‘No, my God, no, I didn’t send it. See, there’s send there, but we’re not doing that any more, it’s all over, she chose the other guy. Christ knows why, he’s a pompous dickhead. But look, I can still play this for you, even though it hasn’t been sent,’ and he opened the new link and when the string of words and jumbled letters bloomed into music, Lisa gazed around the cabin in awe as if she had no idea where the sound was coming from.

‘Oh man, I love this tune,’ she said, and she leaned forward and gave Frank’s bony foot a shove to bring him back to consciousness, and sang ‘when you’ve made your mind up’ along with Donovan and his sweet sixties sound. Frank stirred and blinked and rolled his head as he slowly returned to them.

‘Do you remember this, baby?’ Lisa said to him. She sang on, unfurling herself from the floor like a snake charmed out of its basket, swaying from the hips and weaving shapes with her arms.

‘Lisa, you’re so fucking awesome,’ Dan said. She sang like Janis Joplin: soulful, wicked, a smoker’s voice, slightly ruined and all the better for that. Frank watched from his supine position and tapped his gnarly toes against the wooden wall in time to the beat.

‘Hey, I know what, play all the list,’ Lisa said when it ended. ‘Play all your songs, like a total celebration of love,’ but Dan shook his head.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Half of those songs are hers.’

‘No, man,’ Frank said. ‘Songs belong to the universe.’ He’d hauled himself up into a sitting position, and was ferreting about in his stash tin, rubbing it into smaller crumbs for a new spliff. His fingers were too stiff these days to tie a half-hitch or a slip knot, but he was still a craftsman with a heap of weed and a cigarette paper. He seemed to smoke rather than eat. One day, he said, he wanted to wake up dead.

‘It’s too private,’ Dan said, ‘like reading her diary out loud.’

‘No way, man,’ Frank said again, spaced out, still sleepy. ‘They’re, like, out there, those songs, like fireflies: you can trap ’em and they’re yours until you release ’em again.’

‘They are, they are,’ Lisa said, excited by this idea. ‘You just trapped “Sunshine Superman” in a jar for me.’