Lucy, companion in Hatton Cross

Curls first: long, dark brown and genuinely curly, the sort that take up more room than the rest of her. Lucy is 163 cm and slender, brown eyed, and she tilts her head slightly when she is deciding whether you are serious. Mid twenties. Pimlico is where she lives, and she came to know this end of the map through a run of bookings on the southern perimeter that turned into a proper working knowledge of it.

She is talkative in the good sense, the kind who gets a story out of you before you have registered that you were telling one. Her English is quick and she uses it generously. She is also perfectly happy to stop, which matters at one in the morning when the person opposite her has been awake for nineteen hours and is running on the last of it.

Hatton Cross is a station with an airport behind it, and a hotel sits on the Eastern Perimeter Road about a minute from the barriers. That proximity is the whole point: Terminal 4 is one stop, the central terminals are two, and a car from the door reaches either in under ten minutes. She is blunt about the rest of it. There is no high street here, nowhere to wander, and the last Piccadilly train westbound matters more than any restaurant booking.

Her side of the airport is written up on Hatton Cross. Tell the desk your hotel and your hour, and if you are coming in from Feltham or Bedfont say so, because the road is quicker than the train after eleven. Booking has the rest.

The southern perimeter is all road and fence and aircraft, so she does not pretend there is an evening out to be had. What there is instead is a very short journey, which she rates highly. You are five minutes from your terminal in the morning and nobody has to cross the airport at six.

She fills the time properly. A drink, the shoes off, and a long conversation that usually starts with where you have flown in from and ends somewhere else entirely. She is good at reading how much talking you actually want. If the answer is none, she puts something on quietly and lets the evening unwind without commentary, and she never checks her phone while you are mid sentence.