He wants to evaporate. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were … I’ll make sure there’s no damage done.’

She is shaking her head. ‘Have a bit more …’ Her arms gesture around her helplessly. ‘I mean, I shouldn’t have to … you know?’ She is being brave, but the fear is seeping through.

He coughs. ‘I’m sorry. It’s been a bit of a tough job, aye.’

She looks at him as if he’s the last line on an optician’s wall chart. He drops his gaze to the ground and reaches for the door.

‘People talk, you know,’ she says.

‘What?’

She shakes her head and says, ‘See you Wednesday,’ then goes back to painting her nails, as if he has already left the room.

The afternoon passes slowly at school. The teacher chalks words on the rolling blackboard. They take turns to read from a children’s novel about the Highland Clearances and the Countess of Sutherland. She used to live up the road in a white turreted castle full of deer heads and lion skins. The story is about the villainous Patrick Sellar and his flaming crofts. There are scared mothers, hungry children, sheep, dirty tenements, girls at harsh looms, lost fingers, seasickness, the windy deck of a ship, Hudson’s Bay, trading posts, fur and pine. Lauren thinks of the empty fields that stretch around them like patchwork and imagines twin landscapes in Canada. In under two hours, you can reach the most northerly part of the Scottish mainland and stand three hundred miles west of Norway. Lauren wonders why the crofters didn’t go there instead.

Before art class, the children spread newspapers over their tables and put on their fathers’ old paint-stained shirts. The teacher tells them to paint their favourite fairy tale. Lauren carefully paints a cow leaping over a crescent moon while the dog plays a fiddle under jagged stars.

‘Did you know’, says Lauren to Gary, the boy who sits next to her in an Aberdeen shirt every day, ‘that you can see shapes and animals in the stars? Star signs. They tell you what will happen to you in the future.’

Gary is busy painting a black horse and doesn’t answer.

The light starts fading before three o’clock. Lauren watches it from the vertiginous sash window. The bell rings. Girls and boys separate and mill out to their cloakrooms at opposite ends of the building. The lights flicker and the narrow corridor is extinguished into black.

The sudden dark makes the girls bleat and shift close together. The teacher’s raised voice can be heard, telling them to keep calm, she is getting a torch. ‘Everyone this way to the main door. Everyone this way. Turn around.’ Children jostle Lauren on both sides, shrieking and chattering. She finds it hard to breathe. An instinct to run floods her, but she’s hemmed in.