Katelin had hoped she’d hate the book, but Tell the Story, Sing the Song was brilliant: intelligent, accessible, lyrical, colourful, all the things the reviews had said, but more so, annoyingly so, and she hadn’t been able to stop herself from loving it. She hadn’t been able to stop talking about it, either; it’d sparked a sort of intellectual thirst for Australia and, as a result, a country she’d never given a moment’s thought to was suddenly front and centre in her mind. She was reading Bruce Chatwin now, The Songlines, and kept on to Dan about the dreamings and the ancient tracks criss-crossing the land; about the songs, the ancestors, the sacred totems. Dan had no idea what she was going on about, and it was true Katelin hadn’t totally grasped the essence either, but it was a slippery concept, to be fair, difficult to articulate. Didn’t stop her trying. Didn’t stop the interrogations either. Her interest in Ali Connor was a natural and unfortunate consequence of all this, and Dan was fed up to the back teeth of pretending he couldn’t remember much about her, playing her down, denying her significance. Claire hadn’t helped, with the ‘practically moved in’ line. Dan had had to fudge the issue, and make out Alison was more of a friend than a girlfriend, really. He had no intention of telling the truth; it would benefit Katelin not a jot. She had a jealous heart, and a possessive soul, and if he’d said to her now or at any point in their history that there once was a girl called Alison who almost destroyed him, shattered his faith in love for a few years, and nigh on broke his dad’s heart too, it would never, ever have gone away. But by the time he met Katelin, who’d always been thirsty for information about his past, he’d been able to regale her with enough stories – enough cheerful tales of one-night stands and insignificant significant others – to protect himself from having to relive the trauma, while still providing Katelin with the details she seemed to crave. Old girlfriends were like scabbed-over wounds to her, and she couldn’t help picking at them to make them bleed. Dan couldn’t understand this, couldn’t see why she might be needled by his relationships with girls he’d known before he met her. Himself, he couldn’t care less which boys she’d snogged behind the bike sheds. It was irrelevant. But Katelin, God! Dog with a bone.