She switched on the hazard lights and checked her mirrors before climbing out of the car. It was a narrow little B road, on which she had barely seen another vehicle for the past few miles, but the gate was in sight of a bend, and in her mind’s eye, the quieter a road, the more easily she tended to imagine rally cars hurtling along it.

She had driven down in her beloved red Civic, keeping a worried eye on the fuel gauge and specifically the rate at which it was descending. She had gone to a cash machine first thing that morning, and though she hadn’t quite used the last of her drawings filling the tank, if she had to top up again before she got home, it could have serious ramifications for what she would be eating by the end of the week.

She was already considering how she might raise some cash in the short term, mercilessly triaging which possessions would have to go on eBay. She hadn’t even looked up what she might get for the Honda, however. She’d go on the game before she gave that up. She’d run it until the wheels fell off. It had been a comfortable, dependable part of her life longer than most people, longer than any school or college, longer than any house or flat she’d lived in.

It had been her mum’s, the closest Beth Sharp ever came to owning a new car. She had bought it when Jasmine was seven, this sleek, low-slung mid-nineties model that Jasmine considered as exotic and sporty-looking as any Ferrari. It was second-hand, but barely a year old and with a mileage suggesting a quarter of that. According to the dealer in Abbeyhill, along near Easter Road, it had belonged to an English professor at Edinburgh University, one of whose books was a prescribed text up and down the UK. This meant that he got a healthy royalty cheque with each year’s new intake of students, part of which he spent annually renewing his car. In this particular year, however, they had changed the model, which greatly devalued its predecessor.

Jasmine couldn’t understand why they’d changed it. The new one looked nondescript and fuddy-duddy, while she was in agreement with her mum that theirs was the most beautiful car in the world. It was built to last too, conscientious servicing and maintenance keeping it going all these years until eventually it outlasted its owner.

Mum had left it to her, and the first time Jasmine sat behind the wheel, she collapsed in tears. She could smell her mum all around the interior, like she had just nipped out of the vehicle to get something and would climb back inside any second. It wasn’t Mum she smelled, though, just that she had come to associate the smell of the car with her.