‘It’s Cliodhna,’ she said. ‘It was always Cliodhna. Clio, at school. She couldn’t make me change my own name.’

‘She would be your mother, there.’

‘Yes, her.’

‘Have the two of you had an argument, is that what this is?’

‘Aye, you could say that. I don’t want to talk about it, Uncle Donald. I can’t go back, and I didn’t know where else to go.’

Her eyes filled up, and he got worried. He was never quite sure what to do with women when they cried, and while this might be the same child he had picked up out of muddy puddles and hugged when she dropped an ice cream, she now had the added complication of a woman’s body, a body he had registered and put immediately, guiltily, to the back of his mind. He patted her a couple of times on the shoulder.

‘Come on now, love. Come on. It’s going to be all right.’

‘Can I stay with you here?’

He looked around. He had the two chairs, a bed through in the other room. There was a sink that he washed at, topless, in the mornings; the chemical toilet he’d put in last year.

‘I honestly haven’t got the room, Cliodhna. Look at this place. It’s just about big enough for one.’

She started crying harder. He thought back to that last fight with Malcolm, when he’d been angry with him for giving up, for cowardice. Was he just the same, once you scratched the skin?

‘All right, all right. There, lass. I can sleep in the chair for a few days, and we’ll sort something out. Don’t worry. Fash na. Everything will be all right now.’

Had she still been the child he’d last seen, he would have pulled her in, clasped her head close by, wound those curls round his fingers.

He left her tucked up in his bed, tramped the half-mile up the hill to the phone box. Eileen answered on the first ring, like she’d been sitting there.

‘It’s Donald, Eileen. She’s here. She’s with me.’

Eileen let out a tiny moan. ‘I wondered. I did wonder.’

‘I can put her up for a couple of nights at least—’

‘She can’t come home, Donald. She can’t come back.’ She said it in exactly the same way as her daughter had.

‘Eileen, she’s seventeen. She still needs her mammy. She was terrified.’

‘I’m sorry, but she can’t. There’s no way.’ Eileen sounded like she’d been crying, could start again soon.

And that was that. Neither of them would tell him what had happened, only that there was no solving it. He found out the next morning that Cliodhna had been in the middle of her exams, and immediately wanted to make arrangements to get her in at the nearest high school. But she’d been adamant.