This time, though, the house had filled with song as Clio came downstairs each morning. Gaelic lullabies and old pop songs echoing through the hall as she sat on the toilet. This time it had all seemed to be fixing itself.

Ruth leaned on a tree in the gloom, puckering her lips at no one, making that kissy, squeaky noise that the cat seemed to like when Clio did it. The wet bark was cold on her hand. She thought back three nights. Clio had been smiling when Ruth got home, had ushered her into a kitchen full of fresh vegetables and fancy-looking bread and explained that she’d caught the tiny bus to the next town, to the supermarket.

‘And let’s go out tonight, Ruth. Just to the pub. John was telling me there’s going to be a little gathering, with the instruments. We should go.’

Ruth was always more popular when Clio was in the village. The glamour of having been someone still hanging off her, she’d walk into the pub differently. ‘Aye, Clio,’ they’d say now, all the old regulars. If they saw Ruth in the street later, by herself, they’d stop her only to ask ‘Our Clio not with you the now, then?’

Clio could usually be persuaded to sing, too. It didn’t take much. They’d pull her into the circle by the fire, men her age or older buying the drinks ‘for you too, lass. There you go,’ as Ruth was made part of something.

She would always give them folk songs. Usually a bit of Burns, possibly some ancient ballad about a fiery lass who went her own way and ran off with a canny chiel. Usually, Ruth loved to hear Clio do the traditional stuff; that rough husk at the edges of the notes so different from the forced, trilling sopranos Ruth’s teachers had affected at school. Over the years and depending on her mood, Clio had said she’d learned to sing from old women in the Western Isles, from traveller folk who went round the villages, from the vogue in folk song in the 1970s, or from her father. She put spit and soul into her song, and the old regulars would bump their glasses on the tables in appreciation, keeping time for her to weave against.