‘Get lost, you old dero,’ Seymour said. ‘Who’d take candy from strange blokes wearing pineapple earrings?’ Angie giggled, and he realised suddenly that he’d made a joke and caused someone to laugh, and he couldn’t remember one other time in his life when that had happened.

She caught his hand and swung it as they went back down the main road. Seymour, unused to physical contact, felt woodenly self-conscious, but her hand held his lightly in uncomplicated friendship, and after a while he relaxed and swung in time to her singing. He wondered why kids at the various schools he’d attended so often spoke disparagingly about their sisters. If older sisters were as nice as Angie, making you feel special, as though they could think of nothing better than to spend their free time with you, he wished he’d been lucky enough to have one.

She sang all the way down the long road past the factories, and coaxed him into joining in. His voice, unaccustomed to being raised in melody, was no more than a feeble croak. He didn’t know many songs at all, but she didn’t laugh at him.

‘Hey, heard this old one?’ she said and began to sing, partly to him, mostly to herself, forgetting some of the words and having to improvise:

‘I was weak, too weak to fly,

But you were there, right there beside me,

Urging me on…

Geeze, how does it go? And da da da…

Making me strong, could hear you saying…

yeah, now I remember:

Spread my wings and left the nest,

Swearing nothin’ would get by me.

I tasted love and I tasted life,

But not enough to satisfy me…

Urging me on, and making me strong,

Could hear you saying:

Go on, girl! You can do it, it’s only life;

Ain’t nothin’ to it!

It’s just a…a seeing-through it from the inside,

From the inside…’

Seymour listened, enchanted, for she had a sweet, lilting voice, but when they came to the steep part of the road leading to the bus terminal, she sang more slowly, pausing for breath at the end of each line, so that the tempo of the song changed and became almost unbearably poignant and sad.

‘Like a star in the midnight sky,

That fades into the morning;

Came back to show you I could fly,

But you had gone without a warning…

Could still hear you saying:

Go on, girl, you can do it,

It’s only life…

It’s just a seeing-through it from the inside,

From the inside…’

They reached the terminal and her voice dwindled into silence. Seymour was relieved, because you didn’t sing in front of a crowd of people, though he had a suspicion that Angie might have no such scruples if she hadn’t been made breathless by the long walk.