‘Where did you get those?’

I had the two mackerel out on a chopping board and was trying to watch a YouTube video on filleting fish, feeling like Gordon Ramsay only more sweary. ‘Got given them. By a fisherman.’

Lottie put the kettle on. ‘You’re a charmer.’

‘Aye,’ I said, taking a gulp of air, holding it, and pulling off the second fish head.

The book had just been an excuse, really. The next day I got up early, smashed together all of Lottie’s remaining baking ingredients and left Jim a message to say that I needed it back after all.

In the garden I put my hand to the silver birch.

Just a tree. Dashed all over with those little horizontal markings – you could imagine that twenty children had scratched in their ever-increasing heights. I tugged at a curling edge. The inside of the bark was pale beige, with slightly darker strokes. I kept peeling, meticulously, using both hands to pass the strips round, unwrapping it like a bandage. The thing had grown from right here. From right here. I’d not found anything about tree spirits in Adam’s book.

There was a tingling on my leg. Fucking midges. Never thought I could hate something so small so much. I whacked my calf, hard, and kept tugging at the tree. Another tingle, as if several were guzzling on my skin. I couldn’t see any. Now I was being tickled from my ankle up to the inside crease of my knee. I scratched like mad and swore for every last damned bastard hell midge I couldn’t see.

Lottie called my name and stuck her arm out the back door, holding my phone. I could smell baked oats and honey.

My fingers were syrupy, a burnt red.

‘Want one?’

Jim stepped over a tree root and looked back at the open tub of biscuits.

‘You know, just for some variety in your diet of fish and hare and twigs and mud or whatever.’

After the birch abuse and some seriously OCD hand washing, I’d met him at the end of the village in the late afternoon to get my book back and had persuaded him to come for a walk. Everything in the oakwoods had a density to it today, sweat pouring off it like when you’re four hours into a club and the walls are slippery and you slide down them as you get off with a third year you don’t fancy.

‘Can you eat those?’ I pointed to some mushrooms shelving along a pine-trunk, their undersides the colour of parchment, the tops dark and dripping.

‘Best not.’

‘Why not?’

‘They’d do you in.’

‘In a good way?’ I smiled at him in a manner that I hoped was devilish.

Jim looked at me like he was examining something under a microscope. ‘No.’

‘Shame.’

He held up his biscuit. ‘Very nice.’

‘I know,’ I said, like a champion.

We sat down at the crest of a hill.

I plunged my finger into the acid-green beanbag next to me. ‘What’s this?’ There were mini-forests of it all over the place.