‘Oh well, that’s different,’ her father said. ‘I can see that has some validity. What are you getting at, though?’

‘Don’t you know yet?’ Stella asked, and pranced out, leaving the conversation at that.

‘Get us some vulva paper, I mean bog roll, while you’re out,’ her father shouted after her, just before she banged the front door, just to have the last word.

Stella lived on the main shopping street in Ayrness, a short walk from the tattoo parlour in one direction, and Rowan and Inga’s in the other. Neither of them would have got a tattoo, even at her age. They were too wary of what the old guard thought. Only her generation was truly free. It was a new age; she was sure of it. Tara had had it done first, on her ankle. Hers looked a bit like the islands’ flag. Tara’s mother, Amrita, got the idea after going to the Archipelago Women’s Club where Vs were part of the branding. Stella’s V was both more Neolithic, being bigger, and more explicit, seeing as there was no mistaking it. It was not unlike those cowrie shells people wore which were only obviously vulvas if you were minded to be lewd. The ‘thing’ of seventeenth-century parlance, Mx Thompson said.

By the time she got down to the street, the nun and the Pakistani were standing outside M&Co. Skintight jeans were still in fashion, bejewelled with sparkling plastic blobs; rows and rows of them, down either leg. Neither the Bosnian nun nor the Pakistani teenager seemed like potential customers but they were enjoying the perusal, smiling as they gazed into the shop window, their glances meeting in their reflections. The yellow and pink fringe of Mariam’s headscarf trembled as she laughed. The soft black shoe of the nun nudged the blue spotted welly-boot of the other; their fingers – oh little silver darlings, Stella thought, they’re holding hands.