This is how you get over a rape. You clean yourself from the inside out. You are a sponge held under a running tap. Each time you are squeezed out and filled with fresh water, you become cleaner and cleaner until no speck of contamination remains.

I need to put something pure into my body. Tinned peaches for breakfast may be technically a fruit, but they are not pure. They are processed, preserved, coated in sugar, and therefore not up to the task of washing me clean of sin. I rush out the door and down the street to a shop, where I buy organic apples. If they don’t do the trick, nothing will.

I put my contact lenses in for the first time in a year.

I am waiting at the entrance to the reserve at five minutes to eight. No one else is here. I am the first. This is virtue of a magnitude I have been incapable of for two years.

The others arrive at almost ten minutes past eight, full of apologies. I accept their contrition with the patient good humour of one who has been cleansed by organic apples. Eugene and his cousin Raz arrive together, and Moira a moment later. Raz looks like a version of his cousin who has faded in the wash. Where Eugene’s hair is glossily black and Byronic, Raz’s is flecked with grey, receding, and cropped close to the skull. Eugene holds himself upright like a young David. Raz is a little stooped and his paunch is losing the fight against gravity.

Nevertheless, Moira seems quite taken with him.

She holds onto his fingers after shaking hands. “Well, aren’t you the handsome one? Why didn’t Lucy tell me that her new boy had a good-looking cousin?”

She sounds like someone from a movie.

We set off along the marked path with Moira and Raz leading the way, and Eugene and me following. My self-satisfaction took a knock when I saw what the others were wearing. I thought I had dressed appropriately for the occasion, but I was wrong. Maybe five years ago, when I last did something like this, it would have been appropriate. I am wearing a pair of jeans, a baggy, long-sleeved T-shirt, and trainers. A hoodie of sorts is knotted around my waist by its sleeves.

The others are wearing professional hiking gear in engineered fabrics that cling to the body and undertake to “wick” sweat away from the skin. They don’t wear trainers, but hiking boots with textured, trail-gripping soles. Their sunglasses wrap around their heads, so they can’t fall off, and their hats are made of shiny, sun-reflecting neoprene. Armstrong went to the moon with less technology than these people have employed for a morning walk.