‘Sorry.’

I craned round. ‘I didn’t say stop.’

He stopped anyway, unfolding himself slowly and disappearing inside. The sound of a cupboard being opened. Bracken lifted his head up from his paws and looked at me. I pulled a face at him, African–American literary criticism careering round my skull, fighting for space with Simone de Beauvoir and queer theory. Who needed coke when you had five more exam-condition essays in the next two weeks. ‘My brain is going to implode,’ I said to him. ‘Help me.’

A tiny, upside-down comma of a whistle from Jim and Bracken whipped past me into the kitchen.

‘Whatever, fickle dog.’ I tipped the bottle up. I was getting quite good at whisky.

The porch was at the back of the house, overlooking a matted garden and a tiny thread of stream, with woodland beyond. Midges were just starting to rub their evil little villain hands together.

‘That’s a very uncouth way to treat sixteen-year-old Macallan, you know.’ Jim sat down next to me. He’d been scraping moss off the roof tiles all afternoon and his hands were stained and tacky.

‘That is because I am extremely uncouth,’ I said.

‘Oh, aye.’ His voice was almost the same colour as the sky. ‘You and your English degree and your red wine and art films.’

‘I haven’t got my English degree yet. I still might colossally fail,’ I said grandly, drinking from the bottle again.

‘You won’t.’ Quietly, amused.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, if I got it. When I got it. About anything, really. I eyed his bare feet and the two grey hairs that had recently appeared behind one ear.

One step at a time.

He’d talked of seeing his brother in Australia, meeting his two young nephews, once enough years had passed since his release. He said it carefully, as if it wouldn’t come true if he spoke too loudly. I’d scrolled through images on my phone of amazing places that he could visit now, even with his conviction. He’d just nodded, as if trying to digest a statistic about light years or the size of supergiant stars.

Bracken came back out. He was the colour of dead ferns, with a white stripe between the bones of his forehead, and gave an acute bark only when absolutely necessary.

‘You are the best dog in the entire world,’ I said, putting my fingers in his warm chest as he sat down on his hind legs. ‘I hereby declare Tyger to be silver-medal doggy to you. I basically totally love you.’ Bracken gave me a full-frontal huff of appallingly stinky breath. I slid my eyes over to Jim.

He was staring into the milky light. A single midge was manically doodling in front of him.

‘That last bit wasn’t to Bracken,’ I said, mostly into the dog’s neck.

Jim took a small breath and still didn’t look at me. Maybe I hadn’t said that out loud. Or he was ignoring me. I was that midge.