The environment: totally fucked.

By now Zoe knew, of course, how past-life/patriarchal the world beyond the islands was, with its male-dominated throb of tyres on roads, testosterone-fuelled engines broadcasting their smoke into the air, doors slamming through endless streets, planes shrieking overhead. Island living was superior. But during the autumn half-term, when Kath was off to London, Pauline to her cousins’ in Edinburgh, Tara taking the boat to Berwick, and Stella’s family driving to Wales, Zoe (along with a not-inconsiderable proportion of her peers, but still, she felt abandoned) stayed in Ayrness. In the summer, her island-prison was at least enlivened by the tourists, with their unstinting jollity, their interesting-looking beach novels and awe-inspiring dresses. Few were the visitors to the islands in the autumn, however.

Her Uncle George came up to see them. Sitting in the library at her homework desk, she overheard him talking on the phone in a heated way about the woods above the house. She knew he was arguing with Sebastian, her father. (Zoe, the silent ghost of Harcourt House, avidly absorbing grown-up conversation.)

Our islands: boring boring boring

As George ranted about the bottom line, Zoe stood in the library at Harcourt House looking at the old map of the islands which hung there. The map was in black and white, with old-fashioned spellings. This was what the islands felt like to her:

black and white

OLD-FASHIONED

spotted with marks of age and usage.

JUDGE: She took you to Cwen, the island?

ZOE: Cwen? Yes. Many times.

JUDGE: Did you like going there with her?

ZOE: I did. [Laughs] I only sometimes wished she wouldn’t talk to me so much about women.

BOYS

Yes, them. Zoe has begun to notice the few men around her as if the spotlight of her brain has picked them out of a generalised darkness: her uncles, brusque, false-friendly. That boy, Euan, from biology, taller than her only by a fraction, who smells so familiar (laundry powder, school dinners). At night, or worse, when she is sitting at her desk, doing her homework, she feels a cavernous warm space open up within her; it is waiting for something. She thinks of Mr Mills, who teaches their class about renewables. Even though his eyes move over the classroom of pupils in annoyance – teenage girls are so stupid – she bestows on him her thoughts. She doesn’t think of him naked – she doesn’t know how to think such a thing – but she thinks of him so often, his clothes become superfluous; he is the sum of the words he speaks to her and they are thrilling.