I can still hear Lorna’s pen scratching across the page of her notebook. I don’t look at her. None of this feels real anymore. It feels like tagging along. I hardly see her in the week and when I wait to give her a lift it’s like I’m dragging her away from her real friends, the grammar school kids with their mobiles, low-cut jeans and platforms sandals. And the guy who’s always giving her the eye. She giggles. It’s embarrassing. Her voice is different. Like she’s trying to bleach the northern-ness out of it. I can just imagine her with him at the club in town wearing a short skirt, shuffling around to the Euro-bland dance music we’ve always hated, and him in a bog-standard checked going-out shirt moving in for a snog. So predictable. The thought of her wasting time with a guy like that. The thought of me going away with her somewhere hotter than this. Right now, anywhere other than this is unimaginable.

When Nan met her for the first time she told me to be careful, she said if I didn’t watch myself Lorna would have me for breakfast. She was already losing it then. But she still knew who I was. She hadn’t started acting like I was invisible.

I pick at the grass in handfuls and let it drop. Everything smells like life. Wispy clouds moving across the sky. Blur my eyes and stare long enough and they could be old men or game birds or anything. Nan and me sheltering from rain under the pale green metal bridge. She told me it was really an aqueduct. She told me about boggarts and trolls, that there had been more sightings in this little corner of Lancashire than in any place in Britain.

‘They live under bridges,’ she said, ‘but don’t worry, they never come out in the rain.’

‘Wake up,’ Lorna says, ‘come on, time to plan.’

She sounds like my mother. So bloody eager I can’t stand it.

‘I just don’t feel like it today.’

‘Then what the hell are we doing here?’

I sit up. ‘Look at this place. How can you even think about Australia here?’

‘My mistake. I didn’t realise we were here to appreciate nature. Is that what we’re doing then, Alex? Soaking up the deep fecund essence of the earth?’

She’s grinning at me. I get up, grab my shoes, my rucksack.

‘Alex?’

I walk quickly across the field, ignoring the sharp stones and twigs, and all but hurdle the metal gate.