Our eyes locked. It felt like a shaken bottle of Coke had been opened inside me, an eruption of fizz bursting from my core and flashing all the way through to my hands and feet. In the week since we’d spent that afternoon by the pond, I’d been rehearsing my next meeting with her over and over in my head. I actually had lines prepared. But I just froze. Eventually, I managed a pathetic wave, like a child standing in the rain, acknowledging a stray animal.

She cupped her hands round her mouth. ‘There’s a gap right there!’ she shouted, pointing to a ramshackle corner of the demolition fencing. ‘Come up.’

Staring up at her, the heat in my forehead sizzled away each raindrop as it landed. I staggered through the undergrowth and squeezed myself between the giant steel hoops of the cordon. I had a sense of crossing a threshold into a world that was not my own as I meandered across the forecourt, negotiating the maze of crumbled tarmac, broken fridges and dismembered sofas.

I couldn’t recall the works being active, but Gramps had often told me how 500 jobs were lost when the doors closed during the last recession. It was one of the many stories that he’d conclude with the claim, ‘This country’s going to the dogs.’

If the outside looked like a face from which the eyes and features had been hollowed, the evidence of gouged-out life was even more compelling inside the darkened shell. A whiff of machine oil still clung to the wet concrete floor, where pale squares left by long-absent tooling lay like chalk outlines drawn round forgotten murder victims. Near the stairwell in the far corner there was a stack of scorched timber and plastic, the wall and ceiling blackened with soot. I knew there’d been several fires here over the years, but no one had yet succeeded in burning the place to the ground.

I hurried up to the first-floor landing, pausing at the sight of a used condom hanging like a stalled slinky over the edge of the top step. I prodded it with the tip of my shoe and it oozed into a heap on the stair below. I wasn’t repulsed by it in the least. In fact, something about that wrinkled ball of latex actually excited me.

‘Do you like what I’ve done with the place?’ she said as I appeared on the upper floor.

In the near darkness, I could make out a floor-to-ceiling swastika in crimson paint on one wall. At its base was a heap of aerosol cans.

‘That wasn’t me!’ she said, giggling from the far side of the room, dwarfed by the vast frame of the window in which she sat. The light was failing fast, but still the grey evening sky made a silhouette of her form, her back against the wall, her legs stretched across the sill.