“We’re going to have such a lovely time, now it’s just the two of us,” her mother said. “Aren’t we? It’s us girls against the world.”

Katrina nodded. She thought of Jill, living her new life in Edinburgh, and wondered when she would come back to visit, already half knowing the answer was never. Still, Katrina was relieved to see her mother up, and she was also absolutely starving, so she squashed down the prickly anxious feeling in her chest and sat at the table to receive her food.

There followed several months of “girls’ trips”, which involved Katrina being swooped upon suddenly, made to put on a series of new dresses her mother had bought for her (each, Katrina noted with dismay, frillier than the last), and then taken on a day out. Sometimes these were wonderful: they would go into Glasgow and Katrina’s mother would visit the shops and then buy Katrina a huge milkshake and take her to the cinema (“the pictures”, Katrina’s mother said, although Katrina knew only old people called it this, and she thought her mother must know this too). Or they would drive for an hour to get to the beach and then eat fish and chips and ice cream sitting on the sand, however cold the wind was.

“Aren’t we having a lovely time?” her mother would say to her, and usually Katrina would agree.

Other times, however, these outings were more bizarre, like when her mother took her to the hairdresser’s, had them seated in chairs side by side and said with her high, tinkling laugh, “Make us look like sisters.” Perhaps the hairdresser had taken pity on Katrina, because she gave both of them fairly nondescript shoulder-length cuts that weren’t striking enough in themselves to make the similarity emphatic. Katrina didn’t mind her new cut, but she had preferred having her hair long so she could wear it in two plaits.

Some of these outings would take place on school days, which Katrina didn’t like. She enjoyed school and worried about getting behind with her work. The worst occasion was when she was supposed to be presenting her project on the Victorians to the rest of the class. Katrina had been working on it for two weeks and had created a model of a Victorian schoolroom out of two shoeboxes she’d cut and sellotaped to make into one, with desks made of matchboxes, and the dolls from her dollhouse stitched into tiny uniforms she’d sewn herself out of dark blue cloth. A teacher at the front brandished a matchstick cane. When Katrina’s mother said on the Wednesday morning Katrina was supposed to present, “I’ve got a lovely surprise for you today,” Katrina’s heart sank.