What Zoe’s father failed to provide in terms of presence/attention (forget meal-cooking), he made up for (in other people’s eyes) by his appearance on national media. I heard your dad on Radio 4 this morning, Pauline’s mum would say approvingly, as she stepped through the back door with Pauline, in time for macaroni cheese. Or: Your father does come across so well on telly, doesn’t he? Or: Hey guys! Zoe, Zoe, quick! Your dad’s being interviewed again! (Kath’s younger sister). And so Zoe would enter the front room sheepishly, squeezing on to the settee between Kath and her mum and sister, and watch with a mixture of pride, shyness and fear: as her father argued with a member of the opposition about fisheries policy. That was the nearest she got to having a real father mostly.

Zoe would’ve died for the story Pauline told: of locking herself in the bathroom when she first got her period, of her father standing in the passage, banging on the door, and shouting, Get on with it, child! Do you want me to come in and wipe your bottom? Of her coming out, and telling him what had happened; of him immediately hugging her to him, and saying, Run and tell your mother. Of them having his special spaghetti for dinner that evening. What would it be like to have a dad like that? A dad you could talk to, one to one, in person? Her periods hadn’t started yet. But when they did, she would ring Sebastian up and tell him. And he would be so—

Friends: often mean, sometimes hateful.

At school, during one of her regular week-long periods of being un-friended by her friends, Zoe walked into the toilets in the library, to find two older girls sitting on the floor under the hand towels, stamping a pile of leaflets with green stars and stickers. She knew exactly who they were: Stella Armitage and Tara Gill. They looked up at her and grinned.

‘Here, take this,’ said Tara, handing her a leaflet. With her shaved head she could’ve been a boy. It was rumoured she had a triangular tattoo on her ankle. ‘We’re having a gathering this afternoon.’

‘You’ll come, yes?’ said Stella, who wore green nail polish, had a nose ring and played the fiddle.

Zoe took the leaflet and retreated to a cubicle. As she peed, she read, The polar ice sheets are melting. The time for inaction is over. See you@5, Library Meeting Room.

When she came out again, the girls had gone, but she could smell something of them in the air still, through the air freshener, a smoky woodiness. The Green Club. That would be something to tell her father, the man on the telly, the next time he ever stopped to ask her anything about herself. That she, like him, was an environmentalist.