The wind was too sharp today to sit up on the steps. One-handed, she wrapped the cigs back up in their plastic carrier, placed them deep into the crevice, and wedged the rock in, tight enough that no hippy’s horned toenail could unlodge it, even at a run. Then she carried her lit cigarette with solemnity down to the beach. The tide was coming in with a ferocity she appreciated, battering at the rocks. Slap. Slap. She slipped her sandals off and stood on the sun-scorched black sand for as long as her skin could take it. She inhaled again, imagined weedkiller and asbestos filling up her lungs. Above her, on the cliffs, the sun hit the glass wall of the yoga studio, made white-hot patterns on her retinas.

Nikolas and the van would be halfway to the airport by now, she guessed, creaking up hills, an awkward silence between them all, patchouli cloying the air as none of the windows worked. She hadn’t gone out to say goodbye, for the first time ever, but she’d checked from the window that Clio had actually got in the van and gone, and there she was, squashed in the back seat, staring pointedly the other way. Off to the ferry port with you. Sit on a hard plastic seat alongside a hundred stinking backpackers till your arse blisters, breathe in the horrible smells from the cheap cantina. Get seasick. Throw it all up over the side. Go on. Do you some good.

It wasn’t that Nikolas had a problem with smoking per se. They didn’t do it quite so often any more, but there was usually a bag of grass lurking around their residence space, a pouch of tobacco. It was the chemicals and the corporation that got him: a billboard advertising cigarettes would pitch him into a fury very much at odds with his character. Cigarettes were one of the only topics that he spoke quickly about, listing off the thousand poisons that were hidden in there, the callousness with which corporations developed murderous addictions. Weedkiller, asbestos.

The politics of smoking. From her early radical days, the most enthusiastic smokers Xanthe knew had been lefties, all of them so sure that their rollies, their pouches and their papers were another way of sticking it to corporate culture. The old creed of blindness, ignoring that no fewer tobacco plantation workers were exploited and lungs could still grow tumours even through you rolled your own. These cigarettes, slender things with their rolled-gold ring of sophistication, meant another life entirely to Xanthe. Meant boarding school, three bums shoved together out of a window; meant London members’ clubs and dark wood, cocktails, intoxication, bright, penetrating laughter and society pages. They meant everything she’d rejected at the age of twenty, steadily built herself into another person in an effort to get away from, and yet here she was, hiding them in a crevice in the cliff face for emergencies.