Someone to her left pushes Lauren and laughs. The torch beam passes over the crowd and she sees Maisie MacAllister at her shoulder. ‘Lauren! Are you afraid of the dark, Lauren? Are you?’ Maisie disappears again as the torch moves on.

‘Scaredy cat!’ another girl whispers behind. ‘Scaredy cat!’

‘She’ll be bawlin’ her eyes out.’ Maisie, back beside her, gives Lauren a harder shove and she stumbles. She feels another leg hit her shin and falls hard.

‘Uh-oh!’ Snorting laughter. Her face is hot and she starts to cry without a sound, her burning cheek pressed against the ridged, itchy carpet. She tries to reach for something against the moving forest of legs around her. Her hands brush against one and another kicks her. Someone takes her outstretched palm and pulls her up. The hand is adult, but delicate. It lets her go and she feels a light pat on her back as she is carried along by the stream of noisy children, following the torch beam which has now moved in front of them. She tries to look for the figure who helped her up as she moves away but sees only the shapes of little girls behind her pushing out of their cloakroom. Another taller girl blocks her view and she realizes she has reached the light of an external door.

Lauren spots Billy and hurries to walk beside him. ‘How’s it going?’ he says. He never seems surprised to see her. She starts to say something, but then shrugs as they walk towards their school bus in the twilight.

When he’s finished work, Niall meets Sandy for a pint at the Tavern. It is smaller and dingier compared to their usual haunt, the Black Horse Inn, but the pints are slightly cheaper. The bar is on a hill – a main road – and a window stretches across two walls, overlooking the rolling peatland, its heather no longer in flower. The moon has appeared, shining over the rugged afternoon.

Niall remembers coming here as a teenager with his group of friends on the never-ending summer nights, when the hills were purple from June to August and they felt unmoored from the rest of the world. He remembers learning to fish on the long midsummer days of June and July, when the bright sun begins to set just after 10 p.m. He would go out with his friends to remote lakes in the woods catching rainbow trout, drinking from yellow tins in rowing boats, whether they were allowed to or not.

Niall sits in one of the beech chairs and recognizes a man across from him as someone from school.

‘Kenny! You all right there? We’re getting some pints in,’ he says to the balding man seated alone with the crossword. ‘You want something?’

‘Hi there, no, you’re OK actually, thank you.’ Kenny gives Niall a funny look. ‘I hardly ever see you about these days.’