I tucked my hair into my jacket. ‘Oh, you know. Around.’ I nodded at the mountains over on the other side of the loch. ‘Into it.’ She’d think it weird, me hanging out with Jim. It probably was weird.

The ferry arrived at the opposite slipway, a line of cars ready and waiting. Lottie drifted on to the list of things she would do when she got home to Surrey – more Benji-time, more discerning choice of clients, Italian lessons, Alexander technique. I tried not to think about what I would do. Get some shit cleaning job to try and claw back a scrap of my overdraft. Bore myself to death on Redhill High Street. Take up heroin to distract from guilt. Cry.

There was a double-beep like a goose honking behind us, and Bev waved through the window.

I woke up thinking I was freezing cold, only to find the bedsheet tacky with sweat. I was sure I’d heard something.

I’d just about got used to the stifling vacuum of silence up here. But now, wide awake in the dark, my blood humming, I found myself praying for raucous rat-arsed students, police sirens, a toddler shouting the same word over and over. Sounds that meant people. Real, fleshy, lovely muscle-and-fat-filled people.

A rustling noise. Coming from behind the curtains. My ears went hot. The window was open – I could just see the metal arm poking at the material like a long finger.

There it was again. The sound of someone rubbing two padded envelopes together. It seemed so audacious, so rudely penetrating.

I didn’t breathe. My lips had completely dried up.

Rustle.

I lay with my hands flat on my stomach, like a corpse, daring it to happen again, dreading that it would. Every time it came, it had a different rhythm. Two rubs. Silence. Three, a gap, and one more.

It was playing. It was taking the piss.

I stared up into aubergine-coloured darkness – an aubergine rapidly spotting with mould, my eyes dancing, the mould multiplying. White-grey mould, a galaxy of it, descending on me. And one single, deliberate creak. Shitting hellfuck. I thrust my head under the duvet, put an arm out to pull in my phone and my headphones, and whacked on the squelchiest trash-dance I could find, praying that no one was there, trying with every fibre of my being to transport myself to a sweaty, strobey superclub complete with dilated pupils and shoving and drinks spilling on my feet. Superclub. Superclub.

In the morning, the plastic band of the headphones was digging into my jaw. Working them off, I felt something under the back of my hand.

There was a long, white feather on my pillow.

‘Thanks for the present,’ I said to Lottie in the conservatory.

She looked up from her book. ‘What, darling?’

It was a swan feather. Or a goose’s. One and a half times as long as my hand, and startlingly white. Surely not the feather of a proper bird – birds would get grubby, flying about, bombing into the woods, lording it in the loch. The barbs were slightly shorter on one side and tightly pleated, the spine a shade darker. In bed I had run it along my lips. Moleskin, or velvet.