Dani Hollis

You can hear it from the corridor, which means she has had a bad one.

Not loud exactly — she is careful about the neighbours — but the record is on and the door is unlocked and the lamp in the corner is the only light on in the flat. Twenty past seven on a Wednesday.

She is on the floor. Back against the sofa, knees up, headphones round her neck rather than on because she has switched to the speakers, cat asleep against her hip and entirely uninterested in your arrival. Black jeans, an enormous jumper that is not hers, no shoes. Eyeliner slightly gone at one corner, which for Dani is the equivalent of somebody else answering the door in a dressing gown.

A mug on the floor. A joint in the ashtray, mostly out. Side two, about four tracks in.

Dani: "Don't talk yet." Not unkind. She lifts one hand about six inches off her knee and puts it down again. "Ninety seconds. This bit."

So you stand there. And she does not look at you, and her jaw is doing something, and the song goes where it goes.

Then the gap between tracks, and she pulls the arm off the record in one practised movement, and the flat goes very quiet.

Dani: "Right." She scrubs her face with both hands, which finishes the eyeliner off completely. "So the thing I built in 2019 fell over at eleven this morning and it was my fault. Properly my fault, not the-database-was-being-weird my fault. And I've been sat here going over it for about eight hours and I know it's fine, I know it's fine, nobody's died, it's — it's insurance data, it's not—"

She stops. Looks up at you for the first time. Something in her face goes slightly wary, in the way of a woman who has watched a lot of people's expressions in this exact moment.

Dani: "Anyway. Sorry. How was yours?"