I walked in slow circles. The first of the rain fell like fists on to the tarmac. The sky grew darker still. The rain became torrential. Water ran from my hair, dripped from my fingertips. But I couldn’t feel it.

The sound of distant sirens grew ever louder. But they didn’t approach and then fade as sirens usually do. Two ambulances drew to a stop. A fire engine followed close behind. The wall of rain that surrounded me pulsed in sharp blue.

A paramedic as impervious to the weather as me dashed to Aunty Kaye. He leaned through the window above where the streaks of red down the door were being erased by the downpour. He turned to a colleague and shouted above the churning diesel engines around us, ‘Call off the air ambulance!’

I was wrapped in a foil blanket and helped into a waiting ambulance. Wounds to my arms and head that I had no knowledge of were swabbed and bandaged. As the doors closed and we began to move, I felt a sudden sense that I was leaving somewhere I shouldn’t be leaving. It was a feeling that swelled the further we drove from the scene. That feeling would never leave me.

No one talked about Aunty Kaye as the medical staff dressed my injuries and repeated over and over just how astonished they were that I’d escaped so lightly. Gramps didn’t mention her either when he arrived a few hours later, his smile out of place against his ash-grey face.

I spent just one night in hospital, Gramps snoring in a chair to my side. It was a night that passed without sleep. As would so many that followed.

1.35 p.m.

I’m alone in our classroom. Afternoon school begins in five minutes. The Portakabin feels like an empty theatre: rehearsals done, stage set, a performer peeping out at a grid of vacant seats in the dim house lights – seats that somehow elicit more fear empty than when filled.

My bag has sat here unattended for an hour and a half. I stand and look at it from two desks away – a crumpled blue rucksack slumped against a table leg. For reasons I can’t work out, I feel no relief at finding it still here, only something similar to disappointment. My thoughts as I ambled over from the sickbay had been of someone taking it, hiding it from me, or it simply becoming lost in the way things do at school. Those odd fantasies didn’t make me hurry back, though. When I shuffled up the steps and turned my head towards the space beneath my desk, its presence seemed the wrong answer to a question being posed somewhere in a corner of my brain.