Yes, she said, she’d go, she’d be there soon. Still no word from Duncan. She texted him again: Going to the Union. C u there? He wouldn’t come. He didn’t like the Union. Too many sherry-sippers. Too much black tie and coke in the toilets and chalets in Megève. It bothered him, he said, it being called the Union when it was the total exact fucking opposite of what that word meant, and for a long time she’d avoided it, wanting Duncan’s approval. Now she wanted Ben to greet her approvingly, too, like a prospect; like an equal. She wanted him to say her story was fucking amazing to her face. And even once it came out, once Duncan stopped talking to her altogether, once June stopped coming to work and another scout took over, and Claire returned from a tutorial one day to find her bed full of rubbish, actual rubbish, wet and stinking orange peel and yoghurt pots and clumped spaghetti in tomato sauce and the chewed end of a kebab, and she had to bundle it all up inside the sheet and carry it to the kitchen, a disgusting baby – even then, she knew that she wanted these things.

PLIGHT

For a long time, Claire maintained that if you got to know someone – anyone – very well, then you would come to love them, in a sense. Love was a factor of familiarity. It didn’t much matter what you were becoming familiar with. There needn’t be things in common.

The figure she used to illustrate this, at university and beyond, was her elder brother, Callum. She and Callum, by anyone’s reckoning, were not alike. Claire was reading Art History as a pretext for drinking too much and, when she could afford it, taking cocaine. Her friends in halls knew her as a sleepless lock-in attender, a last-minute essay basher-out, and when she invited them, in the Union bar, to imagine what this elder brother was like, they pictured someone equally reckless. But Callum worked for the genetics service on Ward 10 of Chapel Allerton Hospital, karyotyping patients’ chromosomes in order to reveal the trisomies that were causing recurrent miscarriage. He wore Levi 550s in medium stonewash that he bought once a year from the outlet at McArthurGlen. He wasn’t autistic, he just hated shopping. If he had been born in 1400, he might have become an itinerant preacher, crying Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! in the streets.

She wanted to theorise her bond with her family as an accident of exposure: the same brick semi-detached, barbecue and swingball set. Mum and Dad and Callum and her and Dean.