But he raises his head now and watches Rose. They’re the same age. He watches, then shouts, a huge, incoherent roar. He runs at her. Rose turns sharply. He pounds into her, a full-body tackle, and the two fall. Rose shrieks.

‘Jack!’ shouts Graeme.

Aaron is a few hundred yards away. He comes running back, twisting and flapping. Jack and Rose roll on the ground. Graeme gets to them first, pulls at Jack’s hoody. The two of them are flailing, sandy. Rose flings her head back, and Graeme sees with a shock her wild grin of delight just as Aaron hurtles up and flings himself onto Jack. Jack rolls, Graeme stumbles, and they all go down.

‘Stop!’ roars Graeme.

And they do.

They are on the sand, damp seeping into their clothes. The sea is wide, the sky wider. They half lie, half sit, in a heap. Jack’s leg rests across Rose, Aaron is leaning against Graeme.

Graeme can hear their breathing.

‘OK,’ he says.

They wait.

‘OK,’ he says again.

Later, in the caravan, Graeme tells them a new joke.

‘Why do seagulls fly over the sea?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Aaron.

‘Because if they flew over the bay, they’d be bagels.’

Aaron cackles. He picks Graeme’s phone up.

Rose has three magazines spread out on the pull-out bed in front of her – Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Take a Break. Caz, the social worker, brings them every time she visits. She’s large, like Graeme. Maybe fat. She and Rose sit, side by side, carefully turning the pages. When she leaves, Rose cuts the pictures they were looking at out of the magazines and puts them up in her room. She cuts out adverts for perfume and clothes and shots from red-carpet photocalls and feature interviews with beautiful people and adverts for furniture and kitchenware and limited-edition figurines of shepherdesses. The pictures cover the whole wall now.

In the caravan, Rose turns the pages slowly. Faces smile back. Her brows draw in, an expression of faint puzzlement on her face. Page after page, slick and mysterious.

Jack is outside. The football makes a steady thunk on the wall. Every time it hits, the caravan shudders.

Aaron puts Graeme’s phone down on the table and clambers over to sit on the bed by Rose. He looks over her shoulder.

Thunk.

‘Jack!’

Thunk.

Graeme stands up and goes to the door. ‘Ball,’ he says.

Jack hands him the ball. He follows Graeme back into the caravan. He stands in the middle of the main room, kicking his toe gently against the edge of the kitchen cabinet. Then he goes to Rose.

He climbs onto the bed with care on the other side of Rose. Aaron, Rose, Jack. Their shoulders touching, their feet stretched out. The magazine on Rose’s lap.

Graeme watches from the table.

‘Do you think they’re all rich?’ asks Jack.

They look intently at the page.