She looked at him as though he was a lost cause, and turned away, padding barefoot back downstairs. He really must go; there were no notes to be written on Billy. There was nothing to keep him up here, and he was dead beat. But he hung back anyway, considered @AliConnorWriter for a while, for just one more minute – two minutes – three minutes. She was hard to leave, so soon after finding her. For almost ten minutes, in the end, he looked at her face, scrolled through her tweets, then googled her name and saw a whole world of information on the rise and rise of Ali Connor. Then he thought: Fuck it. He went back to her Twitter profile, clicked on the ‘Follow’ icon, snapped the lid of his laptop shut, silenced Willie Dundas, and went downstairs with McCulloch.

3

ADELAIDE,
12 OCTOBER 2012

Alison Connor’s mum’s friend was a Ten Pound Pom called Sheila; with that name, she used to say, she’d fitted right in in Australia. She’d sailed to Adelaide from Southampton in 1967 on one of those dirt-cheap assisted passages, following the promise of a new life in Elizabeth and a job at the Holden car plant, and there, she’d met and married Kalvin Schumer, an engineer, a real Australian, born and bred in Adelaide to German parents and as fine and strapping a man as Sheila had ever laid eyes on. At weekends, he’d wooed her on long trips north out of town to the desert, shooting big red roos to feed to his dogs, and snatching up snakes from the red earth, cracking them to death on a rock, like a whip.

All this was in her letters, which for a while after she emigrated came about once a month, a conscientious and lyrical correspondence that really got on Catherine’s wick. She’d known Sheila Baillie when they were girls in the same street, but then the Baillie family moved to Liverpool, and Catherine only saw Sheila once more, at her own wedding to Geoff Connor, but Sheila hung on to the friendship, never quite grasping either the extent of Catherine’s indifference, or her relationship with the bottle, so she didn’t know that her letters from South Australia, chock full of verve and immigrant zeal, only shovelled further misery and bitterness into Catherine’s soul by flaunting a vivid picture of the world, so different to her own drab orbit.