He saw her long before she ever saw him. There was a girl in the woods, wearing tight blue jeans, mud spattered green wellies and a diaphanous white shirt that floated around her arms. She had blonde hair that fell in soft waves across her shoulders, and a pale, slightly pinched-looking face. There were two spots of hectic pink blush on the tops of her cheeks, and she was carrying a battered-looking paperback book under one arm. When he stepped out from the trees near her, she started, almost dropping it.

‘Oh,’ she laughed, her face turning pinker. ‘I thought I heard someone else walking here. Sorry.’

‘You’re from the commune?’ Michael cleared his throat. He didn’t much want to speak to anyone, not with mud on his hands and the graves so close, but right from the very start there was something about her – something that provoked him.

‘Yeah.’ She hugged the book to herself. ‘Are you not?’

‘Did you get lost?’

She shrugged and looked away. ‘I wanted to see the woods in the morning. I didn’t think anyone else would be here, because …’

When she trailed off, Michael nodded. The other young people from the commune wouldn’t be here because they spent every night drinking and smoking weed, staying up until the small hours talking and laughing before sleeping until midday in their fetid sleeping bags. Or grunting together like animals. Michael had heard them himself, from his room in the house, or from the woods.

‘I can walk you back there.’ It was clear she didn’t want to go back just yet, that she’d come here with the express intention to wander a little longer, but she bent to his will easily enough, nodding once so that her hair bobbed up and down. ‘What are you reading?’

She looked down at the book in her arms as though she’d never seen it before. ‘Oh, this is my old Grimms’ fairy tale book.’ She held it up for him to see; the brown cover was covered all over in white creases, and in the middle was a stark woodcut of a huge black wolf, its jaws open wide to reveal lots of white teeth. Its feet were tangled about with ivy, and it stood against a stark white sky. Michael’s heart began to beat faster at the sight of it. Who was this woman who carried what he was in her arms?

‘It doesn’t look much like a children’s story,’ he said, uncertain what else to say.