A few miles west of Bristol she dry-heaved into the stinking pan of the train’s toilets. O’Donabháin’s session was one of the earliest, at eleven a.m. on a weekday. He’s a harmless old murderer poet these days was what Wales reckoned, by the look of it; his session was three lines lost in the middle of the festival programme, part of a strand called Voices Redeemed. Other redeemed voices were a white South African apartheid-era cop, a reformed heroin dealer with an inside account of the trade and a perjurer MP who’d found Jesus in prison. They’d been given afternoon and evening sessions. O’Donabháin seemed to have been marked down. The walk from the station to the festival campus in warm wind and strong sunshine lifted Bec’s spirits. When she entered the artificial brightness of the conference centre, her soles squeaking on the expanse of corporate carpet, her gorge rose again and her heart hammered. She stood in a toilet cubicle, arms locked against the edge of the cistern, head hanging, drool spilling from her lower lip.
