,’ Sally was saying, and Jean’s daydream evaporated.

‘What do you mean, a “situation”?’ Sally talked so much like a businesswoman, these days. Was a businesswoman, of course. You just never got used to it, with your own kids: having them speak to you like bank managers discussing your overdraft. Not that Jean had ever been near going into her overdraft.

‘I’ve had a message from James.’

‘What sort of a message?’

‘A text, Mum.’ Sal’s voice crackled with impatience and Jean had the feeling, more and more familiar these days, that she was the junior one. ‘He’s made a threat – and it could be some sort of joke, or … but he’s talking about …’

Even when Sally had explained it, Jean couldn’t understand it, not really. Even when Sally had hung up, promising that she’d find a way to get hold of James, telling her things were going to be all right and that she’d call back as soon as it was sorted.

Jean stared numbly at the phone numbers of her children, the strange long numbers they had these days – especially Sally’s, with the international code, the foreign-looking ‘0061’ at the start. They were written in biro on a strip of paper which never left the phone table, was held down with a kangaroo paperweight Sally had bought her. There was no point in trying James if Sally was doing it. Jean didn’t want to tie up the line, or whatever the phrase was. She would only get in the way. And yet, not to call him. Her son. James. Not to call him, if he was in danger.

She had sat down on the stairs while Sally was talking, but now she stood up again, and her fingers went shakily over the buttons. Nine-nine-seven. Her fingers left a clammy film across the handset and she looked at the phone cord quivering gently as she extended the receiver. No dial tone. ‘The person you are trying to call is not available.’

Jean put the receiver back into its cradle and took a deep, uneven breath. All right. She was going to get dressed. She would get dressed and put the kettle on. There was no point in trying to address this, this baffling emergency, without at least making things as normal as they could be. She would get dressed without waking Lee – not that he wouldn’t be sympathetic, but she needed to wrap her head around this alone. And by the time she had done all this, Sally would surely be on the line again, to say it was all fixed.

But it didn’t feel as if she could go back upstairs, somehow – not straight away. Jean’s heart was beating at a speed which she couldn’t remember it reaching for many years. These had been fairly quiet years, after all. An even keel. Some fresh air would be good, she thought, and went to the front door. The lock, the bolt, all the things you continued to do every night in case of some intruder, some wolf at the door. And yet now the wolf was here, had come in down the telephone line.

She peered across at the Bradshaws’ nice new drive. The silver cars all slumbering as you looked down the hill, ahead of the supermarket trips or drives to country pubs which would make up their Saturday duties. The neat shuttered houses, green and brown bins outside; the absolute normality of it all. No reason, when she and Lee had gone to bed last night, to imagine anything outside that normality could jump on her like this. Of course not. Lee had watched a documentary about Pink Floyd, whose songs went on a bit, if you asked her, but he was happy. Jean had read a bit of her novel, which – like almost all the books chosen by her book group – was about a missing child. WHAT WOULD YOU DO? the blurb had asked, and Jean had thought how distant, how far from one’s real experience, the question seemed. How far-fetched these books always seemed.

And now this.

But the danger here was not of a kind that you could call someone to come and stamp out; it wasn’t in a shape which she could hold in her hands. Jean felt the swirling of her stomach again. Talking about ending his life. Why? He must be depressed, Sally had said. Or in ‘some sort of trouble’. And Jean had felt it like a slap, heard an accusation. She was always there for James to talk to. But how long, in fact, had it been? He wasn’t chatty on the phone. He wasn’t someone you could call for a weekly bulletin in the way she did with Sally.

Depressed about what? In what sort of ‘trouble’? It was appalling that she didn’t know, couldn’t even guess. Well. She could guess. Perhaps he still wasn’t over the mixed-race girl, if you were still allowed to say that; lots of things you weren’t allowed to say, nowadays, according to the younger members of the book group. Perhaps it was the job, money. She gathered that he wasn’t working for the taxi company any more, and even that job had been a bit of a comedown because the business went wrong, or he fell out with Michaela, or whatever exactly had happened there. But she could have given him money. She could have come up with job ideas for him, he could move back to Bristol, there were people hiring at the gym where Jean did Pilates, and at Boots, and that was just off the top of her head. Or perhaps it was his weight that was getting him down – but if that was the problem, there were so many diet plans.

It hadn’t been easy to tell, at Christmas, what sort of shape James was in. To her concerned eye he had looked a little overweight and dishevelled, and he’d been evasive when she’d asked about his love life (while trying to avoid that phrase) and what avenues he might explore work-wise (while feeling she was twenty years too old for that phrase). Evasive, but not unhelpful. He’d got involved basting the turkey, chopping vegetables with so much force you’d think, as Lee said, that they’d done something terrible to him. When the Bradshaws had come round on Boxing Day with, as always, a new-smelling and complicated general knowledge board game, James had done his usual trick of getting the first five questions right and then deliberately playing less well when Mr Bradshaw began to get grumpy and swig the port like regular wine. She had glanced across, proud, wondering wherever he got all these facts from. But prouder still that he knew when not to use them. When James had left for London on the 29th, she’d taken both his hands in hers, her boy, and said, as always: look after yourself.

How empty that sounded in her head, now. And how negligent it felt, that she hadn’t seen James since Christmas. Nine weeks, ten? They went by so quickly. But of course she wouldn’t have let nine weeks go by if she had thought he needed something. Whatever was wrong, she could help him; that was the point. It was her job to help him. Yet she had somehow neglected that job. And now – without what felt like fair warning, without anything except this dizzying distress call in the middle of the night – now, things were on this knife-edge, and she felt sick.

She went back into the house. The cool past-midnight air had made her shivery, if anything. She went to fill the kettle. The kitchen felt smaller than it usually did. Jean took a deep breath, opened the dishwasher and began to make little piles of plates and bowls on the worktop, to be transferred into the cupboards. Just something to do that was normal. A neutral taste to offset the acid of this, of the thing there was no possible way of digesting. James has sent people a message that he might do something terrible. James has been talking about – something happening. She couldn’t even quite frame it as a phrase in her head.

If only she had a mobile phone, she would at least have seen the message with her own eyes. It might make no practical difference, but she wouldn’t have this terrible sense of having been wrong-footed. Of being so negligent that dozens of people – by the sound of it – were aware of her own son’s despair before she knew the first thing about it. She’d just never got used to them. She was the wrong generation. Lee had a mobile, and the few times she’d tried to type out a message on it, it had taken so long that she might as well – like her father – be popping a letter in the post. It was the same with all of it. Her Facebook page, set up by James, had gone unmonitored for months; it was too much, the way it kept telling you about new features, and she hadn’t really recovered from the laughter of her children when she asked how to ‘befriend’ people on the site. Emails, Jean tried her best with, but she’d always found typing laborious: her fingers just wouldn’t fall into the right patterns, it was like trying to play the piano. Talking was so much easier. People just didn’t seem to be so keen on that, these days.

The kettle had boiled, and Jean looked blankly at it. It was one of these new ones with a transparent body, so you could watch the water – under a blue light – frothing and bubbling right up to the second it clicked. It was no better at the actual job than the shrieking kettle she’d had for years, before Alan died. But Sal had said that was ‘on its last legs’ and that this one had the best reviews.

Jean flipped the top of the Kilner jar, got a teabag out, tossed it into the mug. Milk came last, no matter what anyone said. She rubbed her eyes. She didn’t even want the tea, not really. Of course not.

She saw James as he had been at twelve, a chubby, polite boy in a smart grey jumper, off to Edinburgh with his father. With Alan, her soulmate. She experienced a quick and lacerating sense of loss for those days, of the time when they were a family. It wasn’t fair to Lee to think like that. It didn’t do any good, either. But this again was not really thinking, it was just feeling; it came from lower than the brain, from somewhere not so easily located. And the loss became a longing, to know where James was, to know what to do to help him.

It was absurd to think it, but without a mobile phone it felt as if she was further away from him than she should be. The decision not to own one of these devices – which she’d never had the slightest desire for – all of a sudden seemed careless to the point of selfishness. And the darkness outside, in the garden barely lit by the fingernail of moon, felt like a big solid wall between Jean and her son.

9
M1 NEAR LUTON, 01:23
KARL DEAN

At about the time James stabbed the screen to dispatch his news, Karl had been waiting to pick up an important passenger from the SSE Arena, formerly Wembley Arena, and take him all the way to Newcastle. This should be just short of a five-hour drive at this time of night, if he kept to the speed limit, which of course he wouldn’t. Newcastle was a fair old schlep, as Karl was fond of saying – but he was happy doing it himself. There weren’t many drivers he’d trust with a VIP job. There were even fewer these days, without James. And besides, there weren’t many drivers who he’d be happy to see earning the money, when he could earn it himself. Yes, Karl was the boss now, so every journey was arguably earning him money. But when he was at the wheel, he was essentially making money for his own business and then paying himself pocket money from that business. It was like being, as he’d recently said at a party, both the ringmaster and the elephant. It didn’t really make sense because elephants in a circus didn’t get paid, and in fact circuses weren’t allowed to have them any more, but it had gone down well with the table, and the reception sometimes meant more than the truth.

Anyway, you didn’t know how long it was going to last, this job, any job, not even when you were in charge. Not in – as radio hosts were always saying – ‘the current climate’. There were plenty of younger drivers who would have taken this in a heartbeat. Karl had been at the bottom of the ladder long enough. He knew that hunger.

There was lots of it about. That hunger. Some of the young ones would keep going till they fell asleep at the wheel, if he let them. Everyone needed the wedge. The fella who’d replaced James had recently done an eighteen-hour stint, which wasn’t technically illegal, but also wasn’t technically a good idea at all. By the end of the shift, his texts had read as if a dog was walking across the screen. Yes, there were a dozen of them who’d do the big schleps. It was where the proper money was. And some of these gold card clients, like the DJ geezer who was currently in the back of Karl’s car, were also capable of coming out with fairy-tale tips. A footballer had once given Karl a pair of trainers, brand new, and – as it turned out – worth £400. Just handed them over at the drop-off. ‘Do you want these, pal?’ Karl had put them on eBay, and someone had paid the reserve price before he got home.

A story had done the rounds about a female driver – little bit of a rarity, in this industry – who’d got a pop star to Gatwick against a very tight deadline and, the next morning, found ten grand in her account. No reference. No sender name. Just a set of life-changing digits. And she’d gone well over the limit, by all accounts. She could have lost her licence, game over. Or, of course, lost more than that. Someone pulls out at a corner, she goes into the back of them, lights out. But the point was, none of these things did happen. She won the gamble and she won the ten thousand big ones. And that was what you were in this job for.

How many other jobs could you watch money coming in every time you got a text, any time the phone hummed in its little perch on the dashboard? And how many people like Karl, whose dad used to wallop him, who dropped out of school at 16, could have built an app like that? Or rather a whole empire, powered by an app?

Yes, life was sweeter than he’d ever thought it could be. But tonight – tonight, as he and James used to say, had not been the dream.

First: the customer, the DJ, had an attitude on him. He wanted to sleep, in fact he had to sleep, that was his thing. As soon as he got in the back. ‘I have to sleep, mate. All the way, yeah? Wake me up at the hotel, I don’t want to wake up at all till then. At all. Yeah?’ Fair enough, it was late: though from what Karl could make out, the geezer had only been on stage for an hour. You’d think he’d been doing mountain rescue the way he talked, you’d think he’d been doing mountain rescue and working a pizza oven at the same time. Still. Fine. Customer always right. But Karl didn’t have the power to guarantee that the guy could ‘just sleep’ all the way. This wasn’t a magic carpet service. This was two hundred and eighty-two miles of bloody tarmac.

And tonight, crossing even a tiny area of that tarmac had been the ball-ache to end all ball-aches. More than half an hour to get away from the Wembley area. The stadium, the arena, all of it, absolute murder to get away from. If Karl had three wishes, he’d use one of them to set the whole place on fire. Not with people in it; he wasn’t a psychopath. And anyway, the genies couldn’t kill people, could they – at least not in Aladdin. That was one of the terms and conditions. Yeah, wish one would be to tear down this whole area. Wish two, that he’d never given James the job of driving Hamish Elton, so he’d never have had to sack him. Wish three, thought Karl, glancing in the rear-view mirror to make sure the guy was asleep, would be the old ‘infinite wishes’ trick, but they probably had a procedure for that, so that people couldn’t take the piss. Well. Karl wasn’t going to wait around for genies. He was used to working his own miracles. He wasn’t going to fuck about rubbing a lamp when his phone contained the riches it did.

A slalom of temporary traffic lights, hi-vis jackets carving up the roads. Like most drivers in a big city, Karl had long stopped associating workmen with any sort of improvement or even change. He barely saw them as people. He just saw a sort of cartoon figure, a helium balloon with a grinning face on it, who’d come out with a spade just for the fun of it, to make a great big hole where Karl wanted his car to go.

The satnav was already showing forty minutes later than its original estimate. Karl always felt like he was losing a game when that happened; he loved steaming into town ahead of the original time. No, they weren’t looking at being in Newcastle till the thick end of 5 a.m. at this rate. Bit of McDonald’s or something, another Red Bull, turn around, back to London for mid-morning. And that was if it went well. It would be Saturday morning coming back, normally not too bad, but you never knew. If he got caught up on the M1 coming back into London, if there was an accident or something, he might as well stop off and buy a Santa hat for nine months’ time because that was roughly when he’d be back at his gaff.

He sighed as the fake traffic lights stopped him once more and swigged from the can in the drinks’ holder. Karl was proud of himself for giving up coffee, which made you too jittery, but if he was honest he was now equally addicted to energy drinks, which also made you jittery and cost four times as much. Also, he’d overdone it: he would need to piss like a donkey well before Newcastle, at this rate. But never mind. The DJ fella was worth it. The money, transferred by his management, was already in the company’s account. Karl didn’t know much about the man: he hadn’t signed up for the app, as some passengers did, unwittingly granting Karl access to a huge amount of their personal information. But he was obviously a big deal and his management company was worth about ten of these jobs a year. Yep, this geezer – whoever he was – was getting to Newcastle asleep if Karl had to chloroform him and charter a private jet.

When he was driving, the business essentially ran itself. The app, its central nervous system, paired passengers and drivers instantly. Drivers knew to contact passengers directly if there was a problem. In an emergency they could go to Karl’s assistant, Hugo, who was always awake when Karl was asleep or at work. Hugo had psoriasis and it came on like buggery at night, which was a shocker for him but made him perfect for these shifts. In short, it would take what Karl had once termed a ‘double emergency’ before he had anything to worry about at the wheel. Like the one he’d had to sacrifice James for.

So when James’s suicide text slid onto the screen, it was displaced within sixty seconds by four notifications, and disappeared. A year ago, this would not have happened, even with all the noise on Karl’s phone, because anyone on Karl’s ‘favourite contacts’ list was fast-tracked by another app; their messages would stick at the top of his inbox. This allowed him to make sure that his mum, for example, could always reach him when he was out and about. But Karl had had to remove James from the favourites list when he removed him from the job, because James’s pleading texts had made him feel bad. Karl wasn’t in the business of feeling bad; he’d felt awful quite enough when he was growing up – when he lay awake sobbing at night, when he came back with his school report shaking in case it wasn’t good enough.

That was the past. The present was about good vibes. The vibes from James, since he had to leave the company, were not surprisingly less than good. And so the two of them hadn’t been in touch for a few months now, and that record continued as Karl continued towards Newcastle, and James’s train – for the time being, on a similar route – proceeded towards what would be his last ever appointment.

10
EVERYWHERE, 01:45

It was a strange time of night to send a text to one hundred and fifty people, and it was – as James had acknowledged himself – a bit of a strange thing to do full stop. One consequence was that a peculiarly mixed cross-section of his contacts became the first to learn of his suicidal intentions. While someone as pivotal to James’s recent life as Karl remained ignorant of the message, it reached a number of people who had no idea what to do with the information.

The message was read, for example, by a former passenger of James’s, who owed him £50 she would never pay back. She was in a hospital in Birmingham, stuck in the frustrating stage of labour before anything really happened except widely spaced spurts of discomfort. It was read by Michaela’s former accountant, who gave it little thought because she was about to make love to an artisan ketchup and mustard entrepreneur. It was seen by one of James’s former colleagues at the start-up, known at the time as Exploits because of his CV of drunken disgrace, which included throwing a curry off a bridge into traffic and making a near-successful attempt to kidnap rocker Jon Bon Jovi. Heavy drinking had served Exploits very much less well in his thirties than twenties. He now slept on a friend’s sofa in Cumbria, was unemployed, and had gone back to being called Ricky. He glanced for a second at the message, took in none of it, and dropped the phone back over the side of the sofa, where it had been before it disturbed him.

Between this bracket of contacts and those (like Steffi and Michaela) most affected, there was a bank of people who found themselves worried to think of someone like James being so stricken, but worried in a manner too passive to interrupt their plans – which mostly involved drifting into sleep. Almost all of them had a memory of something generous James had done, since he’d accrued a reasonable résumé of small kind acts simply by living forty years as that sort of person. They remembered him giving them a lift because he was the only one not drinking that night; or even coming to pick them up in his private hire car, and not charging them. They recalled taking credit for a pub quiz answer James had come up with, or owing him a drink because he’d gone for a round without even being asked. He had made a kind comment about someone’s haircut – although fearing it was a gauche thing to say in the flesh, he’d done it by text, and so long after their meeting that they had already booked their next haircut. He became friends with older people whose computers he’d fixed; helped them to write emails to family members; went out shopping for them, took them to hospital. A solid guy, you might say. Enough so that it was a shock to learn he was thinking of doing something so rash, or talking about it for effect, or whatever he was up to.

Some of them did attempt replies, in tones of wary but genuine concern. Hope you’re OK. Call someone. Things aren’t as bad as you think. Please speak to someone for help if you’re serious. A couple of them even tried impulsively to ring James, but were not surprised when the call went straight to the ‘not available’ brush-off. They consoled themselves with the knowledge that someone higher up James’s chain of acquaintance must, surely, be sorting this out. Most of the recipients, as they finally went off to sleep, had either got the weird little incident out of their minds altogether; or convinced themselves that whatever was going on, it would probably be fine when they woke up.

There was another category of people, of course: those who did not receive the message, were not on James’s phone, but would find that their lives were affected by James’s even in the time he had left. These people could be anywhere, because of the paths technology had built, because nobody was very far from anybody any more. Indeed, one of them was on his train.

PART TWO

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