Wake-up call

This is the morning that Michiko burns all her "before" photos.

This is the morning that Joe decides he will break up with his girlfriend if the weather report is good.

This is the morning that Jess converts the work slush pile into a table-full of origami pieces for her boss' desk; when arranged, the pieces spell out "I QUIT".

This is the morning that Alex gets his licence back and can stop faking his enjoyment of walking everywhere.

This is the morning that Tarek gets a text message from his accountant girlfriend, suggesting their relationship may not be "solvent".

This is the morning that Marina decides to increase her luck in life by kissing more inanimate objects - her bank card, her student ID, her train ticket.

This is the morning that Bernard will re-rehearse his lines for the last time before actually calling her.

This is the morning that Elsa starts to leave music boxes in random elevators across the city.

This is the morning that everyone wakes up to new bearings.

Paper trail

He used to leave her notes in the glove compartment. The first handful were simple 'thanks' for lending him her car. Then they became descriptions of stories he heard on the radio through the day: the secret home cinema found among the remains of six million bodies in Paris' underground catacombs; the guy who conducted studies of shadows for a living (his documents stopped council parks and historic monuments being darkened by needlessly tall buildings); the woman who crafted such convincing fake flowers for her garden that the artificial blooms even attracted butterflies.

Then he left curiously useful tips like which cafes had the tastiest soup and which bookstores had the best-looking boys at the counter. This was how she got addicted to gazpacho and met her husband.

Sometimes he left definitions of crazy words (CALLIPYGIAN, meaning having a nicely-shaped bottom) and strange records (the London couple who kissed for more than 31 hours; the rules meant they had to keep smooching even when they went to the bathroom).

It was a lottery of facts whenever she opened her glovebox.

She guessed he spent a lot of his time in traffic, thinking about things, as he drove around delivering pamphlets. Even though he returned the car in the evenings, she rarely used it. She considered even selling it to him, but then she became pregnant and knew being able to shuttle around in a car was a luxury she couldn't now give up.

He would fill her glove compartment with suggestions for baby names. They were all obviously exotic destinations covered in BBC World Service reports: Odessa (Russia), Tirana (Albania), Kericho (Kenya) and other cities dotted across the globe.

Then one day, he didn't return her car. She rang him until the dial tone exhausted her, with its clinical melody. She went to his house but his neighbours only shrugged when she approached them for clues and details. Reluctantly, she rang the police. They found her car two days later. It had been abandoned by the Cahill Expressway.

She gave birth to a boy whose name revealed no geographical origins whatsoever. She got tired of eating gazpacho - like her baby, she only ate vegetables that had been blitzed into easy-swallow goo. She never knew what was on the news, its mix of horror stories of kids decapitated by their dads and infant soldiers left her feeling unmoored and depressed.

Her glove compartment currently stocked only a spineless car directory and some takeaway menus.

One day, just as she was about to drive her son to childcare for the first time, she thumbed through her well-used directory to locate the street, and out sailed a piece of paper from between MAP J16 and MAP J17. It was a crinkled note and all it said was "Man conducting study of his own shadow. Not sure whether it will be in Odessa or Kericho. Hopes to find it soon." That was the last note he ever left her.

At the end of the tunnel

They'd been driving through the tunnel for five hours. She kept reading the dash-dash-dash pattern of overhead lights as a distress signal - even though each flash above was unrelentingly even, nothing like the short-long alternations of Morse Code.

It had been at least two hours since they had seen another car.

"A world's scenic drive in the world's longest tunnel. Thanks for inviting me," he said.

She didn't say anything. It wasn't the world's longest - far from. It was one of those ugly construction projects that everyone complained about in public, but kept mute about when using it as a shortcut. The problem was she'd never taken it before - in fact, she'd wanted to avoid it, but he'd pressed her into it, just to avoid the toll slapped on the route she'd planned on taking. She relented because it meant she could get rid of him quicker - even though they were grown up, she always felt she were still babysitting her brother.

"At least if we were going through the Chunnel, I'd be in London by now," he added.

Of course he'd prefer being a geezer in "Kangaroo Valley" rather than be in the more appealing-in-every-other-way Paris, she thought. It was like he plotted his life itinerary around booze and partying.

"It's not even the world's longest tunnel, smartass," she said. "That's in Japan, between two of the islands. No one really uses it because it's cheaper now to just catch a plane."

They drove on for another hour, making intermittent attacks at each other like twitchy snipers. She didn't know what made her madder - her brother, or the red flare of the "no petrol" warning, or the Groundhog Day-like tunnel. This bare, unending road would keep spooling on and on forever, until the crack of doom, she thought. Then another hour passed before her car clunked out entirely.

"Thank for chauffeuring me around on an empty tank, genius," he said.

"Looked pretty full when we left, asshole."

" Well, trust you to have a street directory from the Middle Ages, Miss Know-All - this tunnel's not even on it."

She got out. The tunnel was stifling and frigid at the same time. She was probably the first person to breathe in all this pollution-sifted air.

There was no reception for her phone. There hadn't been anyone for hours. She was stuck with her desert island nightmare.

"I'm gonna stick by the ve-hi-cle," he said. "You never know, might be safer. Me protecting your wheels.'

He'd love it to claim it as his own, she's not stupid. God knows he'd be too lazy to ever afford anything vaguely adult as a car. Adult to him meant porn, not unglamorous responsibility.

She was going to walk on - even though she was probably going to keel over from inhaling years of accumulated tunnel soot or some other killjoy airbone disease.

It was funny, as a kid, she had loved tunnels - zipping through dark passages that sent their family hatchback into a landscape unlike the one they'd first entered. Beaches, airports, foreign suburbs. It was like a slow and technically-crude version of teleporting.

She also dreamed of cruising through those massive redwood trees in California - the ones that had huge tunnels cut out of them. There was one that was designed for horse-drawn carriages to go through, that was how old it was. But it eventually fell down and now was just a historical note.

When she was 28, she sat in the back seat as her then boyfriend navigated their hire car through the Italian border to the Swiss Alps. The open-close bursts of monumental mountain scenery then tunnel monotony made her feel intensely alive. It made her think how much she liked tunnels - how you were forced to move forward, there was no other way to go - there was no room to change your mind and U-turn back. Unrelenting like life, in a way.

And now she was going to find out how this all ended.