RUTH

Glasgow, 23 January 2018

It was like skiving, like playing hooky. A whole day snatched out of time.

As soon as she’d thought this, Ruth felt foolish. Which would you rather have – a day off work, or your friend alive?

Don’t answer that.

Alison had been great, really she had. Ruth had misjudged her. She’d appeared there, in the woods, gently pulled Ruth back inside and wrapped a towel around her wet hair. She’d said the cat would come home when she was hungry. She’d refused to let Ruth sleep in her house that night, packing her up and folding her softly into the front seat of her car. The next morning, Ruth woke to hear Alison on the phone, forceful like she’d never been.

‘Well, her best friend just killed herself. In her house. No, Ruth’s house. She’s the one who found the body. You’ll give her the week off work, Greg.’

Before she’d left for work, which had happened under extreme protest, Alison had suggested, in this new weak-tea voice she was using, that Ruth would need to let people know.

‘Her family. Friends. That sort of thing. People should know. And she was famous, a bit, wasn’t she? What happens when famous people die? Anyway, just when you feel up to it, obviously.’

The taxi fare from Alison’s to Clio’s flat in Glasgow was twenty-six pounds, and Ruth paid it with a giggle, because the numbers suddenly meant nothing. The stairwell smelled of cheap disinfectant, underneath it something sharp and noxious like man’s pee. The older women in the close all took their turns to clean it; the mop and bucket would be left, pointedly, outside Clio’s door once a month.

Ruth should go in, really. She should open Clio’s garish turquoise door, its slapdash home paint-job still streaky, with blobs on the skirting and facing walls. When Alison had suggested she use today to make contact with Clio’s friends and family, she’d probably imagined her doing that from the freshly laundered sheets of her own bed. But Ruth had scrolled through her phone and come up with very few people who knew Clio, and she didn’t think it was appropriate that any of them were the first to hear about it. She needed to go through family if she could.