‘I’ll go on the spider frame. I mean, it’s not really a spider frame, is it – it’s a pyramid made of ropes, but that isn’t really right either. Maybe there’s a word for it and I just don’t know it. Or we could make one up. The Germans will have a word for that. Do you know the Germans have a word that means being pleased when somebody you like fails at something? I think it’s schnecktopopple, but that might be a drink I had at the service station on the way to Liverpool …’

Fin leans on the railings by the park. Watches his sister, all white socks and dark skin, clambering underneath a length of red, soggy rope. Sees her climbing, giggly, gleeful, up into the top reaches of the big climbing frame.

‘That’s great, Lilah. You’re so good at that!’

‘I know!’ comes the reply, as she dangles upside down from a rope, skirt falling down over her head.

Fin stares past her. Stares past the black brick of the old windmill. Imagines the little guesthouse just beyond the treeline. He doesn’t remember it very clearly but he knows he and his dad were resident there for a time, back when people were trying to hurt Mammy. Lilah had been tiny then. Wasn’t even talking. He feels a mild pang of nostalgia.

‘Are you coming up? I bet I can hang for longer than you. I bet … oh, poot.’

Fin looks up. A pocket calculator has slipped from Lilah’s coat, bouncing and clattering down among the ropes and skittering off into the mound of dead leaves.

‘Fin,’ she says, apologetically. ‘You know you’re the best brother ever …’

Fin doesn’t mind. He’s a caring lad. Loves his sister and knows it’s his job to keep her safe enough to be whatever brilliant thing she’s going to be.

‘Don’t worry,’ he shouts up, breathing in deeply as the wind carries in a bright, briny aroma of the sea. Leaves lift off from the pile, dancing away into the darkness of the wood.

‘You look funny upside down, Fin. Did I tell you about the people in that book I read? The one in the jungle, with the people who hang by their feet because it’s the only way the world makes sense, and I thought to myself that would be OK but you’d get an awful headache and the indigestion would be awful and that got me thinking about how bats poop, and …’

Fin starts to rummage in the leaves. Rakes his hands through the mulch: earth and conker-cases, sticks and thorns. Swallows down the smell of disturbed earth, of onion skins and sweat and the wormy gristle of maggot-chewed roots …

His hand touches something hard.

Something firm.

Something flesh.

And then the leaves are rising, tumbling down from the black-clad limbs of some dark, mud-caked thing, rising from the ground, squirming upright like a corpse being born …

Pain, suddenly. The sensation of teeth upon bone. The momentary stench of his own burning skin, as the metal incisors of the stun gun jab into his unprotected flesh.