‘I’m really sorry the book wasn’t to your liking. We all have our different memories of Clio, and these are mine, built up over thirty years of friendship – before you were even born, I suspect. Human beings are such multifaceted things, aren’t we – two people can have completely different pictures of the same woman very easily. Just because you don’t recognize the woman that I knew and loved, please don’t invalidate my memories of her. And how could something as small and flimsy as a book manage to encapsulate the whole of a person’s life, especially a life like Clio’s, lived so big and brightly?’

She was still glaring, but she didn’t interrupt him again. He reached out the hand that didn’t hold the pen towards her, being careful not to touch.

‘We both miss her hugely, don’t we. I think that’s pretty clear. I do need to give a bit more time to these people now –’ he gesticulated at the queue, which had morphed into a goggling mob around her shoulders ‘– but I would really like it if you and I could meet up and chat about our memories of Clio later on – are you in town for long? Are you based in Glasgow? Here’s my number – I’d love to listen to everything you’ve got to say. I’ll take it on board, I promise; perhaps we could find some common ground about such a brilliant woman eventually?’

He wrote down the numbers quickly on a receipt someone had left on the table, substituted a seven for the final eight at the last second. The bookshop assistants he had summoned with his frantic eye signals hovered nearby, walked her gently out without causing any more of a scene. Neil breathed, took a sip from the glass of wine the publicist had put on the table for him, looked up at the man in the leather jacket who was next in the queue.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘She was some woman, and she’s still got the power to make passions run high, eh?’ He reached for the book, already open at the title page, and the man in the leather jacket echoed his chuckle.

HAMZA

London, 2018–19

He wished, many many times, he’d never told Gemma about the break-up with Clio.

‘A curse?’ Gemma had said. ‘She actually put a curse on you? With her period blood?’

‘Nah. Come on, man, I don’t believe in all that. It was just fucking weird was what it was.’

‘Mm. Dunno, babe. My grandma would believe in all that. S’a Congolese thing.’

‘Yeah well, Clio ain’t Congolese. She’s a pissed-off middle-aged woman from Scotland who just got dumped, that’s all.’