Outside, Ali sat for a while on a wall and took a few moments to collect herself. She’d done a sterling job of foxing Beatriz, but man, she was in a spin. The cause of this turmoil? Daniel Lawrence – Dan Lawrence, @DanLawrenceMusic – had landed boldly and with perfect pitch into her peaceful day, delivering to her a beautifully judged slice of 1978, a song – no, not just a song, the song, the very one – that had sent her spiralling back in time. She’d been dealing with a crowded inbox – so many emails, so few of import – when she’d seen the Twitter notification, seen his name, opened the link (with a lurching, pitching sensation of the heart) and had immediately fetched up back in the past, at Kev Carter’s party, for God’s sake; the party where she’d dropped into a sort of Costello-inspired trance, then opened her eyes at the closing chords and realised everyone in the room had been watching her dance. She’d looked immediately for Daniel, and there he’d been: dark-eyed, intense, his gaze locked on her face, and then he’d crossed the room, taken her hand, and led her upstairs. ‘Pump It Up’: a track of tracks. She’d played it, in a mesmerised state, perhaps five or six times. Such a familiar song to her, but this morning, strangely and acutely new because – and she couldn’t explain this either; couldn’t understand why it should make a difference – it had been sent to her by Daniel Lawrence, from across the world. Daniel, who’d been everything to her for a short while, but whose place in her life had long been relegated to a part of her past she was careful not to visit. But this morning, from out of the clear blue sky, there he’d been, and he’d felled her with his good taste and judgement, and the pared-down genius of sending only the song, with all its new-wave attitude, its post-punk resonance.

She hadn’t dithered, this time, or panicked or prevaricated, as she had for a few weeks when she’d first seen his name. This time she’d replied in kind, very decisively, without a moment’s pause: sent a link back to him, Blondie – of course – ‘Picture This’.

She’d propelled it through cyberspace to Dan in Edinburgh, to show him she understood, she remembered too, she believed their shared past was worthy of homage and what better than another nostalgic high point in Kev Carter’s mix tape? For a while she became as obsessed with this as she’d been with ‘Pump It Up’: pressed play each time the song ended, entirely drawn in by Debbie Harry’s fallen-angel face and unmatched magnetism, her astonishing allure in a demure yellow frock. She played it four times, then played it once again, just for Clem Burke’s drumming, and then, mid-listen, she’d suddenly been poleaxed by a seismic shift in mood, a violent landslide into a melee of regret and sorrow and dry-mouthed anxiety. Ghosts and shadows filled her head: a mother, a brother, a household loaded with shame.