There was a silence, and the sound of him scratching his beard. ‘Sorry.’

I stayed sitting up, thinking, go on, just ask. Go on, Polly. ‘Do you fancy – maybe you could come up here?’

The rain tumbled just above my head like peppercorns. The wind seemed to have grown long false nails and was trying to prise the ends of the roof off. He thought I was a massive slut. I was a massive slut. Then he made a sound, very formal, like he was about to make a speech. I opened my mouth to say, it doesn’t matter, I almost said it, when there was a creak and two steps, and the top of the ladder scraped against the side of the bed.

His blanket was dumped on top of my calves. I wriggled over and he got in beside me and arranged it over the bottom half of the bed. I lay, rigid, trying to remember the words to Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’.

He moved onto his side towards me. ‘Turn around, then.’ He spoke as if it was obvious, but really gently, a sigh of leaves.

I twisted to face the wall, and he moved up to me and put his arm on my waist, just below my ribs. I waited for him to shift a little closer, start kissing my ear or something, but we just lay there, clothes on. He didn’t say another word. I could feel his breath blotting my neck.

His arm was so hot. My own breathing was shallow, as if I were trapped in a box and had to ration it. I made myself inhale more deeply, my ribs lifting his arm up just a little, and down again. Up, and down. I listened to the wind, and the rain.

12

Oh, the wind and the rain. I remember it, that night.

It can change in seconds. A bright day can be shrouded in sleet as you blink, the mountain opening every vein, and the paths become rivers, and then the sun comes out again and everything is newly minted.

There’s the rain that begins to crystallise in the cold. Tiny, laced worlds. The wind that heaps voice upon voice, low roars and pipe shrieks, like someone is pressing their elbow into it, making it wheeze and sing.

The kind that binds skirts to skin to hair to feathers.

It rains when the sun shines, as it did on the night when everything changed. Making it sparkle, even as it fell. I caught it in my hands, danced in it. You’d asked me to marry you, a ring in a fine-broken egg, and I’d shouted yes, in your ears, in your mouth, to the hills.

Everything can change in seconds. Rain and sun. Girls and not-girls.

I woke up with my face in his back, forehead touching his T-shirt, my nose numb. Everything was a vague, grey colour. He smelled sort of oaty. His breath whirred in his throat like one of those little hand fans you’d never need up here. I pulled the covers over my head and let the air get fuggy. A leather belt had strapped itself around my skull. Whisky brain.