The shock hit the room in a harsh vibration. Adele found herself actually shivering with it. On the stage, Cliodhna was frozen beside the screen with her own, much bigger, bottle of Prosecco, a half-daft smile stuck on her face. The stage-manager guy cut the sound from the screen and the room was silent, its lifeblood drained; everybody knowing right then, even though there were so many more results to come in. A wavering spotlight found Cliodhna; she stepped forward into it, her body apparently being sucked in on itself. There she was, Adele realized. There was the girl, the girl being dragged back to the small, sooty village she didn’t want to live in by a relentless, clanking old bus and the smell of mayonnaise sandwiches.

2015

The bed was wheeled in, the porter clipped it into place and the anaesthetist handed over the chart. Unidentified female. Suicide attempt: cuts on both wrists. Blood alcohol levels high. Found in a bath at a hotel after the water had leaked through the floorboards, two rounds of bystander CPR at the scene and a further two in A&E, currently unconscious but stable. Some blood loss, but a haemorrhage prevented. The hotel had been unable to confirm her identity as she’d checked in as ‘Jean Johnstone’ but the reservation had been made under a card with a different name. Adele walked up to the bed to begin her checks, and there she was. Bandage-bound wrists above the covers. Up close, she recognized that same face from the stage, the one scored by defeat. Up close, there were as many wrinkles as she herself had, counting their shared years on the planet. Up close, on the pillow, there were threads of grey running through the mass of red hair. Nobody had washed the smeared make-up off her face yet, grubby grey tear-stains marking her nose and cheeks.

‘I can identify this patient,’ she told the ward sister. ‘I went to school with her.’

‘Are you declaring a personal interest?’

‘No. Not at all. I haven’t spoken to her in decades. But I know exactly who she is.’

Once she was sure the woman was stable, once she’d checked the tubes and lines, hung a new blood bag, put in the catheter and drained her bladder, Adele took a seat by Cliodhna’s head, began gently wiping her face with cotton wool. And she whispered to her as she did, quietly, so as not to wake the other patients, so the charge nurse couldn’t hear her.

‘Well then, Cliodhna. Well then. This wasn’t your time, pal. Not this time. I know, I know what it feels like, but you – you’ve got so much more to do. So many more people waiting to hear from you. You’re going to do big things, my lady. Trust me. When it is your time, you’ll make it count. Much more than this.’