Then, going on, unobserved, I scrounged in the kitchen, selecting and pocketing some Italian chocolate truffles.

Out in the shed, Bea and Benny were still focused on the Peewee 80, squatting in the dirt with their heads together. I was used to seeing Bea leave her cousin out of things, and now their closeness surprised me. Benny had taken off the shift lever, found a buckled part and hammered it flat again, and as I approached he was putting the pieces back. Bea turned and saw the socks I’d brought.

‘Those are my school socks,’ she said, and took them and turned them over in her hands like stones. School did not mean our school, but the one she would start at in a few weeks’ time. She added, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ though her tone told me it did.

Off we went. It was just like before, but better cushioned with the sanitary pads. We hurtled over the tussocked ground and the stepped ridge drew close. That was the day we came closest to reaching the top. Or I should say I, because Bea’s boots gave her blisters halfway up. I left her airing her feet on a flat rock in the shade, and after climbing for a while I thought I had made it. Then I saw two things that stopped me in my tracks. One was a sharp ravine that dropped away not far ahead; the other was an animal that loped into view. It was a fox, with an orange coat, a supple, elongated body, and a curious, frank gaze that it turned in my direction.

I moved instinctively. Keeping my eyes on the fox, I felt in my pocket for a chocolate truffle, softened now in the heat, and set it on the ground between us as a tribute. It was a disloyal act because the Noffeys hated foxes, but I was already acting from an allegiance to something else. I didn’t want to be like the Noffeys, something I wasn’t; I hoped to be something else that I hadn’t yet defined.

The fox watched me with interest, ears pricked, alert. Taking several steps back, I ceded the ledge and returned the way I’d come. Bea had grown impatient. I didn’t tell her about the fox. Going the rest of the way down, we found the motorbike where we’d left it.

‘It was the washer that was the problem,’ Bea said, lifting it off the ground. ‘Behind the switch lever. It had bent out of shape. That’s why it wasn’t changing gear.’

‘Benny’s good with bikes,’ I said.

‘He’s better than a mechanic.’

It occurred to me to ask why Benny was the way he was.

‘It was an accident of birth,’ Bea said, and I pictured her cousin as a slippery newborn baby, being dropped on his head by a careless doctor, or perhaps by his father. I recalled the rubber gloves I had seen after the night of the twisted calf, bearing the traces of blood and fluids, obvious signs of the sliminess of birth. I said it sounded like a thing that could happen to anyone.