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greeted him with a thud of his tail against his legs. Upstairs, Stacey was sitting up in bed with Holly curled around her.
    ‘Sorry, did I wake you?’
    ‘No. This one did. Said you’ve gone a-hunting. Don’t squash me, Holly,’ Stacey shifted her daughter off her legs.
    ‘Johnny Mac’s got a job for me.’
    ‘Good. He’s going places, you know?’
    ‘Yeah?’ Phil rummaged in a box on the top shelf of the wardrobe.
    ‘He might have something permanent soon. He’ll need someone to run the office full-time.’
    ‘Here it is. I knew I put these tapes somewhere.’
    ‘Are you listening, Phil?’
    ‘I can hear you.’ He turned and looked at her. Stacey was prettier when she didn’t frown, but it seemed to be her default expression these days. ‘I can’t see how answering the phone for Mackenzie is a fantastic career move.’
    ‘The bills don’t pay themselves,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should apply for it.’
    ‘Maybe you should.’ He bent down and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I need to go. I should be back before you have to be at the pub. Bye, little chicken.’ But Holly rolled away and stuck her thumb in her mouth.
    As he left Moorsby-on-Humber, the sky was growing lighter. Phil reached over to the passenger seat and grabbed a tape from the carrier bag. The delicate percussive opening of Betty LaVette’s ‘Let Me Down Easy’ made him smile. Any second now the vocal would kick in with a swift boot to his guts. It was one of those tunes that landed him back at another time in his life, over a decade ago. A girl called Katie, kissing him goodbye at the airport on Ibiza, the salt still on her lips from her morning swim. She said she’d wait for him, wished she could come with him, but he was on his way home for a funeral. His mother was dead and he had to face it on his own.
    He hit eject and failed to catch the tape. It skittered across the floor under the pedals. He grabbed another. The call and response of Chris Kenner’s ‘Land Of A Thousand Dances’ shuddered through the speakers. Rewind to six months before his mum died. Chuck Everett’s Soul Bar in Playa d’en Bossa. Chuck made him some of these tapes so he could get a decent band together for the bar. For a blissful few months they’d played in paradise to packed houses, Phil on trombone bigging up the brass sound. But when Phil got back from that wet, English funeral he found that his so-called mate had moved in with Katie. No. Chris Kenner had to go too. Phil managed to get the action right this time and caught the tape. He dug a little deeper in the bag, finally settling with Beverley Knight. Good driving music, ‘Moving On Up (On The Right Side)’. Phil laughed, the van wasn’t moving up on anyone. A few bars in to the song, he was overtaken by a hearse. When the Humber Bridge came into view, his heart lifted. You really felt like you were going somewhere on that bridge, even if it was only Hull on the other side. People knocked Hull, but Phil liked it. A port was always full of possibilities; it was a way in and a way out.
    He had the instructions in Mackenzie’s wobbly handwriting: pick up the stock from a warehouse on the industrial estate and take it to an address in Doncaster. Easy money. He thought Stacey would be happy for once that he’d got some work. But somehow it was never enough. She didn’t seem to understand that he needed to be flexible in case any bookings came in. And whatever else Johnny Mackenzie was, he was certainly flexible. He always had something on the go and was good for a bit of cash in hand.
    Phil sang along, drumming the wheel with his index fingers. Driving jobs were all right. Even in this old heap of junk he could get into the music, be with his thoughts and get paid for it. He’d done his fair share of bar work but he hated it, it was all too rushed. That was how he met Stacey. He’d come back from playing a stint with an Abba cover band on the Hull-Rotterdam ferry. He’d been trying to hitch