ONE

      Garnet Street, Glasgow, 1998

      ‘Tadaaa! All hail the party buffet …’ With a flourish, despite the fact that she’s alone in the kitchen, Hannah sets out three bowls on the worktop. She’s wearing an outsized white T-shirt, sipping beer from a bottle and pretending to be hosting a TV cookery show. ‘Here on the left, we have sumptuous tortilla chips, chilli flavour, the ones with red dust on … moving along, we have dry-roasted peanuts and this, the pièce de résistance, is my very own dip, which you can whip together in just a few minutes with some beans, garlic and, er …’ She swigs her beer, and detecting a garlicky whiff on her fingers, tries to remember what the other stuff was.

      ‘Ugh, has someone been sick?’

      Hannah’s flatmate, Lou, has appeared at her shoulder, her freshly washed hair dripping rivulets down her cheeks.

      ‘It’s our buffet,’ Hannah explains with exaggerated patience. ‘Come on, you’re supposed to be impressed. I’ve finally managed to cook something before I leave. You should be in awe.’

      ‘I don’t think that counts as cooking.’ Lou winces as if Hannah might have scraped the stuff in the bowl off the pavement.

      ‘Well, I was going to make hummus but we didn’t have chickpeas, so I mashed up those butter beans instead.’

      ‘It looks ill. Kind of … beige.’

      ‘It’ll be fine once everyone’s had a few drinks,’ Hannah insists, mopping up a smear from the worktop.

      Lou smirks. ‘Han, those butter beans have been in the cupboard since we moved in. Three years they’ve been sitting there. Your parents brought them in your emergency rations box, remember?’

      ‘Isn’t that the whole point of canning? They find tins at the bottom of the sea that have rolled out of shipwrecks, and when they open them they’re perfectly fine. These things just don’t go off.’

      Now Sadie appears, swathed in a silky robe, dark hair pinned up with an assortment of clips. She peers at the dip from a safe distance. ‘Is that all we’ve got to eat?’

      ‘Well,’ Hannah says, ‘I was thinking of knocking up a banquet, wild boar on a spit, ice sculptures and all that, but …’ She checks her watch. ‘I kind of ran out of time.’

      ‘How late is it?’ Sadie asks.

      ‘Just gone seven …’

      ‘Hell …’ In a flash of red silk, Sadie flies out of the kitchen to the bathroom where she turns on the juddering tap (the tank only holds a bath-and-a-half’s worth of hot water, so the three girls are accustomed to a water-sharing system that requires a frequently flaunted no-clipping-of-toenails rule). Hannah glances down at the dip. Oh well, she thinks as Lou drifts back to her room, it’ll do for filling in that crack in the bathroom wall. It can be her parting gift to the flat.

      Hannah doesn’t want to think of tonight as an end-of-era party. It’s a celebration, that’s what it is: of four years at art school, three spent living with Sadie and Lou on the first floor of a red sandstone tenement block perched on a perilously steep hill around the corner from college. Funny, she reflects, how a place so distinctly unlovely, with its mould-speckled bathroom and grumbling pipes, can feel like the most palatial abode when you’re about to leave it. It’s like getting a haircut. You can hate your hair, absolutely despise it to the point of wearing a hat at all times. Then, as you trot off to the salon, you glimpse your reflection in a shop window and think, actually, it looks great.

      She