She shook her head. ‘I’m going to tell you everything,’ she said, ‘but I can’t look at you while I speak,’ so Dan sat back and waited. He wondered how – and if – he could help her, and decided he should simply be patient, so he let his mind drift as he stared across the small room at the alien world outside the window. In the boughs of a small fruit tree there was a posse of parrots with Day-Glo crests, and they were squawking fit to burst, a terrible cacophony that made him think of Brian Johnson screaming out the lyrics in one of those thundering AC/DC tracks. He thought: This girl grew up with sparrows, and the occasional robin for a splash of colour. Imagine waking each morning to a flag-cracking yellow sun and a heavy metal dawn chorus? He closed his eyes and tried to remember the lyrics to ‘Back In Black’, something about hitting the sack and being glad to be back, but he couldn’t get there, he’d never been much of a headbanger, but then she started to speak, and he listened to a story that was unthinkable, about a world he hadn’t known existed. Catherine, Martin Baxter, Peter, and there among them Alison, trying to cope, trying to be strong in the bleak and increasingly messy melee of her domestic life. Dan listened, shattered by this account of a dark and barely manageable life in Attercliffe, bitterly reproaching his younger self for never really pressing her for details, never trying hard enough to overcome her fierce privacy about home, always happy to simply meet her off the bus in Nether Edge, never picking her up, never taking her back to her door, never really questioning her vehemence that he shouldn’t do either of these things.

On she went beside him: the drunkenness, the chaos, the role Peter played as her ally and support, until his own shame drove him to attempt suicide. She told him about the scene at Brown Bayley’s, the photographs displayed there by Martin Baxter, how she’d torn them down, then gone home and had to cut Peter down from the light flex, and then had fled to his, Daniel’s, house, forgetting he’d be long gone to Manchester. Dan groaned, thinking of the hard time he’d given her only yesterday for missing the gig. But she wasn’t finished; she continued on in the same low, expressionless voice, as if she was reading a written account of someone else’s terrible history. Peter revealing the escape fund, urging her to get the hell out of Sheffield and be free. Her refusal; her confidence in her own ability to tough things out. And then Martin Baxter, fulfilling the menace and violence he’d always threatened, overpowering her, raping her, treating her with bottomless contempt, showing her just how weak and worthless she really was. Dan moaned with a kind of visceral pain, a futile agony that she’d borne this abominable assault and its consequences entirely alone, undefended, unprotected. Lovely, clever, talented, incomparable Alison Connor, thought Dan: his shining light.