But when I look up, he’s just staring at me. I don’t have time to work out why.

C is for . . . Circulation.

Am I really going to do this?

There is no one else.

‘Get everyone to move away,’ I tell Ant as I shuffle closer to Joel, my knees touching his arm.

His dark-gold skin is covered with a film of sweat. I’m trying to find the right spot between his ribs; my pale hands look like a little girl’s against his broad chest, and my nails are ragged and bitten.

Doubt fills me. He cannot be dying. Any moment now he’ll sit bolt upright. Laugh in my face. I’ll be known forever as the idiot girl who fell for Joel’s wind-up.

But as I glance down past his torso, I see a dark patch around his groin. And then I smell the sharp tang of urine and I know this is not a joke.

‘Please, Ant, nobody needs to see this. Move them away.’

‘You lot, move. Give the girl some room.’

I place my right hand over my left and push down for the first time.

No. Too cautious. The plastic training dummy always popped up and down jauntily. Joel’s ribs and muscles seem to fight me.

I do it again. Harder. There’s nothing jaunty about this. I have to be savage.

The third time feels right. I do what I was taught to, tuning into my own voice as I count out loud.

‘One and two and three and four and five and six and—’

They taught us the right, rapid rhythm using the old kids’ song, Nellie the Elephant, but right now, the nursery-rhyme pace feels wrong. Jaunty, again. The jokers in the ambulance cadets used to try to find the most inappropriate songs with the same tempo.

‘Stayin’ Alive’.

I repeat the lyrics in my head to time what I am doing, but they’re so inappropriate they sicken me. My hands feel too weak for the violence needed to force the blood around Joel’s athletic body. Was that a rib buckling? He will be so badly bruised when he wakes.

If he wakes.

It’s not the movies. Hardly anyone survives in real life.

I mustn’t think like that. Push harder. Try a different song.

‘Another One Bites the Dust’.

But the lyrics to that one are even harsher.

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—

I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I try to take in as much air as I can to give to Joel.

Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.

I tilt his head back, the smooth skin of his throat taut and still warm. Pinch his nose as hard as I’ve been taught to pinch the vinyl nostrils of Resusci-Annie, to stop precious oxygen escaping.

Lower my head. Seal his lips against mine.

Close by I hear one cheer, then a volley of them. Somewhere in Brighton, fireworks explode.