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.
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.
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