And oh God, Alison, there she was. She was dancing, alone, in the crowd. She’d kicked off her shoes so she was barefoot, and she was dancing with her eyes closed, and she didn’t move her feet at all, although the rest of her body was caught up in the music, and her arms made wild, wonderful shapes above her head. She danced like nobody else. She danced in a way that the others tried to copy, but each time they almost got it she changed, shifted, did something different, but her feet didn’t leave the floor. Daniel watched her, completely transfixed. He’d never seen anything so beautiful, so uninhibited, so fucking sexy, in all his life.

2

EDINBURGH,
10 OCTOBER 2012

You could always spot a journalist at a gig. Standing at the back, no drink, an air of having seen and heard it all before, and straight off out of it the moment the set ended. Dan Lawrence was one of them, and there he was again, at the Queen’s Hall, watching Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy singing spry and catchy songs about the death of love. Dan never sat if he could stand. You should never sit at a gig; it wasn’t sodding theatre, it wasn’t cinema, it was music. Once, when he first came to Edinburgh, he’d come to the Queen’s Hall on a free ticket to see Prefab Sprout and found he was marooned up on the balcony in a numbered seat, but he’d stood up anyway, looking straight down at the heads of the band, trying to read their set list, which was directly below him, taped to the stage. Tonight, though, he was in his favourite spot, leaning against the wall, as close to the exit as possible. Dan liked Billy – a grizzled alt-country geezer from Louisville – but you wouldn’t know it from his expressionless face; he wasn’t even taking notes, just absorbing precisely those elements of the set that would make good copy, and thinking about what else he could do with the material, what else he could turn it into, in exchange for money.

Afterwards, he walked out of the venue into Clerk Street, without looking for familiar faces or a sniff of a pint, and set off for home. Katelin would be in bed already, sleeping with deep and wild abandon, flat on her back, her arms flung over her head like a child. They often kept different hours, and when he slid into bed alongside her, her steady breathing sent him to sleep like a gentle metronome, and she rarely even stirred: she slept the sleep of the righteous.