In front, Maisie’s brother Stuart is telling Billy about oil rigs. It is all he will talk about, given the chance. ‘It’s semi-submersible, see. You’ve to watch it doesn’t sink.’

‘When I go to Disneyland Paris tomorrow I think there’s gonna be a ride that’s semi-submersible.’

Lauren wonders whether the MacAllister kids were in the forest the previous day after all. She is about to ask Stuart when the hand yanks her plait again, to more laughter. Jenny, a blur of black hair beside her, whips round in her seat, pointing a pastel fingernail. ‘I saw that. Yous two quit it.’

‘What are you talking about?’ comes the reply.

‘Leave her alone.’

Lauren pulls her knees up towards her. ‘It’s OK.’

The day passes quietly. Lauren’s Primary 6 class draws pictures of ancient Egyptians on coloured paper and sticks them to the walls. Lauren draws Tutankhamun with a blue and yellow headdress. She learns how to spell ‘sphinx’ and writes it six times in her best handwriting.

In Maths she helps their textbook’s series characters, Olivia and Rajesh, to solve puzzles as they trek through the rainforest. She has to separate blue spiders from red spiders and see how many stones they need to build a temple. How high it will be. At what angle it slopes.

At morning interval, she buys Highlander crisps from the tuck shop and eats them sitting against the radiator in the girls’ cloakroom, licking salty crumbs from her fingers. Most of the children are playing outside, but she prefers to go unnoticed here, in the warm. The space is empty today, apart from her classmate Rachel Munroe, who is practising the fiddle over by their row of coat pegs. Rachel comes to school every day with a sleek, high ponytail that swishes back and forth when they play sports. She writes everything in scented gel pens.

If people play a musical instrument at school, it’s usually the fiddle or the chanter. Each student learns the same tunes in the same order, by ear. The chanter players like to huddle together in the playground to practise together. Mr Muir, with his puffy red cheeks, is their teacher, priming them for the high-school pipe band.

Marching around the village on a Saturday night, playing the bagpipes while everyone watches, is Lauren’s idea of hell. She loves the fiddle though. The school fiddle players prefer to play alone at lunchtimes. If two are in the cloakrooms at the same time, they’ll compete with each other. Rachel is now running the gamut of the primary-level repertoire, each song a little faster and more complex than the last.