Rose looks up, her neck arcing back, making her body into a snaking loop of bent limbs, from her knees round to her upraised chin. Alisha is struck by how elegant she is. Yet she’s also the most ungainly person Alisha’s ever met, barring Aaron. Grace and clumsiness seem now to sit side by side in her, comfortably. And Alisha feels herself fade into the background.

No one moves. The ease and polish of Titch hang in the air, even as she seems lost here, caught on a moment’s decision. She touches the corner of her eye with her forefinger, then lowers it. The two girls watch her silently.

‘Would you like to come for some work experience at the magazine?’ she says. ‘In London?’

Titch feels a bubble of wonder rise inside her, an expansiveness. She thinks of that sobbing boy and the broken window. Yes, Titch tells herself. Yes, this is possible. Yes, I can be good.

‘You could stay with me,’ she says. She feels almost weightless. ‘You could stay in my house.’

In a wood, beside the train, Rose sees a small lake. A looping, reed-lined shore. An island, with one tree. She’s never seen a tree like it. She leans her head against the window, pressing into it as the train zips past. The leaves fall in a curtain, suspended on thin, whip-like branches that trail in the water. The branches curve from the crest of the tree before they hang straight, and it makes the whole thing look like a frozen fountain, green gushing up from the lake and falling back down.

And it’s gone.

Tractors, furrowed fields, rising fells and then endless flats. Houses gather, clump, cluster, and then you’re in a town, a city, a bridge over a river, a castle rising then falling, and back, fading out into suburbia, and in a flicker, the houses are gone and might never have been.

She keeps her forehead to the glass. It feels good to maintain the contact.

She’s eaten her sandwiches already. She has no money for the trolley. It clatters past, the chocolate at eye level. She could just reach out for it.

She wishes Aaron was here.

Her hands rest on the table in front of her. Her sleeves are pushed to her elbows. Her arms are thin, downy with a faint corona of blond hairs. The hollow behind her thumbs is deep.

She looks up to check the strap of her bag as it hangs down. It’s a small rucksack. It has a second pair of jeans, five pairs of pants, five pairs of trainer socks, another hoody, a washbag and a notebook in it.

Beside her, a man is eating a huge biscuit.

She touches the back of her hand. She closes her eyes, and imagines her hand is Aaron’s.

She opens them. Outside, sheep dot flat pasture. Trees flick past. More sheep.

She rubs her face. She feels her skin move over her cheekbones, her eyeballs under their lids.