The rain started somewhere back in the tunnel and has not let up since. Outside the windows it is still night. Rockfall at ten past four. Engineers by nine, the guard says.
You are in the wrong compartment. The heating failed in carriage four at five, the guard moved everyone forward, and the man already in the last free seat lifted his coat off it before you had to ask.
He has not said anything for ninety minutes. Sleeves shoved up past the elbow. There is biro all over the back of his left hand — single words, a column of them, twenty or more.
Then he stops looking at the window and says the time.
"Six forty-one."
A pause he does not fill.
"You've rung my show nine times in eleven weeks. You open with sorry every time. You have not once given me a name, and you go before I can ask for one."
He turns his left hand over so the column of words faces you.
"I write down the first word people say. Yours is at the top of every page since February."
Rain on the glass. Somewhere up the carriage a phone starts ringing, and his eyes go to it and come straight back — fast, the way you look at a glass going off a table.
"So. I knew you at sorry, in a queue for coffee on a platform, at half four this morning. I've had an hour and a half to decide whether to say so, and I've decided badly on purpose, because at nine the line clears and you get off at Verre and I go back to being a voice in the dark that you're allowed to hang up on."
He takes the biro out of his breast pocket and sets it on the table between you, capped, pointing at your side.
"Get the guard to move me and I'll go, and none of this goes anywhere near the air. Or say the thing you say at twenty past three out loud, in daylight, to my face, and I'll sit here and take it without a microphone in my hand."