We felt sure Genevieve wouldn’t last until the end of the summer, but she confounded even us with how quickly she left. I watched her outside the caravan most nights and, despite myself, I felt pity for her. She sat in an old deckchair, smoked roll-ups and sang quietly, holding slight notes. She drank beer and let the bottles roll away from her. I had never heard songs like that before, they weren’t rock songs or songs off the radio, and she never knew all the words.

If she was waiting for him to come out and join her, he never did. Her last week they fought loudly and frequently. Her face developed the sunken look of someone who has become familiar with saying sorry.

This was it, according to my mother, the only story – the woman behaved desperate, got it in the neck, went ugly. He took her bag to the front gate, but didn’t wait with her. I asked her if she had a plan and she said, God, no, I don’t have a fucking clue where I’m going, and that answer seemed brave and insane all at once. My friends and I celebrated her departure like it was an amazing heist we had pulled off. We went to the pub and got ambitious with alcohol left in abandoned glasses. It made us solemn. Genevieve was tall and the right age. She had good legs. We hoped she didn’t hitch.

Shortly after she left, my mother came into the bathroom when I was in the tub and sat on the edge. I pulled my knees up. Our bath was cracked and plastic and, if I splashed, water flooded the floor, soaked into the hallway, trickled into the kitchen and someone, it didn’t matter who, screamed.

‘Was Genevieve pregnant, do you think?’ she asked me.

This was how it was with my mother – everyone was either pregnant or dying.

‘No,’ I said and dipped the tendrils of my hair into the water. I watched them floating shapelessly like weeds. ‘Not pregnant,’ I said, preoccupied. ‘Just annoying.’

(At sixteen one of us would become pregnant. Statistics dictated it would be one of us and statistics will have their dreary way.)

A man was caught violating a woman in a car, not far from us. The woman escaped. The man became a suspect in the missing girls and we gathered around our parents’ leftover papers. Violating, we agreed, was a funny, old-fashioned word. When they questioned this man, he said of the escaped woman, ‘She’s lucky: she’s alive.’ We widened our wild eyes at each other, still brave then, still merciless. Can you believe that, we repeated? She’s lucky: she’s alive.

The summer slipping away from me, I went to the caravan. He wasn’t there but the lights were on and I let myself in. It was damp and musty and had the air of everything being put together in a hurry. The duvet cover was from an old set I recognised from my parents’ room. There wasn’t an oven, just a hotplate with a tube linking it to a canister of gas outside. There was barely anything hanging on the clothing rail. No photos, no postcards. I thought he would revert back to himself, happy again, after Genevieve left, but the opposite happened. He kept odd hours, stayed up all night and returned from the fields in the mornings rumpled, smiling manically. He made mistakes with the animals. He bought a pack of cards and let me beat him, howling mockingly at the moon. He touched my face, told me I was a good girl.