He got there. I felt him go, but there was still time, a little time. I held the dead weight of him, counting the seconds. A sudden and terrible comprehension of everything I was losing. My mouth was an inch from his ear. I wanted to say something, use words to hold him hostage. I knew the secret name he had given his bike when he was eleven. I’d seen his face, green with leaf light as we lay beneath the willow trees. But I wanted to keep those things safe too, sealed off from the present, so I said nothing.

Marcus had a few words for me.

“It’s over. I don’t want to see you.”

I said I was sorry about David. I managed that.

“I used to be jealous of him, of what you had between you. God, I wished you’d fucked off with him all those years ago, instead of hanging round to poison everything. I don’t want to worry about you or look after you anymore. I’m sick of it.”

“I’m sick of you looking after me too.” Like all the gratitude I had to feel, all the guilt for not getting better, had gone bad. Resentment, that between us he always got to be the noble one, the knight, and what that made me. For a glorious second, it felt that I was slipping my chains and riding off on the back of the dragon, but then it lurched back to feeling like I was in a film, that all that was keeping me from falling forever was Marcus’s hand gripping mine, and his grip was slipping, and then I had that odd dreamlike sensation, like in the second before you wake up, when you are finally falling and it’s such a relief.

“Well, hope you enjoyed the fuck, Marc. Are you glad you got it in before you told me you don’t want to fucking see me anymore, your last-minute sightseeing?”

He didn’t say anything to that.

“Em—”

“Don’t fucking say anything about Em.” Shouting in my face, spit flying. I got my dress on and opened the van door.

“It’s not like it’s ever any good with you anyway.” And this was unfair and untrue. Or it was only true sometimes, and when it was, it was not Marcus’s fault.

He did look at me then, ugly with hate, like I was a criminal, a robber who had stolen something precious from him and sent him a video of myself shitting all over it before destroying it forever.

Marcus blinked. When he opened his mouth, his voice came out hoarse. “And every day you get more and more like your mum.”