The fairest maid was bonnie Jean.

And ay she wrought her Mammie’s wark,

And ay she sang sae merrilie;

The blythest bird upon the bush

Had ne’er a lighter heart than she.

But hawks will rob the tender joys

That bless the little lintwhite’s nest;

And frost will blight the fairest flowers,

And love will break the soundest rest.

RUTH

Glasgow, 2020

The film was one Alison had chosen. It was a documentary, about free-diving, about men who purposefully slowed down their heart rates and repressed the instinct to breathe in order to push themselves deeper and deeper into the ocean; the sort of thing Alison liked to experience voyeuristically but would never dream of doing in real life. Ruth was curled into her shoulder on their new sofa in their new house, picking at her nails, only half-watching at first.

This man, the one they made a film about. He could have been James Bond, played by Alain Delon or a young Richard Burton. He had that reckless loner glamour that men loved in other men. He was committed to the ocean; it was his passion, his one true love. His friends, now old men, their ears full of hair, giggled that he had a girl in every port; the daughter he abandoned blinked back tears as she said she missed her papa growing up but understood that he had a higher calling.

Alison’s body tensed obligingly as the tiny silhouetted body plunged down and down and down into the blue, as the strings on the soundtrack tightened.

The man was filmed at Japanese temples, learning meditation in order to better slow his heartbeat, control his fleshliness. The girls came and went. His friends who lived near the ocean said he would come and stay with them for months at a time while planning a dive, that he never contributed to expenses but that was just his way. They seemed honoured to have assisted with his plan. In sexy honey-rust voiceover, the actor who played him in that big-budget movie in the Eighties read out the man’s writing. He wanted to be more like a dolphin. He believed human beings were capable of transcending their physical limitations; he also believed nature would have been better off without us.

The man killed himself in his seventies, alone in the house he’d built, on a cliff, on an island. Loneliness, explained his friends, his daughter. Her voice broke. That great noble sacrifice he’d made to the ocean had come at a cost. But his legacy lived on – they had started a school to teach other people his techniques. Young women who’d idolized him as children swam on underwater cameras, mermaid-free with their hair streaming out behind them.