Lauren jams her hand in her right coat pocket for her knife, but it’s empty, the same as the left. She feels the nub of a shoe close to her heel and stomps on it, hard, feeling the ridges of toes crunch flat. She turns around and wipes soup off her face with one hand while the other shoots out and rips out a small hank of Maisie’s hair. She begins to run fast down the open walkway, away from the howling. Her footsteps reverberate and her breath comes out in gulps. Her fists are hot with sticky soup and hair.

‘I’m gonna curse you. I’m gonna curse you,’ she repeats breathlessly until she reaches the cloakroom entrance.

‘Hie, Lauren!’ Billy walks out of the double doors with another boy, David. They are wrapped up in football scarves and hats. He runs to her. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Maisie.’ Rage is pulsing through her. Her own hair, thick with green gunk, could crawl off her head like an animal.

‘Honestly, enough’s enough.’ He looks over at his friend.

‘We’ll find them. I don’t hit girls, but you know. We’re gonna bloody find them,’ David says.

Lauren’s anger flickers at his tone, this other boy, repeating something he has heard, something he ought to say. She smiles a fake smile, driving down anger and embarrassment and freezing it. She can feel the clump of Maisie’s hair growing sticky in her hand. ‘My dad’s gonna go mental,’ she says. She can see excitement flare in David’s eyes.

Billy looks at her a second and says, ‘Here.’ He pulls off his Aberdeen beanie and thrusts it at her.

‘What?’

‘Just till you get to the toilets, so they don’t see. Go on.’

She beams at him, scrunching the soup out of her hair. ‘Thanks. I’ll wash it for you.’

‘Go,’ Billy says.

On her way to the cloakrooms, in the hot hat, Lauren checks her pockets again, but her knife is gone. She tries to remember the last time she used it.

By the time Niall leaves the house at lunchtime, the sky is darkening and the air has a sharp bite. He stops at the Spar and walks past the cereal to the top of the booze aisle in a daze, staring at the labels.

‘Niall.’ Jill, the woman who served him last night, comes out of the back room behind him, pushing aside heavy strips of clear plastic that hang in the doorway. He hadn’t realized she knows his name. He nods.

‘Y’allright?’ she says as one startled syllable.

‘Yes, thank you. You?’

‘Have you heard about wee Ann-Marie?’ She jerks her chin to the door, the outside.

‘Aye.’

‘I was telling Aileen, who’s at the till the now, mind when you were in here? Mind … she was in here too.’

‘Aye.’

‘And you left together.’ She is serious now, giving space to the words.