Dan’s immediate neighbours on the canal were Lisa and Frank at the stern end, capable Jim at the bow. Lisa and Frank were old hippies, summer-of-love originals who claimed to have stayed on an ashram with the Beatles, but it was probably just the pot talking. Jim was lonely, a retired merchant seaman who couldn’t live in a house, needed the gentle wash of water to rock him to sleep at night, missed his crew and the force-nine gales round the Bay of Biscay and the sardine sandwiches on the ten o’clock watch. He was also a first-rate handyman, always in a boiler suit, tinkering with his pristine narrowboat, Veronica Ann, rubbing down her paintwork, greasing her innards. Lisa and Frank’s Ophelia was going to rack and ruin. She peeled and rusted with quiet grace while they cooked aloo gobi in the galley and ate it cross-legged on the flat roof, then lay on their backs and shared a joint. Jim battened down his hatch on this nefarious activity but many a time Dan joined them, although never if Katelin was with him. Student counsellors couldn’t smoke pot, she said, and she wouldn’t bend, even for Frank’s home-grown cannabis, which – as Lisa said, without irony – was full of goodness, organically grown. But Katelin rarely came to London anyway; this was Dan’s orbit, Dan’s world. This city, these streets, this boat; her name was Crazy Diamond, the choice of a previous owner, but what a choice! Shine on, he’d thought when he saw her for the first time, a for-sale notice taped to her side, a phone number and ‘Call Paddy’ scrawled underneath in biro, like an instruction for Dan alone. So he’d called Paddy, and within two weeks he’d had a key to the boat and another to the towpath gate, and a licence from the Canal & River Trust to say, yes, Crazy Diamond was his. This was ten years ago, and Katelin had liked the idea very much at first, but then discovered she felt too confined to relax here, and the whole cassette-toilet thing freaked her out, so the boat had shifted, over time, from the notion of joint ownership to being only Dan’s, his lair in London, and here, among this canal-dwelling crowd, he felt off-grid, cut loose. His stuff was all over the cabin and the place was a tip, a comfortable tip, on his own terms, and smoking pot with Frank and Lisa was just part of the same scene. They weren’t reckless about it, or irresponsible; sometimes they burned bushy sprigs of rosemary on a barbecue on the towpath to mask the smell.