‘Fair enough. Do you miss being with kids your own age?’

‘Not really. Sometimes. I’m too busy,’ Juliet said.

‘Oh yeah, doing what?’ Grace asked.

‘Studying and hanging with Davey and the lads. Oh and his friend Trevor, the sound engineer, is helping me learn how to use a sound desk, like Ma.’

‘And what age is Trevor?’ Grace asked suspiciously.

‘Seriously, Grace!’ Juliet laughed.

‘Are you happy?’

Juliet hunched her shoulders. ‘My ma is dead.’

‘Do you want to come home?’

‘No.’

‘OK. I love you.’

The truth was she didn’t want to go home but she didn’t want to live on a bus either. Driving from city to city was gruelling and often lonely but she would never leave Davey.

We were meant to be, weren’t we, Ma? I mind Davey and he minds me. They spent a lot of time together, talking, reading, listening to music and eating shit food in shit diners. It was fun sometimes. It was Davey who’d thought she should find herself a hobby. He introduced her to Trevor. She was immediately drawn to the sound desk in every stadium they landed in. Davey noticed. Trevor was patient and kind to her, always open to her sitting with him during soundcheck and answering her many questions. He showed her photos of his wife and child. He knew what it was to miss the people you love. She could talk to him, and sitting at the desk listening to the sound ebb and flow from it she felt closer to her mam than she had in those last days lying beside her dying body. She told Kyle about Trevor over Skype.

‘You know the way my ma used to do sound for Davey and the band when she was my age?’

‘Yeah,’ Kyle said.

‘Well, Trevor the sound guy is really cool, he lets me watch him work, and during soundcheck he lets me mess around. Sometimes he’s teaching me things and the set-up is way bigger than Ma ever dealt with – she used a ten-channel desk. Trevor’s is ninety-six.’

‘Wow,’ Kyle said, but it wasn’t a believable wow.

‘You don’t care,’ she said, and he grinned a little.

‘I care,’ he said, and she knew he meant it and it made her blush. He looked a little older on-screen. They talked a lot but she didn’t talk to Della at all. Juliet missed her but she understood some friendships could only survive one on one and in the real world. Juliet didn’t live there anymore.

She dreamed about her ma a lot. Weird, blurry, sad dreams that haunted her for days. A recurring dream involved her mother calling out for her help from the kitchen floor of their old rented house with blood flowing from her and pooling around her. She tried but she couldn’t get to her. An invisible barrier kept them from one another.