‘Yeah, all right, you?’

‘Yeah,’ Dan said. He raised his right thumb to show a short, jagged white scar running from the base of the nail all the way round to the fleshy pad at the back. ‘Apart from this disfigurement, obviously,’ and they both laughed. Reighton Gap, 1974, and Rob and Daniel had only been allowed to go camping there if Dave went with them. Dave, sixteen to their fourteen, and all he’d done by way of supervision was put up the tent, which was when he’d driven a metal peg through Dan’s thumb. It’d needed stitches really, but there was a woman in a caravan with a first-aid kit. She’d swabbed the wound and poured Dettol over it, then bound it in a series of pink Elastoplasts, one on top of another, until the blood stopped seeping through.

‘I blame you for my failure to make it as a lead guitarist,’ Dan said. ‘Couldn’t use my strumming thumb for months.’

‘Reighton Gap,’ Dave said. ‘What a fucking dump. I lost my virginity there though.’

Dan laughed. ‘Easily done, I should think.’

‘Wendy, her name was. I think it was anyway. Might have been Wanda. I was clueless, but she seemed to know what she was doing.’

‘No wonder we never saw you.’

‘She opened my eyes, that girl.’

‘Is Rob doing OK?’

Dave’s smile faded. ‘No. No, he’s not. He’s a drinker.’

Dan said, ‘Ah, right.’

‘We all drink, us Marsdens, but our Rob doesn’t stop. He started when he got made redundant.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Steel. Darnall Works.’

‘Oh, but Rob was …’ Dan hesitated, not wanting to offend.

‘Brainy? Yep, he was. Is. Cleverest lad in our family anyway. He went in on a management scheme, but brains didn’t save you from the chop in the steel industry.’ Dave sniffed, and gazed for a moment out of the window, then turned back to Dan. ‘You did all right though.’

‘That’s tough, about Rob,’ Dan said, and he thought about the passing of time and the lad he’d known, a steady kind of individual, thoughtful and quiet. At Reighton Gap, Rob had searched for fossils on the beach – ammonites, belemnites, crinoids – while Dan had stared at the girls in the sea and imagined them naked. He sat back in his seat and regarded Dave. ‘This is crazy,’ he said. ‘You, on this train. It’s like back to the bloody future.’

‘I know, right? You look the same, sort of. Good-looking bastard.’

‘Why were you in Edinburgh?’

‘Checking out a new site for a bar. This company I work for, they take over derelict buildings and turn ’em into artisan gin palaces.’ He put speech marks around ‘artisan’ with his index fingers.

Dan raised his eyebrows. ‘In Edinburgh?’

‘Leith, believe it or not. By the waterfront.’

‘Is that Bob Marley on your T-shirt, by the way?’