Seymour contemplated the magnificence of knowing how to guide a craft through snags and rocks, of being trained in martial arts, of scaling cliff faces. Maybe Jas would just happen to drop in to visit Angie when he was there, and offer to teach him a couple of basic karate punches or kicks or something. Then he could walk the whole length of the alley any time he liked without his heart threatening to burst from fear. Would it be too pushy to ask Angie if she could introduce him to her boyfriend? He turned towards her, but her head was on the seat backrest and her eyes closed. Resting lightly on the bag, her folded hands were as gentle as sleeping doves, but each time the bus jolted to a stop, her thumbs jerked inwards towards the palms, making small tense fists. It was hard to tell if she were asleep or not, but he didn’t disturb her.

If it were sleep, she seemed to possess an inbuilt reaction to distance and correct bus stops. When they reached the terminal and the bus made a U-turn, her eyes snapped open immediately. She leaped up and pulled him out after her, shoving past startled passengers. She hurried him through a small shopping centre and turned into a long straight highway busy with lumbering trucks and vans. It was an ugly road, lined on either side by raw-looking factories and vacant blocks of land.

‘Come on, pal, don’t dawdle!’ she said rather testily, though he was doing his best to keep up. ‘We’ve got a long walk ahead of us. There’s supposed to be a connecting bus route along here, but the damned thing only runs about every two hours, so walking’s quicker in the long run. All this used to be market gardens and orchards once. Isn’t it a pity how they always go and muck nice things up? We used to drive down here to get to the beach at weekends. It was great.’

‘Who’s we? You mean Jas and you?’

‘No, this was when I was a kid. My parents and my brother and sister. See where that car yard is, there used to be a cute little house. You should have seen it, it had a weathervane on the roof and ivy round the windows. I always reckoned I’d buy that cottage and live in it when I grew up, but they went and pulled it down, the rotten…oops, language, I’d better set you a good example, hadn’t I? There was this pretty statue in the middle of the lawn, a lady holding a…oh, what do you call them, those things they played in ancient Rome…’

‘A lyre?’

‘Yeah, something like that. You never saw anything as nice as that old statue, though my sister reckoned it was tizzy. I used to call it Andromeda, but she changed it to Narelle.’