Sheffield. It squatted in her memory like a toad, one of those Grimm brothers’ toads, the warty, malevolent kind, embodying evil. Dan said she’d only have to step off the train at the city-centre station to realise that the place itself was innocent of all charges, especially as she wouldn’t recognise it – he could barely navigate those streets himself since the council started beautifying the place. He kept his tone light, but that didn’t mean he didn’t understand what an ordeal this was for her, catching up with the ghosts of her past. But look, they were together, she’d come to him of her own free will, and he couldn’t help being happy, even if this trip north was, for her, a bit like crossing the Styx to the Underworld. Speaking for himself, he felt renewed, rinsed clean of doubt and bitterness and regret, and shagged out, too, in all honesty: a winning combination of her jet lag and his perpetual ardour had kept them awake most of the night, until they both plunged into spectacular unconsciousness at 5 a.m., when daylight was already seeping through the cracks in the curtains. McCulloch woke them three hours later, demanding – not unreasonably – to be let out, and they’d dragged themselves bodily from the sinking sands of sleep to deal with the dog and make plans. Lisa appeared, a ministering angel bearing a Spanish omelette, and they ate it straight from the little black frying pan she’d cooked it in while she sat with them at the towpath table and smoked her French cigarette. Jim joined them too, proud of the role he’d played in their story, keen to retell it whenever he had the chance, but Ali was mostly under the spell of the hippies, warmed by Lisa’s loopy brand of love and entertained by Frank’s amiable wickedness. Lisa was possessed of a total lack of curiosity about the practical detail of other people’s lives, interested only in the wider picture, the rainbow colours of their souls, the generosity of their hearts. Frank, slowing ever closer to the final halt, generally remained in the shadows of Ophelia’s cabin, although yesterday, while Alison had waited for Daniel, Frank had been briefly reinvigorated by the novelty of her arrival, and had told her a long story about the Beatles at the ashram in Rishikesh, and how one incredible day there’d been John and Paul, Ringo and George, Lisa and Frank, all of them cross-legged on the same flat, hot bungalow roof, practising meditation while being scrutinised by little, grey, sceptical monkeys. Best day of his long life, Frank said, then he’d drifted off to sleep again, worn out by his memories, and Lisa and Alison had talked about, oh, a jumble of subjects, Moroccan spices, stars in the southern hemisphere, the power of music to change the course of a life. Lisa’s mind flitted from one big subject to another like a hummingbird at a fuchsia bush, dipping now here, now there, and rarely still. Alison knew this was otherwise known as a lack of concentration, doubtless the legacy of a life on weed, but it was very freeing to listen to her new-age take on life, and comforting too, not least because she’d wrapped Alison in a smoky quilt and given her chai and a bowl of chana dal, because she was frozen, a hothouse flower from Adelaide for whom this so-called summer in London felt no warmer than an early spring dawn in South Australia. By the time Dan hit the scene in Little Venice, Alison and Lisa were forever connected and when they left after breakfast on Monday for the train to Sheffield, Lisa kissed her on her forehead and slipped an engraved silver bangle off her own wrist and on to Ali’s, to keep her safe until she returned. Ali liked this, a talisman was exactly what she needed; that, and the warm body of McCulloch sleeping on her feet, and the level gaze and steady confidence of Dan on the opposite side of the table from her on the northbound train.