She stopped herself. She was on thin ice again—she didn’t want to go there.

“Can I have a sip of that?” she asked to divert attention.

Nanna passed her the bottle but wasn’t taken in.

“If . . .?” she said encouragingly.

“If whatever it was that got in the way hadn’t,” Jeanette replied, hoping for a smile at least.

She didn’t get one. Jeanette drank, the spirit creating a pleasant warm feeling inside her chest. She took care to drink a little more before returning the bottle.

“Hotel or what?” Nanna said.

Jeanette didn’t understand what she meant at first. She shook two cigarettes out of the pack and offered one to Nanna. She lit them both. Then the penny dropped.

“Oh right—no. We couldn’t afford it. And it was too risky. Someone would have recognised us and drawn uncomfortable conclusions.”

Then she leant forward and cupped her hand around her mouth to stop anyone overhearing, even though no one was nearby.

“We fucked in the boot of the car,” she said in a low voice.

Nanna pursed her lips and nodded. She squinted at the rain as it increased in intensity. Jeanette wanted follow-up questions. Having ended up here with Nanna by chance, she wanted to talk.

“In Peter’s car,” she clarified—as if it mattered.

But it had been a wonderful time, hadn’t it? Now that she came to think about it without being melancholy. She picked up her own bottle from the rucksack, not wanting to take further advantage of Nanna.

“We would head out into the countryside in the afternoons. Anywhere, really. Somewhere different each time. We would stop on small tracks in the forest where no one went in winter. Tractor tracks—a strip of grass running up the middle, you know. We once stopped on the drive outside an abandoned cabin—an old man turned up with a shotgun and knocked on the window. Jesus, what a fright! That was the only time anyone discovered us; otherwise we were very discreet.”

Words poured out. It was a day for that—and it was a good day. It was Nanna who had started this conversation and Jeanette might as well babble on since no one else was talking and the subject clearly interested her benchmate.

“There was a blanket in the back,” she recollected. “For outings. It was covered in burrs that wouldn’t come off—probably hundreds of them. Or rather, you could pick them off, but who has the patience to remove hundreds of mini burrs from an old blanket? We wrapped it around us with the burrs on the outside, folded down the back seat, and put some slow jams on the stereo. On a low volume so that we would hear if anyone was coming. And we rocked the car with our shagging.”

Jeanette grinned from ear to ear. Nanna concentrated on her cigarette, blowing smoke rings that sailed into the air and were pulled apart by the squall of rain that was now beginning to dissipate. Jeanette felt that she had lost interest and wondered whether she was even listening. But it didn’t matter; Jeanette wanted to linger among her memories for a little while longer.