‘Switch it off,’ Katelin said. ‘Or Gordon’ll have your guts for garters.’

‘Which winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,’ said Gordon, ‘was also a first-class cricketer?’

‘That’s sport, not literature,’ Katelin said loudly, hoping Gordon would hear. Rose-Ann pushed the sheet, and the pencil, across the table to Dan.

‘I think Golding was a cricketer,’ Duncan said in his quiz whisper.

Dan was thinking only about Alison Connor, whose sixteen-year-old ghost had turned his head towards her own. Dark brown hair and the smell of fresh air and her impenetrable, infuriating secrecy.

‘Dan?’ Rose-Ann said.

‘What?’ he said, remembering where he was. His phone was still in his hand.

‘Turn your goddamn phone off,’ she hissed.

‘And answer the bloody question,’ Katelin said, tapping the answer sheet in front of him with an index finger.

‘It’s William Golding.’ This was Duncan, leaning in and whispering urgently again. ‘I’m almost certain.’

‘What question?’ Dan said. He pushed the off button on his phone and slid it away, back into the dark warmth of his pocket. There you go, Alison Connor, he thought, you’ll be safe in there for a while.

Katelin heaved a sigh. ‘Nobel Prize for Literature, first-class cricketer, who is he?’

‘Oh, right,’ Dan said. He picked up the pencil and wrote Samuel Beckett. Duncan peered at the answer.

‘You sure?’ he said. ‘I’d swear it was Golding.’

When Dan was still Daniel, he’d shared a bedroom with his older brother Joe, who had a job in the sports centre by day, but by night was a snake-hipped, Oxford-bagged Northern Soul disciple who hitched to Wigan Casino whenever he could, carrying talc to keep the slide on the soles of his shoes. Their sister Claire – four years older than Dan, two years younger than Joe – loved the Osmonds, and only the Osmonds, as if extending her listening habits would have been a betrayal of her Mormon vows. There was just one record player in the Lawrence household, and it was Joe’s, so whenever he was home Dan listened in on the Vel-Vets, the Pearls and the Dells, and watched his brother spin and drop on the plywood square he’d taped on to their bedroom carpet, then when Joe was at work or on a Wigan odyssey, Claire would claim the turntable, and it was wall-to-wall schmaltz and groove with Donny and the boys. Up to the age of thirteen, Daniel tolerated this state of affairs, but then he heard Genesis at a friend’s house, and he was up, up and away on his own musical journey: the one that had brought him to where he was now; the one he was still on.