The sun dapples the ground with bright patches. It looks flat. Jack knows there’s more. He closes his eyes. He feels the needle in his arm, the dry calm of the clinic. His head is thick, half dead. He wishes he had a pill. He wishes he was dancing.

‘You ever give someone a handjob?’ he says.

The words drop unexpectedly. Jack wants them back. They are not him. They are someone older, someone he’d rather forget.

Aaron says nothing. Jack feels the shift in the current of the air though, and he knows he is not Jack anymore. He has come full circle.

‘Here,’ he says, unzipping himself. ‘Give me a handjob.’

The river drifts past. The ground is muddy. The leaves are too still. Aaron moves closer, reaches out. They sit awkwardly, mud covered, stoned, Aaron’s bony hand moving slowly.

Everyone tries to work over the summer. Alisha gets a job in Asda. Dillon works at the out of town multiplex cinema.

Every day he smells stale popcorn, nylon carpets and nacho cheese. He hears films muffled behind closed doors. Sometimes he watches them from a seat at the side or the back.

Grief has uncurled inside him and moves through his body. Sometimes it’s in his gut, sometimes his shoulders. Sometimes it wraps tight around his heart and squeezes. When it’s at its worst, it grips him at the temples. He can feel the pressure, and the ache behind his eyes. It feels like rage. He’s not angry, but his teeth clench, and his fists clench.

One day he walks home, all the way. It takes him three hours. He walks at the side of the dual carriageway as it winds up the valley. He walks on the uneven verge, behind the steel barriers, under the looming trees. Milkshake cartons and scraps of paper have gathered on the edge of the forest, a tidemark of carelessness. Every now and then, he roars. It has to come out, this grief, and all he can bear is to let it out in deep, guttural roars, that rise at the end to a kind of scream, that sting his eyes.

At work, in front of the huge screens, it clouds his vision. It blocks his ears. He won’t look at it, but he can’t look away either.

At night, his neck aches. It feels like he’s held his head still, stopped it from rocking, held tight all day. He drinks water before he sleeps in case the headache is dehydration, then he lies there needing to piss. When he does sleep, he dreams of everyone alive being dead. His dad, Rose, Alisha, Jack, Aaron, Mr Bradman. All dead.

He dreams of Oni. He hasn’t thought of her in years. He dreams she is under water. She bubbles like smoke.