As they lifted him he saw the other ambulance, its doors closing. There was a police car with its light flashing and beyond it, the car he’d been driving, its side buckled, windscreen shattered. There was another car beyond it, at a strange angle. He could taste blood inside his mouth.

‘Are my friends OK?’ he asked.

‘You’re a very lucky young man,’ the male paramedic told him. ‘You’ve had quite a nasty bump, but you’re going to be fine. One of the girls has been in the wars, but she’ll be all right. If it had happened during the daytime it might have been a different story. If you’d hit other vehicles when your car spun round.’

He didn’t feel lucky. He felt like the unluckiest person in the world. He’d broken Nick’s trust in lending him the car; he’d broken both Nick and Celia’s trust by not being careful enough, driving their daughters. The girls had accepted him into their home, their family. Georgie had welcomed him even into her own body. And he’d hurt them, done them harm. He wanted to be a good person, kind and reliable and considerate of others, as his parents had brought him up to be. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t a good person. And now he’d ruined everything.

‘Can you tell me any more about my friends? Are they all right? Is Cass all right, the girl who was in the back?’ he asked the woman paramedic, who was sitting in a small flip-up seat beside the trolley.

‘We won’t know till we get to the hospital and the doctor sees them, my darling. A few fractures, I’d say. Bruising, certainly. I don’t think it’s anything worse, but like I say, we don’t know yet.’

Stephen felt his face become hot. The shame was scalding. What if the paramedic wrote down what he said? What if there was a police report and it got read out in court, somehow? Then they’d know that he’d asked about Cass first. Georgie would know. Cass would too. What kind of a person wouldn’t ask about the girl he was sleeping with first? A bad person, that’s who.

‘You don’t sound as if you’re a local man, are you, my love?’ coaxed the paramedic, seeing the frantic look on Stephen’s face. Sometimes they got frightened, these young ones.

‘Australia. Melbourne. Well, just outside. But people have mostly heard of Melbourne so it’s easier to just say that.’

‘Hot is it, over there?’

‘Yeah. It gets pretty warm,’ said Stephen.

‘Lucky you came to this part of the world then. We get the best of the British weather, in the summers. Should have been here last year: it was boiling then. Beaches were packed out.’

‘People have their Christmas on the beach, at home.’