‘So his love, the one like a rose?’

‘One of many,’ Clio said, wise. ‘He shagged about like nobody’s business. And I bet it’s dirty. I bet he’s talking about her nipples or something.’

Clio did ‘A Red, Red Rose’ at the school Burns Night concert that year. She stepped into the wobbly spotlight, apparently shy and unsure of herself, plucked three frail notes from her school-issued acoustic guitar and cleared her throat before she began to sing. The assembly hall went silent like it never was.

The Clio Johnstone who won the prizes for her singing each year, who was tall and beautiful and famous around the school, faded gradually away into a slump of shoulders during the half-hour bus trip back to the village each afternoon, while the ‘sooties’ grew back into themselves again as they got home. Clio didn’t come down the village cross with the others, never showed up at anyone’s house for the party if they had an empty. Adele would see her walking along the street with her two weird pals, or just by herself, would offer her a half-smile if there was nobody else around, would sometimes get one back.

How strange, she thought now, to have grown up side by side with somebody, breathing the same bad air from the run-offs, singing the same songs at school, and not have anything to say to them. But at fourteen, fifteen, most of the village kids knew where their lives were going – the boys were really just kicking their heels, counting the hours till they would join their fathers down the pits; some of them already coupled up with the girls they would marry. Clio Johnstone looked at them, found them wanting, kept herself separate. And Adele resented and envied her for it in equal measure. Then there was the scandal, and Clio disappeared, and they talked about her in whispers for a while, but soon after that the strike failure and pit closure had forced Adele and most of her classmates to leave home anyway, scatter to the bigger towns around in search of apprenticeships, secretarial courses, in order to support suddenly unemployed parents. She’d completely forgotten about Clio Johnstone’s disgrace by 1990, the summer that Jamie was a newborn and that voice came drifting back through the radio every time she switched it on, it seemed. Rise up. People got to rise up.

There was that voice now, on the telly, as Dougie watched and Adele didn’t snap at him to switch that shit off. That voice, talking about how Scotland had always voted differently from England, how there was a democratic deficit. Saying that this was a fresh chance, a new start – an opportunity to make the kind of country they wanted. Then, she said, we could rescue the NHS. Adele found herself staying, leaning in the doorway, taking it in.

‘I went to school with her. She’s from the village,’ she said.