Agreed, thought Dan. He’d listened to the Woman’s Hour interview too, found it online after Katelin told him about it. Ali’s voice was altered, she sounded Australian, and of course she would after all these years. But there were traces of Alison Connor in those vowels, and he’d thought: Get that woman back to Sheffield and it’ll all come flooding back. Listening to her, hearing her speak: this had caused him pain, as well as pleasure. To this day he had no idea why she’d gone. He knew it was something to do with her fucked-up family, her mother, her brother, but it had been difficult at the time not to feel that he, Daniel, had failed Alison on some fundamental level, and her bailing out on him was his punishment. God, what a punishment. It’d felt like being denied oxygen. For a long time he’d been in purgatory, and it certainly screwed up university for him; he hadn’t dealt with that experience at all well, all those privileged boys and girls on his course and in his hall of residence, popping champagne corks and mixing cocktails, partying to Queen and Abba, navigating their way through life with supreme, unchallenged confidence because all the friends they’d had at private school seemed to be here with them, in Durham. Dan had lasted three terms before packing it in. Even now, when he heard ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, he was right back in college, alone in his room, the dark, brooding northerner with a mighty chip on his shoulder and a default expression of naked disdain on his face. He’d worked hard, though, at forgetting Alison, chasing away her ghost by playing all the music they’d never shared while having lots of sex with edgy girls from Newcastle Poly who were more his type than the university crowd, and, later, even edgier girls in Camden and Kentish Town. He’d worked hard, too, at pleasing them; made sure he was better at sex than he ever had been with Alison Connor. He was serious about it, he concentrated, and in this way, he elevated the activity from ordinary, mindless shagging to a higher plane. It took a year for the pain to feel less than visceral, and another year before he stopped wanting her, and yet another before she rarely crossed his consciousness. But he was young, and wounds heal, and he did, eventually, rub out the memory, or at least diminish it until it was forgotten. And now here she was, back again in this tantalising distant form, apparently still joined to him by what might only be a gossamer thread, but he wasn’t going to let it break, there was to be no forgetting her again. He knew her. She’d helped create him. She was part of his DNA. On the radio, talking to Jenni Murray, she’d been a little spikey at first, a little chippy, and he’d realised then that she hadn’t really altered. She’d gone on to claim she was happy as a clam in Adelaide, but he knew, he just knew, that she was protesting too much, she wasn’t as happy as she made out. Well, nobody ever was.