It’s funny, he thinks, but you forget these things. You forget that Paula Jackson was once Paula Mason, who used to wear charity shop tracksuits, and that before she lived in that posh house on the hill she was two doors down. Graeme sees her every now and then, in school, around. They’ve even had meetings about Rose. But he never really talks to her, not as a friend, or someone he once shared a joint with.

‘Hi, Mrs Jackson,’ he says.

He tells this to Caz on the way home.

‘I can’t believe you ever got stoned with Mrs Jackson,’ she says.

‘Claim to fame,’ he says. He remembers the arch of the bridge, and Ash. Paula Mason, sitting with the rest of them, skinny and boyish and determined to be cool, if only for that one summer.

Was it as simple as that? That Paula wasn’t attractive enough, and so she got away? That Ash was beautiful, and doomed?

‘I tried to speak to Rose, you know,’ he says.

‘About what?’

The road sweeps between high pine forests.

‘About how she needed to be careful.’

The thick dark trees flicker as they pass.

‘Of what?’

He doesn’t quite notice the ice in her voice.

‘The way they made her look. In those photos.’

The road climbs. The trees fall away. The moors rise around them, long and quiet and dim in the dusk. There are few cars, and the radio is off. The hum of the motor and the zip of the tyres on the road are all they hear.

‘I do feel bad,’ he says, after a while.

The words catch in his throat. He doesn’t know who they are for, Ash, or Rose, or Caz. He knows he’s done nothing wrong, but he can’t help feeling guilty.

It’s dark by the time they get back. He drops Caz at her house. She doesn’t touch him as he says goodbye. Just as she’s going she stops and turns.

‘You know, it’s not what someone looks like. It’s how they’re looked at.’

She never says that it’s over, but she doesn’t call.

They put Aaron in juvenile detention. Rose goes to a normal prison, on a charge of GBH. She gets three years. Graeme asks to visit, but she says no. Aaron doesn’t mind.

He goes as often as he can. Each time it is an effort, but he feels he owes it to the boy. And to Rose.

Aaron is pleased to see him. No one else visits. In a way, the place suits him. At least there are rules, straightforward rules you can learn and follow. There is no code to crack, no secret knowledge that will suddenly help you explain the relevance of sixteenth-century poetry, or Newtonian laws of physics, or glaciation.