Cliodhna Johnstone had always had that silky, twisty way of speaking, so that even when she was just raising her hand to give an answer in class the others would always hush to quiet. It made her a target, just as much as the big head of ginger frizz, the strange golden eyes always darting about, the way her singing rose above the others as they droned out the hymns and Burns in assembly. Just as much as her weird name – Jean, the teachers had called her, and she’d refuse to respond. Cliodhna, she’d said, when pressed. Clee-oh-nah, and it sounded like music. ‘Jean is my middle name.’

That wee pointy chin, aimed at the ceiling to hide the wobbling. At first she’d been skelped for it. What a thing, Adele thought now, whacking tiny, five-year-old palms with a ruler just because their owner asked to be called something else. They got you submissive early in that place. Beat out anything that could maybe even begin to grow into cheek. Jean she became, until high school; until she revealed she’d been wearing that name under her clothes all this time, holding it tight to her. And Adele, sharing the bus with her and the other kids from the village all the way to the big school in the town, admired her for it from behind a magazine.

On the bus, Cliodhna befriended that weird couple of older girls from up the hill, and Adele heard them call her Clio; she seemed to arrive at the big school a newly christened, fully formed person, sloughing off her former primary-school classmates and names. Adele would see her in the corridors sometimes, although they never shared a class, laughing and chatting and shoving into people, hiding cigarettes at break time with a new gang who all stood over on the opposite street corner and wore lots of make-up.

Adele stayed close to the children she’d grown up with; they walked together in a pack around the school, were known as the ‘sooties from the village’, miners’ kids. They looked out for each other as the popular kids faked hacking coughs behind their backs, didn’t really mingle.

She remembered sitting in the study hall near the music block once, listening in to the conversation behind her. The girls were all in her class, but they might as well have been a different species.

‘I mean it,’ Clio was saying. ‘Robert Burns was full-on sexy! Have you not seen the pictures? It’s right there in the back of the book they give us; just not in the bits they read out to us in class. He just got to go around getting all these girls pregnant – he had about thirty kids – and dropping them, and everyone would say oh, pal, och Rabbie, it’s fine because you’re so talented and handsome. Typical man thing.’

‘Men,’ said one of the other girls, knowledgeably.