I picked up my phone and dialled a number I’d found ages ago.

An automated message about a switchboard. I pressed a couple of keys, my fingers looking like they belonged to someone else.

A man with a thick African accent answered.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Hi. Um. I’m wondering about a patient you have there? He’s …’ I didn’t know his name. A tiny drum began thudding in my ribs.

‘OK, what’s the name, please?’

‘Um.’ I mumbled the word bottom. Tried to make it sound Spanish.

‘Is that the surname?’ He sounded so far away.

‘First name. He’s from Barcelona.’ I realised that they might not know that, if he hadn’t woken up. If his wallet had been stolen. ‘Tall, dark hair, early twenties. He was found in Dalston. On Shacklewell Lane. A few weeks ago.’

‘OK, my love. Give me a tic.’ Tinny music. A classical string quartet playing from under the sea loch.

A rustle, a loud sitting-down-again sigh, and the man came back on. ‘OK, I’m not clear if you’re family. Did you know him?’

Did.

‘Hello?’ the receptionist was saying. Other words.

I dropped my phone on the floor. The man was still speaking.

Did I know him.

I lay down on the carpet. Not breathing.

Did I know him. Did. Dead.

I saw Stef again, his arm slung over the boy’s shoulders, pulling him down to shout in his ear. Licking the pill and putting it in his mouth. Me cheering as the boy swallowed. He did that. I did that. I would lie here forever. I wouldn’t move. Blink. I would make my own permanent blackout.

There was a dull sound that wasn’t my heart. Hollow, rounded. I stared at the ceiling. The sound again.

I sat up. I couldn’t quite work out where it was coming from. It sounded like someone in a flat three floors down was installing a bathroom. Except there was nothing three floors down but mud and stone and the crushed splinterings of humans, hundreds, thousands of years old.

Three definite, solid taps at the back of the house. I hauled myself up and went through the kitchen, opened the door. Against the luminous green of the garden were two white, curved shapes, flat and tapered. At first I thought they might be made of cake icing. I walked over.

They were wings. Swan wings.

I sat down, drew them onto my knees. The feathers had the delicacy of pressed flowers and overlapped perfectly. I walked my fingers up the near-translucent spines.

They were so large. They looked real.

The way the wings bent looked like my own elbow joint. Tucked underneath the hem of fine down was the pearled sheen of bone. It had the smoothness of a seashell. At either end of the bone, small slits had been made and rough brown twine threaded through. The longest feathers at the bottom were tied with the same twine so that each wing was closed, the shape of a large pocket.