‘Like I said before he walked in,’ she said, ‘he’s Daniel Lawrence from Edinburgh, via Sheffield. There’s a lot to tell, but I’m not doing it on an empty stomach.’

‘Quite right,’ Dora said, and she grabbed a whisk from the utensils jar and waved it at Dan. ‘Got a treat for you, matey. Eggs my way, coming up. They’re the bomb!’

24

QUORN,
5 FEBRUARY 2013

Later in the day Sheila said, ‘Let’s have a natter,’ hooked an arm through Dan’s and walked him out to the garden, which was small and densely planted, and mercifully part-shaded by the slender arching boughs and foliage of a Chinese tallow.

Dan liked Sheila enormously: a touch loopy, but well meaning, big-hearted. She was generous with her laughter, and she liked to talk but she could listen, too. She was so colourful, her speech seasoned with idiom, her clothes a layered collection of ethnic prints, garments collected on her travels. Like the flora and fauna around them, Sheila seemed too tropical to hail from the north of England; he found it hard to imagine her enduring a slate-grey winter, even in her youth: she’d surely emerged fully formed from the red earth of Australia, rising like a firebird in the sun-scorched bush. She sat herself down on a swing seat built for two, but he didn’t fancy squeezing into the small space left beside her, so instead he sat opposite her, on a low stone wall, the perimeter border of a desert rockery where miniature cacti and succulents shared their arid patch with amulets from overseas, an evil eye, a silver shamrock, an alligator tooth; they hung from the tips of the plants like earrings. There was a low table in glittering mosaic, and on it she’d placed two jewel-coloured bowls, one bearing hummus, the other baba ganoush, and she scooped up these dips on fingers of pitta bread and shovelled them in as she listened to Dan answering her questions. She wanted to know all about canal life and Crazy Diamond, and then all about his job, and had he been to Australia before? Yes, he said, Sydney, April 1997, when INXS released Elegantly Wasted, and Michael Hutchence gave him an interview, but only after nearly killing him on the back of his motorbike. The most beautiful man she’d ever seen, Sheila said wistfully, and then this, by way of contrast, got her on to her German ex-husband Kalvin – the least beautiful man she’d ever seen – and all the details of their disastrous marriage, and the metamorphosis she’d gone through after she’d left him. Then she said, ‘Now, tell me this – are you free to love Alison as she deserves to be loved?’ and Dan hadn’t seen that coming, not at all.

‘No,’ he said, after only the briefest pause, deciding in that instant to be as direct as the question demanded. ‘Not in the sense you mean.’