She went around the room and turned all of the lamps on. She searched for the laptop. The dial-up was so slow she had to put the laptop out of her sight so as not to burst into flames of fury.

Her father had said:

‘You’re not mad, Sara. You’re just addicted to the fucking internet.’

Which did not explain the clutching at her throat or the gleam of menace from cut-steel door handles or the faces at the windows or the medication; it did not explain all of the medication.

Her mother had new tits since Christmas.

She pushed back the couch and she found the laptop underneath and she brought it to the cable by the retro phone desk – a fucking cable! – and she plugged it and hit connect:

Gremlin voices gurgled from the medieval depths of dial-up.

Every inch of her skin burned with itch. She went to find some music. She had forgotten to bring the iPod dock to the house and there was only the ‘sound system’, as he called it, which made her smile, and there were only CDs.

Discs!

She flicked through:

Synchronicity by The Police.

Jesus.

Astral Weeks by Van Morrison.

Who looked like an especially sweaty oompah-loompah.

Revolver by The Beatles.

She played ‘For No One’ back-to-back eight times. She would not play it again because she had feelings about the dark significance of the number nine. She knew she should prefer the John tracks, but. She knew that John bought an island in Clew Bay, in the 1960s, but there were three hundred and sixty-five islands down there, and she could not say which one. Dorinish Island – her father claimed to know it, by sight, he said you could see it from a high vantage beside the house. John sailed a psychedelic caravan across the bay on a raft once but he never ended up living on Dorinish, with Yoko, as planned.

She went to dial-up.

The forum took eleven minutes to load.

She headbutted the couch.

‘Dorinish’ – the word lolled on her tongue, and repeated; it sounded like an artisanal cheese or a seaweed therapy facility.

There was just one green light on 4-Real forum for live – Gretchen from Flagstaff.

Sara typed:

I think I’m going to do it tonite?

And the green of the light for live on Gretchen at once died.

She ripped the cable from the laptop. She slid open the glass doors. She flung the laptop out into the dark. It must have landed somewhere but it did so without a sound. As though it had been caught?

She went to the bathroom and split open her pills to wash the powders away, the pinks and greens, the mica-gleam of the powders, and then the dull mulch as they clotted in the tapwater, and the clots swirled a moment, and disappeared. She opened her mouth and looked inside and saw the healthful pink of her gums and the arch of her jawbone.