‘Coleraine,’ the girl said.

‘Derry,’ Tony said.

He could see her momentary reaction, perhaps attempting to reconcile Derry and Londonderry as the same place, the name politicised to the point that the choice of nomenclature signalled the religion of the speaker.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Alice, sir,’ she said.

‘How long have you been over here, Alice?’ Tony asked. ‘You’ve a bit of a Scottish twang about you.’

The girl’s face reddened a little. ‘The other girls laugh at how I talk,’ she said.

‘They shouldn’t,’ Tony said. ‘That’s not nice.’

The bell above them rang, the girl’s expression changing. ‘I’m going to be at the back of the canteen line, sir.’

‘Go, then,’ Tony said, clapping his hands. ‘Get down there and beat the queues.’

Alice laughed, then turned and ran up the corridor, her thin legs kicking out to the side as she did so.

He mentioned the girl over lunch in the staff room. One of the other teachers, an art teacher whose face Tony knew but whose name he’d never learned, knew the girl.

‘She’s a bit strange,’ she said. ‘Alice Hamilton. They moved here about eighteen months ago. She was at the primary school down the road for her last year or so. One of my friends taught her.’

Tony nodded, angling his head to catch the contents of his ham and cheese sandwich, sliding out before it made it to his mouth.

‘She came over in May of Primary 6. Took her a while to settle. The wee pet was still wetting herself. Annie said she had to keep spare pants in the class in case the wee’un had an accident.’

‘In Primary 6?’ someone else chipped in. ‘She needs a scalping across the arse if she’s at that at that age.’

‘She lost her mammy,’ the Art teacher said. ‘Cancer,’ she added, mouthing the word as if to say it too loudly might upset some of those in the room. ‘It’s just her and her daddy. You want to see the state of her some mornings. He’s doing his best, I know, but you’d think he’d never seen a comb.’

As she warmed to her gossip, Tony found himself losing focus, thinking again of the girl, injecting her own insulin, settling into a new school, a new country where they laughed at her accent so far from home. Or was this now home for her?

That evening, he met Duggan again in Liverpool Betty’s. They’d chatted about home and how events there were unfolding. Tony had spoken with his mother on the phone earlier. His initial reluctance to come to Scotland had been slowly replaced with a sense of freedom that he knew living in Derry would not have afforded him. The phone call had been perfunctory, his mother’s voice without colour or energy. He suspected Danny’s absence from the house weighed more heavily on both his parents than his; after all, he’d been away from home at university. They would have already grown used to his bed being empty each night as they went in to check that all the sockets were off and the blinds pulled. Danny’s bed being empty was a more palpable absence for them, he suspected, and more raw.