I wandered to the edge of the garden, to where the noise had come from last night. It felt like a cut-off point, where the stylised, fairground mania of the garden stopped and the wild started. This must have been the way the deer had gone.

There was a half-arsed path where the leaves had been stamped down, but I couldn’t see any hoof prints, not that I really knew what to look for. My boots left double puddles. A few last-gasp bluebells keeled over and low ferns tickled my calves. The ivy on the trees made me think of Lottie twirling her hair round a finger in front of her computer. I stopped for a second, listening for that noise again, but there was hardly even a breeze.

The path disappeared into a guttering stream. I began to pick my way down it, standing on the stones not darkened by water, some covered by cardigans of moss. One stone got me. My foot skidded straight down into the shallow water and my ankle right-angled. I swore, a lot. Kept going.

After a bit the stream broadened out and turned the colour of cider. I had to put my hands on rocks and grab at overhanging branches, moving in a rather less graceful way than that deer. It had practically levitated. I could see more of the loch by now, a slick swipe of it.

The stream thinned again and I came onto the shoreline. It was a pointed, muscly stretch of rock, curving back into bays on either side of me and out again, a pattern that repeated and repeated. Each bay was tiered like a trifle, working downwards from grass to pale stone to darker rock and loads of stringy, dark green seaweed, the sort of stuff that would clutch at your ankles and pull you under if you stepped on it.

The loch was pencil-lead grey. It made me shiver. I tried to imagine it as one of Lottie’s paint samples on our hallway wall: Loch Grey. Fucking Miserable Loch Grey. The whole place looked pretty unhappy – I wanted to take my sleeve to it again like I had at the window this morning. I should have been sprawled next to Stef, looking at a sea and sky so bright it hurt.

Bev had warned us about the midges. The plague of the summer, she’d said, making them sound biblical, leaving us a bottle of some cheap-looking moisturiser that she swore by. It smelled of the claggy cold cream stuff that I used to stick my fingers into at Nanna’s. And here they were, an extra dash of seasoning to this shitty scene. Loads of them, polka-dotting the air in front of me. Gross.

I sat down on a stone just where the grass stopped, a dry prickle on my thighs, and got out the mint tin. There’d been half a pack of baccy in the desk drawer too, and a few Rizlas. The weed smelled dead pure and lovely.