Driving from Cardiff to Swansea, Lloyd found a passenger in his car.

            ‘Who are you?’ he said, slowing.

            ‘Your inner self,’ came the reply.

            The guy certainly looked like him: older, more haggard, greyer. It could be him.

            ‘You’re on the wrong road, Jim,’ the passenger said, ‘every day commuting a ton of miles to that vehicle licensing hole.’

            ‘It’s a job.’

            ‘So’s being a galley slave. How about jumping ship?’

            Port Talbot steelworks skittered by, its Meccano limbs tangled against the grey sky as if in agony. The other Jim had vanished, gone in a spurt of yellow steelworks gas.

            Work went badly. Workmates faces resembled those of ghouls. The phone calls, a hundred ways of asking the same thing about car tax, lapped in his brain with a disturbing echo. He felt outside everything.