She began marching around Ruth’s hallway, playing an imaginary trombone.

‘Clio. Clio, come on. Let’s get you sitting down.’

Ruth steered her into the kitchen.

‘Anyway, I was supposed to be playing this big big triumphant set, right, all the hits, ending up with “Rise Up” backed by a fucking choir – I mean, a community choir, but still. An I just sat there thinking how did we not see this. Because I knew. We all knew. Whole fucking auditorium knew just because of that one wee village. It got quiet, and people started to leave. How did we not see this? How did we fucking dare to hope that this wee shithole country could just – for once – for once, zat was all I’d asked, eh, overcome its inner fucking nyaff and actually try for something good and pure and positive? I mean, we planned a fucking choir. How fucking stupid are we? And see them all, all these men, all these men men men who’ve been dragging me through their shitey newspapers since I dared to come back to Scotland and be a woman with an opinion, they’ll all just be so smug. They’ll be sitting there, taking their celebratory dumps on their mahogany toilet seats someone cut down a rainforest and sent to B&Q to warm their arses with, tweeting each other their congratulations after they all write their one article again.’

Ruth put the kettle on.

‘How much have you had to drink?’

Clio flapped away an imaginary fly.

‘It doesn’t matter. Tell you why it doesn’t matter? Because nothing matters. Nothing I do or you do will ever make the slightest bit of fucking difference. So why not have a drink.’

With some difficulty, she fumbled in the pocket of her coat for her phone.

‘Lookit. Lookit. Started already. The tweeting. The relentless little nip-nip-nip away from men men men. I’ve taken it hard from them for a year. I’ve let that bloated sack of tatties at the Scotland on Sunday and the weirdo at the Daily Mail and all their crowing cronies in their mums’ fucking sheds on Twitter rip me to shreds and I’ve taken it, babe. I have not flinched. I have turned the other cheek.’

Ruth kept her own counsel here.

‘I just let them get on with it. It was water off a duck’s back, jus rolled right off and ignored it. And why? Because I was so sure that what we were doing was going to work, and they’d all come round eventually, when their kids or whatever were getting amazing Scandinavian education and we had an oil fund underpinning a citizen’s income and we were tackling poverty properly and putting money into green energy programmes and all those beautiful things we were going to do. That they’d see then.’

She’d slumped forward on to the table, was talking from between her arms. Ruth set the mug of tea down beside her face.