Kath Kidman and Pauline Parker, Zoe’s once best-friends, become quite jealous when Zoe joins the Green Club. It is all because of Ravi, that boy from the lower sixth. Not having boyfriends either, they are bottomless pits of vicarious sexual appetite. As they blow bubbles with their gum, or squint at their hair for split ends, or retwist their rainbow cotton bracelets, or scroll through posts on their phones, all they talk about is who they can go out with and how soon they will have sex. The three girls have chosen each other as ‘supports’ for the female bonding mornings, introduced that term by Mx Thompson, to free female pupils from the infamous mainland-fetter of objectification in the service of male sexuality. The girls meet in small self-directed groups every Monday morning at ten to nine, while boys assemble en masse for lectures called things like Deconstructing the Masculine. But as soon as Pauline, Kath and Zoe have signed themselves in with Mx Thompson, they go off to their own corner of the playing field, to sit under the oak tree, and Zoe knows that absolutely everything that comes out of Kath and Pauline’s mouths will be completely forbidden. Kath and Pauline do not care. During those rare and precious, life-skill-building minutes, when they should be giving each other space and support to discuss their menstrual cycles, or undesirable male attentions, or how to truly realise their ambitions as women, instead Pauline will try to imagine where his hands go when you get to second base, or what you do when you feel it hard against you. Then they will pester Zoe for photographic evidence of her with Ravi. Or they’ll try to scare her with horror stories of the perverted things those older girls, Stella and Tara, get up to. Like, are they lesbians? Like, what is she doing hanging out with them? And Ravi, maybe he’s gay?! Is that why he likes you?

There are two women by her mound. They’ve undressed – their clothes, in eye-watering gorse yellows, and the kind of blues that must require entire fields of woad – are piled neatly on the ground. But Cwen isn’t looking at their clothes now. She’s looking at them. She sees a mouth close down thirstily on the other one’s nipple. She sees that one’s finger slide inside the other. She sees the arch of a back, and the nipple-mouth replaced by fingers, and the mouth sucking belly skin, and vulva hair and now – a, a, a, a – it’s sucking where it should be, and Cwen, too, is sucking, and licking, and her fingers are sliding in and out, and she hasn’t felt like this for so long, was it when that traveller-girl came over for a night? The year 725. Fuck. Her mouth opens, she howls.

The island shudders.