Kenny looked down, but I don’t think it was the chips.

“I thought if I started running I’d get there before I stopped. But I ran out of air.”

Even after the hug was finished, we stood close to each other, our arms touching. In our family you don’t say stuff like “I love you”. You show it by standing like this, with your arms touching. Or by sitting together on the couch watching the telly, or by joking with each other while you’re eating your cornflakes. Or by your dad putting his big rough hand in your hair and saying, “Come on, daft lad, let’s get a pizza ordered.” Tina stuck her nose out from my jacket and licked my face and then Kenny’s. The lick was hot then cold, like the sweat on my back.

“Where are we, Nicky?” Kenny asked. “Where are we?”

I didn’t want to say that I had no real idea. I got my phone out. No reception. Not a hint of a bar. Then I tried the printed‑out map, unfolding it with my icy fingers. A few flakes of snow landed on it, and I brushed them away, leaving tracks of ink across the paper.

I saw the path we’d started out on – the path we should have stuck to.

“We’re somewhere here,” I said as I pointed at the blank space between the path and the village. It wasn’t a contour map, where lines show you how steep the land is. There was nothing there. Or almost nothing …

“What’s that?” Kenny said. He put a finger on a line that passed in between where I thought we must be and the top of the hill.

“Er, dunno,” I said. “A path? No, wait, it’s too wiggly. I think it’s a little stream.”

“Will there be fish?”

“Yeah, course. Bound to be.”

Kenny was still pondering. “But it’s in the way,” he said.

“Yeah, but it’s only a stream. We can jump it. And when we get past that, it’ll be downhill all the way.”

“Like Dad?” Kenny asked.

“Eh?”

“When Dad was at school. Them stories … about the beck.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Funny how Kenny had remembered that. There was a beck – a narrow stream – just next to my dad’s old school. Back in the olden days, when there were only three channels on the telly and the internet hadn’t been invented, the best thing they used to do was jumping the beck after school.

I picked up Tina again, and we marched on through the drifting snow.

Nine

Nine

We came to the beck maybe fifteen minutes later. I heard it before I saw it. It sounded like a football crowd, or a forest.

“Nearly there, Kenny,” I said.

Kenny looked up and said, “Good” and that was all.