‘You take care,’ Margaret said.

The girl laughed. She had wonderful teeth too, as wel as the skin and the hair. She couldn’t have been much more than eighteen. She gestured at the baby.

‘Bit late for that!’

At Porter’s Coffee House at the back of the station, Margaret bought a cup of coffee, and took it to a table by the wal , below a poster advertising the Greek God Cabaret Show, ‘£29 a head, girls’ night out, to include hunky male hen party attendant and the country’s most exciting drag queens’.

She felt no disapproval. In North Shields, when she was growing up, there’d been ninety-six pubs within a single mile, and for every miner kil ed in the local coal mines, four fisher men were lost at sea. ‘These a has no conscience,’ people used to say, in that world of her childhood when it seemed impossible that the seas would ever run out of fish and that women like Margaret’s mother would look to a life other than that spent stooped on the windswept quays, gutting and salting the herrings and packing them into the wooden casks that Margaret stil saw now, occasional y, in people’s front gardens, planted up with lobelias. There was a statue of a fishwife in North Shields, outside the library, but Margaret didn’t like it. It seemed to her folksy and patronizing. Her mother, she was sure, would have wanted to take an axe to it.

She finished her coffee and stood up. She was lucky to have Glenda in the office, she was lucky to have someone so reliable and conscientious who was not averse to detail and repetition. Al the same she knew that, when she was out of the office, Glenda was waiting for her in a way she never felt that Dawson troubled to at home, and the knowledge chafed at her very slightly and drove her to linger on her way back in a manner her rational self could neither admire nor condone. If only, she thought suddenly and urgently, if only I had something new to go back to, something energetic, something that gave me a bit of a lift, if only Scott would do something like – like, find a girl and have a baby.

In the office, Glenda was standing by the open metal filing cabinet where the clients’ contracts were kept, rifling through files.

‘I was beginning to worry,’ Glenda said. ‘You said you’d be back by eleven-fifteen and it’s after twelve.’

‘I stopped for coffee,’ Margaret said.

‘I’d have made you coffee—’

Margaret took no notice. She moved behind her desk to look at her computer screen.

‘Any cal s? ’

Glenda said nonchalantly, ‘Mr Harrison came.’

‘Did he now.’

‘To see me.’

‘Has he offered you a job?’ Margaret said, stil looking at her screen.

Glenda al owed a smal offended silence to settle between them.

‘Or did he,’ Margaret said, ‘encourage you to work on changing my mind?’

Glenda slammed the filing drawer shut.

‘It’s a good offer.’

Margaret looked up. She watched Glenda walk back to her desk, and sit down, and open the folder she had taken from the filing cabinet. Then she said, ‘Do you want me to take it?’

Glenda said crossly, ‘It’s not up to me and wel you know it.’

Margaret moved out from behind her desk and came to stand in the line of Glenda’s vision.

‘What is it, dear?’

Glenda shook her head and made an angry, incoherent little sound.

‘What?’ Margaret said.

Glenda said, stil crossly, ‘He unsettled me—’

‘In what way?’

‘Wel ,’ Glenda said, ‘while he was here, I just thought what cheek, coming here when he knew you were out, and chatting me up, tel ing me what I could have if we worked with him, the money and the chances and things, and then after he’d gone I just felt flat, I just felt he’d taken something away with him and I could have cried, real y I could. The thing is—’ She stopped.

‘The thing is?’

‘I don’t want to moan,’ Glenda said, ‘you know I don’t. You know how I feel about my family. The children are lovely. And Barry … wel , Barry does his best, I don’t know how I’d be, stuck in a wheelchair al my life. But after Mr Harrison had gone, I felt something had gone with him. I can’t explain it, I just felt I’d let a chance go, and I wouldn’t get it back again.’

Margaret waited a few seconds, and then she said, ‘What chance?’

Glenda looked at the contract file on her desk.

‘You’l think me sil y—’

‘I won’t—’

‘You—’

‘What chance, Glenda?’

Glenda didn’t raise her eyes. She said quietly, ‘The chance for something to happen.’

Margaret said nothing. Then she came round Glenda’s desk, and touched her shoulder briefly.

‘Me too,’ Margaret said.

Scott had started to ask people from work back to his flat, to hear him play the piano. Once a week or so, he’d say casual y to Henry or Adrian,

‘Fancy a singsong at mine Friday?’ and the word would get round, and eight or ten people would gather in his flat and order in pizzas, and sometimes they’d sing – Henry did a bril iant version of Noël Coward – and sometimes Scott would play something classical, and they’d pile on the sofa or lie about on the floor and just listen, and after they’d gone, Scott would be conscious of having made a brief connection, through the music, which left him feeling curiously isolated and empty when it was over. And it was in one of those post-playing moods, closing the piano lid, picking up the pizza boxes, carrying the ashtrays – disdainful y – to the bin, that an impulse to ring Amy came upon him.

It was not a new impulse. He had, when the piano first arrived, thought he might ring to say that it was safely in Newcastle. Then he had thought that texting would be better – polite, but more casual. So he had composed a text, and deleted it, and then a second, less brief one, and deleted that, and realized that he would rather like to hear her vocal response to his description of where the piano now was. But his nerve had failed him.

There was no real reason, if he was honest, to ring her – unless, of course, he admitted to the real reason, which was that he didn’t want the piano’s arrival in Newcastle to mean that there was no further excuse for them to be in touch with one another. She was only his half-sister, after al , and there wasn’t any comfortable shared history between them, but even the scrappy communications that they’d had had given him a sense of how much better furnished he felt to know that there was a sister there – even, potential y, three sisters – and how very much he did not want to return to the state of being the only son of a single mother; he did not, emphatical y, want his human landscape to shrink again.

He dial ed Amy’s number with quick, jabbing movements, not stopping to think what he was going to say. She didn’t answer, and he listened to her rapid, awkward little message and then he said, with a flash of inspiration, ‘Hi, it’s Scott, just ringing to wish you luck,’ and, as an afterthought, before this burst of courage failed him, ‘Ring me.’ Then he put his phone on the piano, and sat down on the stool and began to play the theme from The Lion King, which someone had asked for earlier that evening, and which was running in his head with an insistence that was, he knew, the mark of a successful show tune.

His phone rang. Amy.

‘Amy,’ he said.

‘Hi.’

‘Sorry to ring so late—’

‘I wasn’t asleep,’ she said. ‘I was doing stuff.’

‘I’m sitting at the piano,’ Scott said.

‘Are you? ’

He shifted the phone to his left ear and hunched his shoulder to hold it in place.

‘Playing this.’ He played a few bars. ‘Recognize it?’

‘ The Lion King,’ Amy said.

Scott was smiling. ‘Yes. The Lion King. I rang to wish you luck.’

‘What for?’

‘Your exams. Aren’t you about to start your exams?’

‘No,’ Amy said.

‘Oh, I thought—’

‘The exams are starting,’ Amy said, ‘but I’m not doing them.’

Scott waited. He took his right hand off the keyboard and retrieved his phone. Then he cleared his throat.

‘Come again?’

‘A levels start this week,’ Amy said. ‘Spanish literature and music theory. But I shan’t be doing them.’

‘Why not?’

There was a silence.

‘Why not?’ Scott said again.

‘Because,’ Amy said, ‘I need to get a job.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to stop being a kid, a schoolgirl, I’ve got to get out there and do something and earn some money, because—’ She stopped.

‘Because?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘Maybe I can guess—’

‘Because,’ Amy said angrily, ‘it’s al in meltdown here, and I can’t go on pretending anything is how it was and that I can be sort of protected from it. I’ve got to do something.’

‘Like not sit your exams.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you told your teachers?’

‘I haven’t told anyone,’ Amy said, ‘I just won’t turn up. I’l pretend I’m going to school, but I won’t. I’l be finding a job instead.’

‘What kind of job?’

‘Anything,’ Amy said. ‘Waiting tables, putting leaflets through letterboxes, I don’t care.’

Scott stood up. He walked to the window and looked at his dark and glittering view.

‘Amy? ’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you listening to me?’

‘Yes—’

‘Do not,’ Scott said, ‘be so bloody stupid.’

‘I didn’t ask for your opinion—’

‘This isn’t an opinion,’ Scott said. He found he had straightened his shoulders. ‘This is an order. I am tel ing you not to be such a complete and utter idiot. I am tel ing you to get into that school and do those exams to the best of your ability and to do yourself and al of us proud. I am telling you.’

There was a pause, and then Amy said, ‘Oh.’