As Gordon saw Owen lean back into the wind, he thought he was playing one of those trust games, where you let yourself fall backwards and it’s going to be all right because your friends will catch you.

In that embalmed shard of time, Owen’s eyes met Gordon’s. Gordon swore he remembered it this way: Owen was smiling. Seeing the smile, Gordon was certain it would be all right; Owen was not worried, Owen was happy. He was Gordon’s beautiful blond hero. It was a game.

But there was something wrong with the angles. Owen’s toes were still on the land, but his top half was in the air, away from the cliff. He seemed to be there for an age, arms out, peaceful, poised like Christ on the cross. He didn’t panic. He didn’t try to stop anything from happening.

Gordon: a life determined from eight years of age.

But Owen had been smiling, Gordon was sure his memory wasn’t making it up. Why? When your dumbfuck panicking little brother has kicked you off a cliff, why, when you had a last chance to speak to him, why did you smile?

‘Nobody believed him and Sam,’ Kelly told Ben.

They were sitting on the ledge now. Gordon had been speaking for a long time, maybe half an hour, and the sky had turned black. Kelly and Ben could not see his face.

‘They came back and said they were playing up here, and Owen fell. No other explanation. Of course that was what they would say. They were little boys.’

Gordon thought back to how Sam had held him at the top of the cliff, stopped him going to the edge and leaning forward to see where Owen was hiding, and then eased him into the lie so rapidly, so purposefully, that the myth had Gordon’s loyalty before he knew what he was thinking. All Gordon was seeing, as Sam spoke, was Owen’s smile. He was still half-expecting that the big boys were playing a prank on him. In a moment Owen would reappear from behind a bush, creep up behind and pretend to give him a shove, scare the shit out of him, and then Owen and Sam would be cacking themselves at the gullible little boy.

What eventually shook him out of this was Sam’s white face and the dry spittle on the corners of his mouth. Sam was talking, talking. He sat the trembling Gordon on the upper sandstone ledge and said, ‘We don’t have much time, here’s what we’re going to do.’