From behind his desk, he let his eyes roam over his past. It told the story of his life, that wall; it kept him steady in this house in Stockbridge, with its long back garden, its shed for the bikes, its front door painted Sheffield Wednesday blue. He and Katelin had been itinerants at first: moved five times in as many years. Then he’d written a brilliantly precocious and obsessive history of the NME and got a half-decent advance, the like of which didn’t happen any more in music publishing, and suddenly gone were the days of dossing, the mattresses on the floor, the mildew on the ceiling, the naked light bulbs, the kilims nailed to their bedroom windows creating a permanent, seedy gloaming. God, though, those days were something else. She was studying Spanish at the university, and Dan spent his nights at gigs and his days writing unsolicited music reviews for the Scotsman. They’d lived on Katelin’s grant and the occasional tenner that Dan made for his writing. They’d met in Colombia, a bar in Bogotá. Katelin was plucky, an intrepid, red-haired, sturdy girl from Coleraine, with skin as pale as milk, even after two months travelling in South America. She spoke fluent Spanish, drank like a navvy, and sang raunchy Irish ballads – folk filth, she called it – when she was hammered. For the first time since arriving in the country, Dan had started having a good time.

They stuck together. She’d gone back to university to finish her degree in the September, and Dan had called on his folks in Sheffield to fill them in on his future, then hitched and walked, with a rucksack and his guitar, all the long way to Edinburgh. By the time he knocked on the door of Katelin’s Marchmont Road flat, he had holes in his trainers, blisters on the soles of his feet, and he hadn’t eaten for a day and a half. He waited on the doorstep, light-headed, half-starved, and for the few minutes it took her to answer, he considered the possibility that she’d be horrified to see him, or – worse – that she didn’t really exist. But then the door opened and Katelin was there, all the flesh and blood of her, assembled exactly as Dan remembered. She’d smiled and said, ‘You took your feckin’ time,’ and that was that.