Since the inquiry opened, a mainland company has begun selling T-shirts printed with Stella’s vulva tattoo. When Tara announced that ‘Climate Change is MAN-made’, her statement was turned into a rap by an artist, DJV, which has had 609,785 views on YouTube. Both young women have had several dozen men offer to rape them.

JUDGE: Can you elaborate, please, on the programme of feminist classes that was put in place while you were at the school?

STELLA: Well, apart from the Monday morning lectures for the boys, and the bonding sessions for the girls, everything else was strictly optional.

JUDGE: What were the options?

STELLA: Every Wednesday morning Inga Stenbridge came in to host a Female Power workshop—

(Eight a.m., the islands still dark, the trees dripping with mist, the schoolgirls chanting, We women: beautiful women, strong women, hurt women, powerful women.)

STELLA: —and during Thursday assemblies there were lectures. But no prescribed topics.

JUDGE: What might those topics have included?

STELLA: For example, Mx Thompson gave a very useful assembly on contraception.

JUDGE: You mean, the lecture called ‘How to Pin it All on Women: The Sexist Basis of Western Contraception’?

STELLA: That’s right. And on Fridays there was girls’ kung fu.

SOLICITOR: [Whispers]

JUDGE: It has been brought to my attention, more than once, indeed there have also been online rumours, and some islanders have been telling members of the press that you were encouraged to hold . . . Vulva Viewings?

STELLA: [Laughs] Men have been saying all kinds of things, recently. But, no. Not actual vulvas. Only my tattoo.

The day Stella got it done – the vulva tattooed in green between her shoulder blades – her father said to her, ‘What’s that triangle? A bird?’

‘It’s a vulva, Dad,’ Stella explained. (Very patient daughter.)

Her father said: ‘It looks like a child’s drawing of a bird.’ And warming to his theme: ‘A bird shitting. That other thing, child, is down below; you think you’re likely to forget?’ And thinking he was really being witty now: ‘Is that what this is, a reminder?’

‘I don’t need a reminder,’ Stella said, squinting a little as she tried to look at her tattoo, which was effectively in her blindspot, and experiencing (it is true) the thrill of the novelty intermixed with an atavistic sense of horror. She was standing at the window of the flat; sunlight came in, warming, but only barely, her bare back. Down below, in the street, shoppers were passing by muffled in coats and hats and scarves; it was winter, after all. She saw the tall Bosnian nun, sweeping along in her bright green ankle-length tweed dress, and with her, another little dash of colour, pink and yellow amidst the British blue and grey, the Pakistani teenager.

‘It’s Neolithic,’ Stella said, and pulled on the coat that was lying over the kitchen chair. ‘The Neolithic people carved them on their altars.’