Late afternoon. Overhead a single bird wheeled high up, watching us move over the tops of the hills. Some sort of eagle, giving a cry like a raver’s whistle at a festival in the morning, long after everyone else has stopped. Every shade of green was on display – Pepperskin, Wine Bottle, Wasabi Bite, Squeeze of Lime. Seventies colours, all bright against a sky so wide it made my ribs hurt.

Jim said that come autumn, the turn of the heather would spread quickly. I pictured it, a purple blot at my feet, bruising outwards from me, all the way to the horizon. Past the horizon. Maybe it would keep going, not stopping at the outskirts of villages but bleeding onto pavements, under fences, up walls, keep bleeding.

The air had a brisk edge to it, but for once some heat came off the stones, which had the look of being pencil-sketched and not quite finished.

Jim turned round. ‘Almost there.’ He looked part of all this, like he had risen up, crackling, from the bracken. Part heather, part bark, part stone. His arms swung, blunt fingers brushing the fern.

I heard it before I saw it. Faint radio static, turned up slowly.

He stopped and I almost clattered into him. There was a gully and a bridge – if you could call it that. It looked like something a geeky kid could put together out of Meccano in about thirty seconds, just metal poles and wooden planks with big spaces in between. It didn’t seem fixed to anything, just slung over the gap. Several metres below, water convulsed, cruising from a corner behind us and bashing itself over rocks before falling away into nothingness. A waterfall.

I raised my eyebrows at him. And then he took my hand and was pulling me across before I could even think about it and I hurtled over, not daring to yank back or look down. He hopped off, me next. The bridge gave a wobble and a sort of hum.

‘Bastard!’ I shoved him a little in the chest.

He gave me a gentle grin before walking to a shallow, sloping ledge.

‘There?’ It looked pretty bloody precarious.

‘Scared of heights?’

I crossed my arms, tight. ‘Scared of breaking both my legs and my neck and my head and being a dribbling vegetable for the rest of my life.’ Like him, I thought, my blood stinging suddenly.

Jim was already moving past me. ‘You’ll be all right.’

He climbed easily down the rock face, soil loosening and falling, and I followed, negotiating stone shelves, the edges grazing my knees. The last time I’d done anything like this was in my final year of primary school, with a bright-yellow helmet on. And ropes. Lots of ropes.

At the bottom there was a coppery circle of water with curved walls almost enclosing us. The falls, not really so high now, barrelled down into the pool, like a big frilly Regency skirt being smoothed out.