She messes with her hair. Wind blowing through the car. I can smell shampoo, her perfume, something exotic. I can smell myself too, sweat and deodorant. The hedges and the farmhouse and the sign splattered with dried mud warning me to be careful of tractors turning. Lorna reaches into the backseat to get a book from the top of the pile. One of her shoestring gap-year guidebooks. Her tanned arm brushes against mine. White and freckled as anything. My shoulders hurt. A quick look in the rear-view mirror. There’s a black Focus hovering up my backside ready to overtake. Let them go, the instructor would say, they were all learners once you know. But I’m not a learner anymore and it’s embarrassing. I put my foot down.

‘What do you think about hiring a car?’ she says.

‘I’ve already got a car.’

‘Not here, you dick. Australia. If we go, I mean. Look –’ she shoves the book towards me. I look down for a second. Windswept beach, white surf, crumbling cliffs.

‘Great Ocean Road,’ she announces, as though she already owns it, ‘it’s do-able in a couple of days with a car. Then you can head up to Darwin for some real heat.’

‘Real heat? What’s this then? Imitation?’

‘You know what I mean. God, your knuckles are even whiter than normal.’

‘Get lost, Lorna, I need to concentrate.’

She goes back to her book. I don’t know how she can read in the car like that. It’s making me sick just thinking about it. But then she’s never ill. She’s immortal. Never misses school, not like me – skiving at any opportunity, missing every school trip since year seven. And now I’m thinking about it: the Skipton Castle disaster. Sitting right at the front of the coach with newspaper on my knees, sucking on an extra-strong mint, biting my lips together, trying to keep my eyes fixed on something solid in the distance. A tree, a house, a road-sign, again and again and again. That rolling feeling in your guts, rising up, coming in waves. And someone calling me a ginger mong in the car park when I was gulping in fresh air, kicking their foot against my foot. Where’d you get your shiny shoes from ginge? Ninety-nine p from the Paki-man shop? Knocking against me on purpose, stabbing their elbows into my back. They should’ve put newspaper on the seat as well. You still piss the bed don’t you Alex?’

But it’s all fields now. There’s nothing to fix your eyes on. Just green and sky. I can’t be sick now, can’t relax, can’t take my eyes off the road.

‘Don’t miss the turning,’ she says, ‘it’s coming up any minute.’

‘I know, I know.’