Abi overreached again, making Dorothy turn. The girl looked sheepish, realised what she’d done, which was half the battle. A boy her age would’ve blundered through, expecting the song to catch up with him. Abi realised that less was more, she just hadn’t 68quite got it in practice yet, but that would come. You don’t have to fill all the space in a song, nine times out of ten it’s better with room to breathe. But that’s a hard lesson to take on board at any age, let alone as a hormonal teenager.

Dorothy thought of herself as a hormonal teen, her second-hand Pearl drum kit set up in the den, bashing away, drumming along to The Kinks and MC5. Her parents had been open-minded about all that stuff, although they never pretended to understand her obsession. It was a crazy time for music, The Beatles and The Stones, of course, but she’d always liked the more underground stuff, and that continued over the years.

She remembered Jim’s face when she said she wanted to get a drum kit set up in the top floor of the house. She’d been in Scotland for two years at that point and was missing Pismo Beach like crazy, and she needed some way to connect to her sun-soaked adolescence. Jim understood that. And once the kit was there, it wasn’t much of a stretch to think about teaching. She was good enough, there was hardly anyone else doing it, and it was decent extra income. It was the early seventies by then, so loads of kids were getting into their own rock bands, and Dorothy loved helping them, keeping up to date with music trends at the same time. It was healthy, the physical exercise of it, making her as strong as the yoga kept her supple. And it was a mirror of that meditation too, losing yourself to something bigger.

And new students kept turning up, despite drum machines and rave music and all the rest. The money was useful, of course, but the sense of identity was more important, giving her something outside of the death business that was hers alone.

The song finished and Abi sat back, the tip of her tongue between her teeth. She was tall for her age, long legs in denim shorts and wearing a baggy white T-shirt that read ‘Feminist as Fuck’ with roses tangled in the lettering. Her face was greasy with sweat and she looked at Dorothy for approval.

‘You know, don’t you?’ Dorothy said.69

Abi nodded. She was growing confident, Dorothy loved that.

‘Lost it in the middle,’ Abi said. ‘Too much.’

‘It sounded great, though. You’re really nailing the floor tom in the verses.’

Abi grinned. It was so easy to make a kid feel good.

Dorothy looked at the clock on the wall. ‘OK, that’s us for this week.’