His thumb stayed near his mouth. Nothing breathed. ‘Aye.’

I hadn’t replied to Stef. What could either of us say now?

‘I just …’ I couldn’t tell him. ‘What do you do? When you can’t make it better?’

There was the sound of leaves, brushing up against each other. He looked at his palm. ‘Sit it out.’

I didn’t even know the guy’s name. He’d shouted it but the music was crashing in our ears and he’d had a strong accent. Stef had thought it sounded like Bottom, which made us both screech hysterically. A name to suit both the gayboy and the English student.

Sometimes I wished I could just swap myself, be someone else entirely. A new skin, like the selkies in the book. You’d shed your old, claggy one and come out slick and fresh-speckled.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I mean’ – I looked over at him – ‘in general.’

Jim picked at some heather. ‘Do you need to know just yet?’

‘Other people do. Other people have direction. I’m just …’ I leant back. ‘A fuck-up.’

A squirrel lolloped into view.

‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘Things change.’

The squirrel looped about, trying to decide what punctuation mark to be.

‘You might think you know, but –’ he stared ahead and gave a sudden shake of his head, ‘it’s not always in our hands.’

The squirrel saw us and darted away.

I tried to wrestle myself out of the dark. ‘What did you want to be? When you were my age?’

He righted himself slowly and looked at the loch. ‘Up to my knees in mud and pheasants. Gamekeeping, ranging maybe.’ He plucked a sprig of gorse and examined it. ‘And married.’ He said it so quietly that it almost got lost.

I hadn’t expected that. ‘What happened there, then?’ I asked, very carefully.

His eyes clouded a little. He took a breath in but didn’t speak. Then he got up, shreds of gorse-flower falling off his jeans. ‘Things change.’ He looked like he was going to walk away.

Of course. That’s what he did. Went moody and fucked off.

But he put his hand out. ‘Come on. Show you something nice.’

I followed him up a hill through the pines. He veered off the track and into a clearing surrounded by heftier trees, where a little sculpture hung from a protruding branch on a length of bright-green wire. Two horizontal oblongs of rough, mottled wood with semicircles topping and tailing them.

Jim sat down at the foot of a tree with leaves the shape of gingerbread men. He crossed his legs out in front of him, clasped his fingers on his thighs and smiled faintly up at me. His eyes moved to the ground next to him. It looked damp.

I slid down between two roots and leant carefully against the tree’s ridges. ‘What are we—’

He put a finger a foot away from his lips. ‘Best not talk,’ he said in a voice that was part-wind and mud.