Jim’s look was pensive, ominous. ‘A fight.’

My heart clunked slightly, thinking of Fraser. ‘Yeah?’

He narrowed his eyes at me. ‘With a tree.’

‘Bad tree,’ I said.

‘Got my own back.’ And he winked.

By the time we climbed up again – the bridge wasn’t any less terrifying, though I ran over it first this time – clouds were loitering over the far hills. The brandy had infused my bones and I powered ahead of him, following the trail we’d made before. I probably had massive dark patches on my arse. I turned round and walked backwards. Jim was watching the horizon, frowning slightly into the sun.

One end of the sky was beginning to look vague and heavy. ‘Is that coming our way?’

‘Aye.’

I listened to the rhythmic rasp and crunch of my boots on the heather and to my shorts rubbing together, like a broom on concrete. My breath, too. I stopped dead. Everything else was so still, as if it had been shushed, forever the moment before everyone yells Surprise!

Jim caught up and followed my eyes to the mountains.

‘Don’t you ever get lost out here?’ I said.

‘I know it pretty well.’

That wasn’t what I meant. I tried again. ‘How is this here?’

A thoughtful pause. ‘A glacier.’ He lifted his arm. ‘Coming right down—’

I hadn’t meant that either. How are you here? I’d wanted to say, and me, standing in this place where you could hear grass, a single blade broken halfway down the stem, creaking. But I let him tell me, because thinking of glaciers melting over millennia made me feel impossibly small, a speck of chalk dust, and it was better, somehow. Because maybe none of it mattered – what I’d done, all the rest of my failings – and we’d be flattened soon enough, crushed and hardened and mixing with mud and river and moss and other bones and becoming the base of a mountain. I could waft over the face of it all, turn in the light like a dust mote, catch it if I wanted to, find a fold of gloom if I didn’t. It should have made me feel hopeless. But it made me feel free.

There was a strange, low roar in the valley. It sounded like a motorway, or a military plane doing a fly-past.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

Jim cocked his head. ‘Wind.’

We kept walking, light skimming the grass. Dark clouds scratched over, and there was a sudden, startling flush of sunshine just in front of us. Everything became floodlit and unreal.

And then the rain came down.

‘Fucking hell,’ I said.

The windows in the jeep had steamed up. The rain was making a sound on the roof like twenty people at a how-many-crisps-can-you-eat competition.

It wasn’t quite night yet, but it felt like it. We’d walked as quickly as we could back to the jeep, still getting totally lashed by the rain, the wind smacking us about. The sky was a series of paint swatches smudged over and over – Duck Egg, Velvet Mushroom, Dove Grey. Black.