Cliodhna’s voice had the same timbre as it had at school, but there were so many other notes in there – at times Adele thought she sounded like she was off EastEnders; at times she sounded drawly and foreign. But when she began to speak about the village Adele recognized Eileen Johnstone’s tones in her daughter’s throat, remembered Eileen hectoring them all in the church hall to keep making sandwiches, keep slopping mayonnaise from that big industrial tub onto endless slices of bread. Eileen had pretty much run the strike, but couldn’t seem to make her own daughter turn up for duty.

‘Imagine that, though,’ Adele’s own mother would mutter, just afterwards, when her dad wasn’t around. ‘Imagine just turning your daughter out. No matter what she’d done. She’s still your blood.’ Adele’s mother had never really liked Eileen; it had always been known and never mentioned in the house.

In the town hall, the women sitting around Adele, maybe about sixty of them, all different ages, a lot of them seeming to be just middle-aged mums, like her, cheered and clapped as Cliodhna finished speaking. Some of them stood up. It was a nice feeling, to be amongst them. Afterwards there were drinks – glasses of wine and chocolate biscuits out on a table, poured by two women about Adele’s own age.

‘Go on,’ Ash said, pushing a glass into Adele’s hand. ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just have one after a long shift.’ The four speakers were brought off the stage and ushered to the back of the room by the woman who had introduced them, each of them given a glass, surrounded by a small crowd. Cliodhna particularly.

‘Are you going to say hi to her?’

‘Och, I don’t think I could. Not after all this time. Thirty years and we never really knew each other. It’s just nice – nice to see her, who she is now. You know?’

It was that distance, Adele thought. That cordoned-off space Cliodhna had always maintained from the people around her. It was fine for her to talk about the village really – it was something she’d seen first-hand, grown up with, but also something she’d made a point of never belonging to. Maybe even that tiny five-year-old could sense the way that town would have sucked her under if she’d let it, got its clumsy black thumbprints all over her face as it turned her into plain Jean Johnstone, married her off.