Tony nodded. Waits had not played ‘Martha’ at the gig, though he had played ‘Time’ at the end and, for a moment, listening to it, Tony had felt truly invisible, like he had disappeared into the music, half hoping not to return from it.

He'd thought about the song one day, while he was teaching Shauna Laird’s class ‘Birches’ by Robert Frost. They’d talked about Frost’s comment that sometimes he’d like to get away for a while, climbing away from the earth but knowing he could return. Shauna had nodded when he’d explained what Frost was saying.

‘Like when your ma’s doing your head in, and you want to get away frae her but you don’t either ’cause you’d miss her if she wasn’t there. Everyone must feel like that,’ she’d said.

‘That’s what makes it such a good poem. It’s saying something you always thought but never realised you were thinking and never expressed.’

‘Do you think if he was alive now, he’d be on drugs?’ she asked. to a chorus of laughter from her classmates.

‘He’d not be the first poet to take drugs if he was,’ Tony had joked.

He’d thought of the conversation the morning of her funeral, as he’d seen her for the last time in her coffin. Should he have said something that day in class, something about the dangers of drugs? Or should he have said something when he first saw her in Liverpool Betty’s? Or when he saw her getting up off the toilet floor? When should he have intervened? And would she even have wanted him to? In the end, as he said goodbye to her that morning, he decided that he should have tried.

‘And you’re away again,’ Karen said. He felt a little sick as he was brought once more to the car, to Karen, to Barr standing outside at the door of the pub.

‘I’m sorry.’ He felt himself unbalanced, as the past and present merged, overlapped and separated once more, as if he was compelled to follow memory after memory, down the rabbit hole of his own making.

‘Am I that poor company?’

‘I didn’t sleep last night,’ Tony said. “I must be tired. You’re not poor company at all. I’m so glad to see you again.’

He noticed a flush spreading along Karen’s neck and jawline, before Barr tapped on her side window and, somewhat gratefully, she opened the door.

‘Can some of you speak to him?’ Barr said.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Take a look,’ Barr said. ‘I give up.’