There were summer jobs going if I was interested.

By the time I got off in Marlborough, I was twenty quid lighter and with three pills, brown-speckled like hen’s eggs, in my back pocket.

“Best not tell Marcus, because of Uncle Darren.” Darren didn’t hold with chemicals. A bit of hash was okay, but that was it.

Peter surprised me because he said, “Fuck Darren.” He’d not been keen to try e before, but now he was. Em had a shift at The Polly, so it was just me, Peter, and David. We dropped a half each in the manor’s kitchen.

Butterflies gave way to tingles, to an urge to move. I raced them round the lake, but stopped halfway overcome by a drenched, sicky feeling.

I bent double, panting. Peter put his hand on my shoulder softly. “You want us to hold back your hair, Andy?”

“I’m all right. I’m all right.” Better than all right, floating. Then suddenly, good so good, and David and Peter feeling it too.

“Let’s go up the castle,” I said.

“But it’s miles.”

“Not cross-country it isn’t.”

The path went up through a sea of emerald nettles, dusty and going to seed. Just past Ogbourne, a track led up to Smeathe’s Ridge. On either side of us, the land fell away. Further on, there was an ordinance survey marker that showed north and south, east and west. To the north, far away, there was the motorway, the M4. Cars were flowing in either direction, a steady flow for as far as I could see, and it conjured the image of a ribbon drawn in either direction, a ribbon being tied around the earth. A breeze was blowing. It plucked at our T-shirts and blew my hair about my face.

“I don’t want it to end,” Peter said. But it seemed like it was already seeping away, so we took the other halves, only to find ten minutes later we were peaking again. When the second halves kicked in, Peter dropped to his knees in the grass.

David turned to me, pale, his pupils black and dilated. He looked like a rare and exotic flower, impossibly beautiful.

Dry mouth. Thudding heart. Skin burning. I sat down and closed my eyes, lost in it. When I opened them again, both Peter and David were lying on their backs staring at the sky.

“I’m going to go. I want to see my mum. I want to talk to her.”

Peter raised himself up on one elbow.

“Bad idea. Bad idea. Stay with us.”

But I shook my head.

“Really, Andy? You’re going to go?” David said. “Can’t you talk to her later? You were going to show me this castle.”