Jen and Eva both spoke very highly of Ursula King – and so, during the two weeks in late August that Zoe spent in the newspaper office doing work experience: shadowing journalists who covered the health beat, crime, arts, finance and immigration (something the islands generally encouraged) – she was shocked by how nobody had a good word to say about their boss. She grew accustomed to the raised eyebrows and shrugs that followed Ms King through the open-plan office, to the disparaging comments over midday coffee concerning her aloof management style, her lack of editorial experience, the piss-poor features she had churned out in Glasgow, where she had worked before returning home, her over-the-water dress sense (she wore short fitted dresses), even the marriage she had failed to hold down (she had sole custody of a son, aged five). To Zoe, who had grown up around women, Ursula’s direct style of speaking seemed normal; but in the office, with its historic macho culture, Ursula was called overly aggressive. Despite her university degree, and her time on the Glasgow daily, she was spoken of as under-qualified.

Zoe was sent out with Colin Grieves, an old-time journalist who covered finance, to a GreenFuel press conference on its latest tidal-power developments. Instead of getting the W8 to Lerston, as Zoe expected, they got into his battered Mazda, a proper rusted island car, and drove at something over the generally observed speed limit of 60 mph along the straight road which linked the archipelago’s largest towns, overtaking three tractors, several geriatrics and the W8 itself, happily puffing out water.

Colin hated green energy, doughnuts with holes in, and feminists. He also hated the W8, Inga at the council, and everything that the evil alliance between the two represented. Environmentalism took the piss, it encouraged sensible individuals to speak as if they were away with the fairies, and the numbers didn’t add up. The infrastructure was exceedingly expensive, with very poor and unreliable returns, and hydrogen buses were the worst of it. We’re a fairly big archipelago at eighteen thousand, he said, barely glancing in his rear-view mirror as he swung off the roundabout into the Lerston industrial estate, larger than Berwick, and even though the council doesn’t receive revenue from the oil industry we rely on it for jobs. The fact that the council is in league with GreenFuel makes me suspicious; I’m not going to stand up cheering as our money is pissed away on cash-gobbling vanity projects. The council’s getting a subsidy from somewhere; and I smell unfair business advantage. He braked hard to avoid hitting a GreenFuel minibus, then sat for a moment behind the wheel, taking several deep puffs on his e-cigarette.

Zoe reported this conversation to Eva later that afternoon, and her grandmother barely flinched—