‘I mean really, though. Who just turns up at someone’s house, miles away from anywhere? We’re not in the city now. Just that expectation, too, that you would be here, waiting for her.’

She had been crackling with indignation. Donald had imagined the welcome Cliodhna would have received at the guest house, was unsurprised she had decided not to stay.

Now, looking at the newspaper, knowing her gone, he wondered whether that had been a last chance. He’d heard of dying people doing a farewell tour – had she already decided what she was going to do then? Could he have changed her mind, if he’d just been there, if Morna had been a bit more hospitable? If she’d stayed, just for the night. Could he have made her breakfast, reminded her gently of the girl she used to be? Brought her back?

Well, you didn’t manage it with her father, did you now, Donald Bain? You would have shat it. Shuffled away. Shiter.

SAMMI

Brixton, 3 April 2018

It must have been well over three years since Sam had checked in on any of Clio’s intense, shouty social-media feeds. A while since she’d thought about her, even. She sat there, hunched over her phone in the corner of the café near Elliot’s football practice, frying smell in her nose, letting it all pour back in. Obituaries and despairing tweets from fans, articles and discussions, video clips with the sound turned down. She thought about the reality of Clio. That thin, frenzied woman, in her bedsit with beanbags, turning up unannounced to disrupt a working day, pungent, unwashed and urgent, trailing chaos. She looked at the way two months of death had crafted her into something else, a statue of her, built out of words and pictures, a statue that didn’t need to be anything like the reality. That wasn’t the point.

Suicide as political statement, eh? Well, it was on-brand. She could say that much. She’d read Clio’s last letter and was surprised at how un-Clio-like it sounded, how thoughtful. Measured, almost. In her wake, the commentary: analysis, long think pieces. Even Fran had contributed one. Sammi began to zone out the screeds of comments underneath each article, analysing, criticizing, shouting their partisan slogans, cracking jokes. Thousands of pseudonyms, all across the Internet, all round the world, all of them the same. It was exhausting. This was why she couldn’t take on politics any more.

People had been shocked, she could see that. The right had chucked scorn from a respectful distance, while a left-wing MP had tried to start a debate in Parliament. But then all the news hits stopped, she noticed, just trailed away about four or five weeks ago. The world had created something huge, enthused and grieved it, debated what it meant, and then moved on, busy, to the next thing.