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door to a tiny kitchen that was little more than a scullery.
    This was his space. These were his things. This was his life. Everything diminished to fit within the confines of these four walls.
    He hated to admit it to himself. But he was lonely. He missed Jenny. Even though she had never been the love of his life, she was the one he had settled for. And they had always been friends, sharing a life of extraordinary ordinariness together. A life like so many others, treading water in a sea of mediocrity, until sinking without trace. Which she had done nine years ago, stolen away by her cancer.
    He pushed himself up out of the recliner and crossed stiffly to the bookcase below the window. Why did everything hurt, these days? Her photograph stood in an elaborately worked pewter frame, a gift from Susan. He lifted it and tilted it towards the light, and her smile filled him with sadness. He ran his fingertips lightly over the glass, as if maybe he could still touch her. But the feel of it beneath his fingers was cold and hard.
    She was, perhaps, in her early forties here. She had probably been dyeing her hair even then, but the illusion of youth was successful enough. It was a photograph he had taken himself, and it was something about the love in her eyes that had always touched him. And he wondered if she had ever realized that he didn’t love her back. Not really. And yet, what was love? For hadn’t he been devastated in the losing of her?
    He replaced the frame carefully on the bookcase and turned his watch towards the light from the window. Time to tell her.
    He double-checked that his keys were in his pocket before he pulled the door shut, and slipped as quietly as he could along the hall. His footsteps echoed faintly back at him from the walls and glass of the stairwell as he climbed slowly to the second floor. The door of her flat was at the end of the corridor, large windows facing out towards the school.
    He knocked softly and waited in the thick silence of the night, breathing deeply to catch his breath. He didn’t hear her approach before the door opened and she peered out anxiously into the hall. Her smile lit the darkness when she saw him, and the door opened wider to let him in. He saw immediately that she’d had her hair done. A sheer silk nightdress tumbled almost to the floor beneath her open gown. He smelled her perfume and felt the familiar stirrings of desire. Feelings that never went away. Along with the need for someone to share a shrinking life.
    She closed the door and turned to face him expectantly. He slipped his arms around her, drawing her to him, and felt her warmth and her softness. He lay his head on her shoulder for a moment, before kissing her neck and then stepping back to look at her. Something in his eyes or his demeanour said more than he ever could, and her smile faded. A woman’s instinct.
    ‘What’s wrong?’
    He steeled himself. ‘Fiona, I’ve got to go away for a while.’
    And it struck him that this was really just history repeating itself.
    Half a century later.

 
    1965
     

 
    CHAPTER THREE
     
    I
     
    It’s hard to remember now all the various things that came together to make me want to run away. But the tipping point was my expulsion from school. And, of course, I was always blamed for leading the others astray. But it really wasn’t like that.
    I was born just after the war, into what they later called the ‘baby boomer’ generation. And I grew up in Glasgow in the fifties and sixties, two decades that morphed from sepia to psychedelic before my very eyes as I segued from childhood to adolescence.
    We lived in the south-side suburb of Clarkston, once a village in the Eastwood district of East Renfrewshire, but subsumed already into the creeping urban sprawl of Scotland’s industrial heartland. I remember the trams, and the cranes on the Clyde when they still built ships there. I remember the smoke-blackened sandstone tenements that they knocked down in the