I squeezed my eyes shut in sympathy with hers, felt the heat on the bridge of my nose, shared for a second the same view of warm red landscape as her.

‘I come here for a cry as well sometimes. No need to be embarrassed,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t crying.’

She turned towards me with an exaggerated look of suspicion. ‘Chopping onions?’

‘Bit of hay fever, I think.’ I shrugged and dodged her gaze.

‘Right.’ She hoisted her basketwork handbag into the space between us and delved around in it. ‘Want a ciggie? Sorry, I don’t think I know your name.’

‘Ollie.’ I made a show of thinking about the offer. ‘Best not. Trying to keep off them.’ It sounded pathetic. I’d never touched a cigarette in my life – that’s how hard I was trying to keep off them.

‘Ollie. Cool. I’m Sophia.’

‘I know,’ I replied. Like an idiot.

‘Doesn’t everyone,’ she said, sparking her lighter into life. ‘Do me a favour, Ollie – don’t believe everything you hear.’

She turned side-on to me and ejected a stream of smoke diagonally skyward. ‘Did you know him well?’

‘Who?’

‘Kenny. Obviously.’

There was something familiar in the name, but I couldn’t place it. She shimmied away from me along the bench.

‘Kenny,’ she said again, pointing to the carved inscription on the top rail behind us.

KENDAL ‘KENNY’ BURTON, it read, 1997–2015. ‘THOSE WERE THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES.’

‘I figured you must have known him, what with you sitting here, you know, with that hay fever of yours.’

‘I do remember him actually,’ I said.

And I did. I had a faint recollection of a tall, long-haired guy who kids six years younger than him, as I had been, imagined they’d be like when they got older. And I remembered the mountain of flowers outside the school back in Year Eight, the teddies strapped to the wrought-iron gates, the letters whose ink had run in the rain, the assembly where sixth-formers cried and weren’t ashamed, the two-minute silence. And I remembered that sense of crashing into real life that can take you by surprise when you’re twelve. The sort of reality that has lost the ability to surprise these days.

‘He loved this place,’ she said, raising her knees to her chest and letting her wedge sandals drop to the earth.

Her feet were like little ornaments of porcelain, perfectly pale and smooth, her toenails picked out in the colour of pistachio ice cream. She gave me a perplexed smile when she caught me staring at them.

‘Was he your boyfriend?’ I asked, like a five-year-old would.

She smiled, as though flattered by the question. ‘Do people still talk about that?’

‘Just wondering, that’s all.’