‘What does it take, though? To be that focused on one thing, your political ideal, or your fucking undercover mission or whatever, that you just roll over actual other humans? Know what I’m saying?’

‘Bearing in mind I haven’t seen her for fifteen years, she did always seem a bit, well … There was always so much going on, but I don’t know if she actually had anyone properly close to her. Did she? She would come and go from us as she pleased, and I envied her freedom at the time, but I don’t think she was returning anywhere. I rather got the impression that we were the home she was coming back to. And none of us were really that tight-knit. Not really.’

‘Nah, she’s strictly short-term, mate. And it’s warped her, I reckon. She’s, like, physically unable to see that other people might make deeper connections. Might want to put down roots. Belong to something other than a cause.’

Sam left the island four days later, the same route that she’d come. She wasn’t cured, she knew that. But she could feel the sea lurch and spin beneath her on the boat. She’d held an aum, chanting at the sun with Dido, Xanthe and Xanthe’s gentle boyfriend Nico, found something in that strange harsh sound reverberating through her throat, her chest, her body that had made her feel a bit more like one person, body and mind, one being even, again. For a couple of days there, she’d become the sort of person she would have laughed at at home. The sort of person she hoped she would laugh at again.

Using the Wi-Fi at the airport, she booked herself into a hotel not far from Avril’s house. Streets she’d know, but not her house. Just as the cabin crew were doing their safety check, she tapped out a message to her mother, that she’d be back tomorrow, she wouldn’t be staying at the house, and she’d like to see Debbie as soon as she could.

‘You know what, Xanthe,’ she’d said, sitting at the kitchen table the night before as Xanthe sliced fruit. ‘I don’t think it’s that I’m jealous of you exactly. I mean, it’s stunning and calm here and everything, but I don’t think I could do it, out here all the time. I need a bit of bustle, me. I need a bit of ugly in my day-to-day. That sea would just piss me off, if I had to look at it every morning. What you got with Dido, though. That. I don’t know if I’m ever going to have that again, with either of my kids. Specially not with Debbie. Not now.’