The length of that pregnancy. The long wait of it. It sometimes seemed more real to him now than the years that came after it, because each day notched itself off on Eileen. Her eyes and neck swallowed in a fatty ball, the hairs sprouting out of her face, those blue-veined and swollen feet that needed to be soaked the second she came in, the stink of her wind. She insisted on ‘keeping herself good’, though: religious application of pan and lipstick in the tiny glass that hung above his feet; touching up the colourless roots of her hair with that noxious inky liquid, the stained towel draped around her shoulders. It was a blessing, Donald thought, that there were no full-size mirrors in the building.

Malcolm was quiet in that flat, a curious and down-hearted version of himself, as though some spell had been cast: a transaction exchanging Eileen’s new-found voice for his own. Really, Donald knew, this was all part of the work: Malcolm’s body preparing itself for a night onstage, for its nightly rebirth in the spotlight. While Eileen had found them a flat and a factory job for steady work, Malcolm had charmed his way on to the books of a series of bars and hotels, had organized a programme of regular gigs for what he was then grandly calling the Malcolm Campbell Three (the third was a bodhrán player, Fraser MacAllistair, who they’d toured with a couple of summers ago). Onstage, Malcolm roared and glinted, drew easy laughs from the working men and women in the harder bars, played douce and fluttered at the bus parties of older ladies in the hotels – it was always people that were his talent, more than the music.

In the daytime, he took phone calls in the pub across the street, made things happen. Donald took casual labour in the port, delivered half his wages to Eileen each week until the fortnight before the baby was due, when he moved into a boarding house round the corner.

Although to his knowledge there was never a christening, of course they named him godfather. In the only picture he had of himself with Cliodhna Jean Campbell, she was three days old, balanced on a cushion in his lap and mouthing the rough wool of his jumper in her sleep. Malcolm had bought the Box Brownie especially, seemed always to be snapping her; it was lost or pawned sometime before her third birthday.