Dan took a beer from the fridge, flipped the lid, then sprawled across the sofa and – as he often did, these days – permitted himself the luxury of thinking a while about Alison Connor: the girl he used to know, not the woman she’d become. Alison sprang so easily to mind now, after all those years of absence, and when he closed his eyes he could see her clearly in 3D, a perfectly formed hologram girl in his Sheffield bedroom, where most of their hours together had been spent. God, she’d meant all the world to him when he was eighteen. He’d thought they’d break out of Sheffield together, grow up together, live their lives together, raise funky children with a proper appreciation of music together. When she went – bleak, bleak day, the day he realised she’d gone – she put him into a state of pain so dark, so deep, that he didn’t properly start to heal until he found Katelin four years later in Bogotá. Alison Connor. The smell of her hair, what was it? Just shampoo and Sheffield, probably, but Christ, it was good. And her laugh! Making Alison laugh was the best, it was payday, because she was such a grave and serious girl, as if all her life she’d been wary of fun. She’d fitted into his family life like a hand into a fucking glove; then she’d left them high and dry. There’d been some competition back then for whose heart was in worse shape, his own or his dad’s. Bill had retreated to the pigeon loft for days, and nobody’d believed Alison wasn’t coming back.

Dan drained his beer and sat up. He needed a song for Ali and he knew now what it was going to be. Frank Ocean, ‘Thinkin Bout You’, a slow-burn, beautiful, intimate torch song from R&B’s new wunderkind. Dan copied the link, and pasted it on the growing thread he shared with Ali.

There you are, Alison, he thought. See what you make of that, all the way across the globe, down under in your Adelaide bedroom. He binned his empty bottle and thought about going to bed, then at the door there was a tap-tap-tap, a looming shadow, a hesitant voice. ‘Ahem, Dan? All well in there?’

Jim.

Dan sighed and hung his head. ‘Yes, Jim, fine. You OK?’

‘Oh, tickety-boo, but since you’re still up, I’ve some Lamb’s Navy Rum, fancy a tot?’

Dan unlocked the door and opened it, intending to say no thanks, early start, train to catch. But there stood Jim, hope like a light in his eyes, a bottle in one hand and two enamel mugs in the other.

‘Haven’t seen much of you,’ Jim said. ‘Haven’t seen a soul all day, in fact.’

So Dan smiled and held open the door. ‘Can’t be having that, Jim,’ he said. ‘Come on in.’

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