Instead of me feeling the hardness of the fall, I felt a weird softness. I expected an awful jolt as my legs hit, but it was as if I’d landed in sand. In fact, for a second I thought that’s just what had happened – that I’d been lucky and picked out some patch of sand or mud to land in.

Except that I slumped forwards and realised that there was only rock. And that the feeling in my legs was changing. The soft feeling was mixed now with something dark and terrible. It was the sort of feeling you get when you’re being chased in a dream by some faceless monster. But the feeling wasn’t fear in my head but fear in my legs. Yeah, that was it. The pain – a sick, grinding ache – began to grow like fear. A terror in my actual flesh and bones.

I heard a noise above the roar of the monster, the monster that was the stream.

Tina barking. And a voice. “Nicky! Nicky!”

And somehow I managed to shout back, “I’m all right, Kenny, I’m OK.”

But I wasn’t. I’d landed on a narrow section of flat rock and gravel in between the cliff and the rushing water of the stream. My hands were stinging – I’d come down feet first but then slapped down hard. I looked at my hands. It was only then that I realised the phone was gone. Dropped in the river or smashed on the rocks, I didn’t know. One of my fingers was bent at a weird angle. It hurt, but I knew that wasn’t the real problem.

I looked down at my legs, terrified about what I might see. I was on my side with my right leg on top of the left. I flexed my ankle and a jolt of white agony shot like a pinball up through my foot and my leg, right up into my head. I made a sound in between a groan and a scream.

“Nicky!” Kenny’s voice came again. “Nicky!”

I thought about my brother up there on his own, not knowing.

“Just wait, Kenny,” I gasped out, trying to make my voice carry to him. “Just give me a second.”

My right ankle was screwed – that much I knew. But something worse had happened to my left leg, the one underneath. I didn’t even try to move it. The sick feeling came from there. I had a picture in my mind. The kind of broken leg where the bones shatter and the ragged shards of it jab out from your skin.

I thought I was going to be sick.

But then I thought that there would be blood. Lots of blood. And my trousers didn’t look bloody.