Frank held out the newly rolled, newly lit spliff and said, ‘A gift for you, my friend Dan Lawrence. Join me on cloud nine,’ and there was something very appealing about this, because nothing soothed a troubled heart so well as Frank’s home-grown. Dan took it. Lisa smiled. The world contracted further still into this enclosed, enchanted space, and he took a long, long drag to pull the mind-altering medication into his lungs, through his bloodstream, up to the agitated, overworked neurons and synapses of his brain. He felt himself soften, lighten, loosen.

‘Play us the very last one she sent you,’ Lisa said. ‘Just that.’

Joni, thought Dan, fondly, as if the singer was a girl he used to know. Well, OK, he thought, why not channel those groovy Laurel Canyon blues? With his free hand, he scrolled up the screen to Ali’s final link, and Lisa said, ‘See, Frank, look here, the tune’s all captured in those blue letters,’ but Frank just smiled and said, ‘Lay it on me,’ so Dan opened the song and Joni Mitchell played her guitar for them, and sang them her lonely love song, and Dan felt incredibly good, incredibly happy, and when the track played itself out to its last plaintive chords, Lisa was very still, very contemplative for a while, listening to the silence left by Joni, then she said, ‘No way did Ali choose the other guy, no way.’

Dan looked at her. He was on the cusp of being heroically high, and this made him slow to process her words.

‘She chose you, Dan,’ she said, simplifying things. ‘She chose you.’

Dan shook his head. ‘I saw her walk right out the door with him,’ he said. ‘Saw her with my own two eyes.’

‘Send her “Sunshine Superman”,’ Lisa said, taking the phone from his hand and making random stabs at the screen with her finger. ‘She’ll love it, you’ll be spreading love and happiness. Come on, release Donovan, let him fly across the world.’

‘No. Nope. No way, José,’ said Dan. He was dimly aware of regretting the spliff, but only in a stoned, half-hearted way, and only very briefly. ‘That horse has bolted,’ he said. ‘That train has left the station. That toke’s been smoked.’

This seemed completely hilarious to Dan and Frank, and they dissolved into a festival of damp-eyed, wheezing, crazy mirth, so Lisa had to wait for quite some time before she was able to say, ‘Well, anyway, I’m not totally sure, but I think I might have just sent it.’ She held the phone in front of Dan’s face to show him.

‘Oh,’ he said, peering myopically at the screen in the candlelight. ‘Yep. It’s gone, man, solid gone.’

Frank raised an arm in a kind of slow salute to the magnificent forces of the universe. ‘Follow the bliss,’ he said. ‘Bring it home, daddy-o.’