This was the mode of attack Katrina had feared the most. She suspected that she was being selfish, perhaps monstrously so. But she knew, too, that she had to go forwards, that she had to get away as Jill said. She was glad she had had the foresight to find a room in advance, to pay the landlady a small deposit from her savings and arrange to move in the following week. Otherwise, faced with this, she didn’t think she’d ever have been able to go through with it.

“You’ll be O.K., Mum,” she said, attempting to sound cheerful and bracing. “I’ll be back every weekend, and I can come round for tea some evenings in the week, too.”

“You won’t be able to get here. You must be mad if you think I’ll pick you up, drive all that way.”

“I’ll get the bus,” Katrina said.

“I won’t pick you up from the stop.”

“I’ll walk. Honestly, Mum, you’ll hardly notice I’m gone.”

Her mother began to cry loudly, but when Katrina tried to comfort her, she batted her away, talking inarticulately about how selfish Katrina was, how Katrina wouldn’t be capable of living alone in the city, that she wouldn’t cope, that she would probably be raped and murdered within the first week.

“You can’t even cook,” she said, and Katrina, who had been cooking for both of them since she was eleven, let this pass.

“I’ll manage,” she said.

“But what will happen to me?”

“You’ll be fine.”

“How can you do this to me?”

“I’ll be back to visit all the time,” Katrina said again. She felt as though she were committing a terrible crime, and the excitement of her new job—it had felt like the first genuine achievement of her life—was spoiled utterly. But still she was determined to go through with it. Perhaps this was the first real indication she’d had of her own personality: that she was irredeemably selfish, deep down. She could hardly regret it, though; she had begun to see how she might survive.

Her new room was a little back bedroom in the house of a middle-aged widow in west Glasgow, not too far from the offices of the Herald. Katrina only had to take a fifteen-minute bus ride each morning, and it felt like luxury to get ready in the quiet of her own room, putting on a new pink lipstick without her mother ridiculing it, and eating breakfast undisturbed. Her landlady was stern and imperious, but mostly left Katrina alone once she’d satisfied herself that Katrina wasn’t the kind to try to bring men back, or to break the rules about when she was allowed to use the kitchen or take a bath.