But the activity stuff was good. Abseiling, rock-climbing, gorge-walking. One lunchtime, Matty wandered away from the group, peeling sweaty Edam slices off a baguette, heading along the path to where a bunch of French boys were hurling themselves off a high rock, five metres up, into the lake. Ditching the sandwich, Matty idled nearer, watching their increasingly ridiculous daredevil stunts – dives, forward rolls and back flips, punctuated with the odd smack of a belly-flop. The smell of rosemary and pine and dust and boys.

Rosa had moved them back from Italy, Matty joining the new school in the summer term in time to sign up for the week’s trip. It had been a relief to come back to London, in some ways. In other ways, it was just the same as over there. Suspicious glances, elbows in ribs and grinning nods. Dyke. Weirdo.

It was easier to be a boy in shrugging, monosyllabic French. Matty loitered long enough to be part of a queue of jumpers, and soon was standing at the serrated edge of the rock, looking at a lake as green as wine-bottle glass. The loose, lazy babble of the boys behind. The first jump was terrifying, exhilarating, a slap in the face. Air and air and air and deep water, a perfect encasing, the place Matty was always supposed to be, and an immediate need to do it again.

The second time the edge of a rock shelf met bone on the way down, the click of a wrist going the wrong way, like a light switch. Searing, sickening pain that made Matty want to chuck up, climbing back over the stones to the top, the arm limp and hotly throbbing. A boy – older, deeply tanned – put a hand around Matty’s shoulder and walked back towards the school group. On the way, they went into the cork trees, the dark coolness like a church, and he gently got Matty to kneel and put his dick there, right there, between lips and teeth. He had tasted cold and damp and then hot and damp and shockingly salty, more than the sea. The illicit tang of doing something so adult. ‘I know that you are a girl,’ he said in a muddy French accent as he took it out, wiped it with the back of his hand. He helped pull a gorse thorn out of Matty’s knee and they went to find the teachers.

Matty had nursed the fractured wrist for the rest of the holiday, trying to forget what the boy had said, tongue involuntarily rising to remember the salt there, on the red, curved roof.

‘Don’t worry about it.’

Trevor was sitting on the bed, his leather trousers around his thighs, hands spread wide. ‘Come on. I wanna taste you. I can give as good as I get.’

‘No, it’s fine, mate.’ Hands wiped on jeans. ‘No need.’