We used to talk a lot about ‘the movement’ as student revolutionaries. A single body of people marching with one aim. I’m not sure there can be such a thing any more; the causes that anger the left seem to be so diverse they create rifts rather than solidarity. It’s difficult to imagine a united left-wing movement defeating something like the poll tax, which Clio always referred to as ‘the cause that made me’, these days. But then perhaps, as a middle-class, commuter-belt soi-disant yummy mummy, I’m just not hearing its songs.

In Genoa last year my children skipped along the beachfront Corso Italia. It’s a very beautiful street and they were fascinated by its fairy-tale pavement mosaics, leaned over the railings to gaze at the azure sea below. It was so far removed from that dusty scene of overturned cars, gassed air and broken glass I dimly remembered from my youth that it seemed I must have dreamed that second image. But then, I had the luxury of being able to tell myself that.

RUTH

Glasgow, 2014

Watching Clio in arguments on Twitter possessed Ruth like a drawn-out panic attack during the independence referendum. The relentlessness of it, the piranhas swarming for attack at her every statement. Her profile was high enough to attract them; her public statements sufficiently unmodest to keep them fuelled and ready. The debate had racked up nearly two years of increasingly fraught coverage in the time since Clio had moved back to Scotland needing friends and a place in the world; she had found it as an outspoken advocate for Scottish self-determination. The Scottish media had very much enjoyed the spectacle she’d made for them, and Ruth, like the rest of the country, couldn’t look away. She’d saved Clio’s name as a search, tapped it in automatically every time she clicked on to the app, lost herself in scrolling and scrolling as the second-hand stress began to bubble through her veins. It seemed as though the world, or the very worst subsects of it, was rising up to show Clio her place, each opinion met with a barrage of blokey disdain, an obscene-seeming wet-eyed emoji of laughter. To be fair to her, Clio didn’t moderate her behaviour. She didn’t tone it down or attempt to pacify them. But she would argue with them relentlessly, into the night, sometimes five or six at a time, lost in long trails of oblique replies and misunderstanding, refusing to let any of her anonymous sparring partners have the last word.

‘I’m fit for them, doll. Don’t worry.’

Ruth worried. Of course she worried.

On the morning after the independence referendum, Clio had turned up unannounced, leaning down hard on the buzzer to Ruth’s old flat in the Southside. She’d entered in an unwashed, boozy cloud, dishevelled, squinting at Ruth already dressed and washed.

‘You’re not going to work today, are you?’