The softness fades like a switch pressed. ‘I won’t lie, not for you or anyone,’ she says bluntly. ‘Don’t ask me. It’s unfair.’

‘Unfair? Are you taking the piss?’

‘Seriously, we’re not talking about it.’

‘We bloody are,’ he says, glaring at her. ‘Tell me.’

‘Roland said we have to forget about the past . . .’ she says, her voice growing harder by the second.

‘The past? The fucking past? It was yesterday . . . I want to know . . .’ he says with his voice rising at the feeling of something being hidden from him.

‘I’ve got family,’ she says, speaking over him. ‘I don’t know what happens to them. Harry’s the same. Just leave it.’

‘We just fucking got here and I’m not you,’ he snaps. ‘I’m not a soldier or police officer. I work in a bloody office and investigate insurance claims.’ Anger floods through him at the unfairness of it, at the pure, bitter unfairness.

‘Let it go,’ Harry says, holding a chunk of the cheesy-feet marrow in front of him.

If anyone else had said that Ben would bloody explode but that’s Mad Harry Madden holding a piece of cheesy-feet marrow from millions of years ago and again the surrealness of it sinks deep into his gut.

‘Eat some plum, Ben,’ Safa says, pulling the carcass of the squashed fruit over.

‘I don’t want the fucking plum. How can you be so calm?’

She shrugs, non-committal and avoiding in the same gesture. ‘You learn to lock it down.’

‘How did you learn that? Why? What did you have to lock down?’ he asks loudly, then flinches from the look of pure venom he gets back.

‘Eat,’ Harry says easily, breaking the tension. ‘Both of you.’

So they eat. They eat plum fruit that isn’t plum and lemon–lime–melon that isn’t any of those things.