That and reading about water horses who turn themselves into fit boys in order to seduce some totally gullible girl who should know better, especially when he has weeds in his hair. I’d also found stories about burying healthy babies or feeding them huge lumps of butter and stupid misogynist stuff about crossing yourself when a woman approaches. Whatever. Thank God I didn’t have dark-red hair. There were plenty of mentions of spirits, all with unpronounceable names. Maybe mine was the glaistig, or the caoineag, or the beanshith. Maybe I needed to grow the fuck up.

My leg was itching like mad. I had a look. A near-perfect circle of small red midge-bites, like an anklet.

You made me things. An anklet of grey ribbon and cowrie shells that you strung above my boot. A headdress of pheasant feathers, with the longest, darkest ones in the middle. You once tied twigs together so that they criss-crossed into a star and wound wool round it, a dense spiderweb.

I was always better at harder, more solid things – the rocks, sometimes sanded down into smooth orbs, or just rubbed on my skirt and given to you. Metals, too. My uncle would let me use his tools, though they were too big for the things I wanted to make. Pendants. Bracelets. Hearts.

You said I should be a silversmith. That I had the hands for it, the eye. I dreamt of silver turning to liquid, liquid moulding into the shapes of leaves, snakes, pebbles. Adding tourmaline, dendrite opal, angel-hair quartz.

Silver into liquid into a new shape. Not knowing that it would happen to me.

One evening, a real keepsake. You held a bird’s egg in your palm, bid me lift off the top. It had been broken so carefully that not a scrap of shell was missing.

And inside – inside was a ring.

The jeep was bumping up the track as I came out of the trees. I parked my arse on a lumpy bit of ground to wait for it. Tyger wasn’t with me this time. I worried he was a shaggy bad-luck charm.

‘All right,’ Jim said, his elbow on the window frame.

I wondered if it still smelled of dead deer inside. ‘Are you off somewhere?’

‘No, just saw you coming.’ He nodded at my acid-pink T-shirt. ‘I was thinking about’ – he pulled a face, a mixture of irritated and perplexed – ‘going fishing.’ His eyes flickered to my face and at my neatly bandaged leg for a nanosecond before looking past my shoulder at what I could only guess must have been an extremely diverting spike of gorse.

I split the bit of grass I’d been holding into separate strips. ‘I’ll be no bother. If that’s what you’re wondering.’

The inside of his eyebrows ended abruptly in two short, vertical lines like bookends. He was probably wondering if me not being a bother was even possible. Then he swiped the plastic bag and ragged envelopes off the seat next to him and opened the passenger door.