‘How are you getting home?’ The permanent lines on either side of Adam’s mouth looked as if they had been made with a penknife.

‘I’ll work it out,’ I said, thinking that I’d happily wank Fraser off in exchange for a lift if it meant not doing this again. I had practically suffocated on the aged pheromones floating about in the car.

He sat looking at me. ‘I like your hair.’ One corner of his mouth curled up. ‘It’s like you’ve leant over a paint pot.’ And then he bent over and got me, a hand on my jaw and his stubble on the corner of my mouth. When I stayed rigid, he came away an inch, his finger still behind my ear.

‘Yeah. Don’t do that,’ I said.

Adam made a small, sighing sound from behind a closed mouth, as though a needle had just perforated his stomach, and dropped his hand. He tried to rearrange his face back to its usual slantiness. ‘On you go, then.’

I slammed the door as hard as I could.

This place was a bit swankier than the local one, white walls with deep green-blue window frames, slate floors, whiskies stacked neatly up on a high shelf. There were three rifles lined up on the wall and fishing rods and baskets and other crap.

Fraser was talking to a couple of younger teenagers, one so acne-infested she looked like she’d been sprinkled with dried chilli flakes. He leant his forearms on the bar as he greeted me. ‘Found it all right, then.’

‘This better be good.’

‘Piss off. It’ll be what it is.’

I grinned and let him get me a drink.

Folk time. Fraser sat on the other side of the room with a guy in his forties and a skinny girl who was sixteen or seventeen. They put their heads together and I wondered whether they were talking about me until, without any preamble, they began to play. Fraser jammed his fiddle under his chin in the way you’d hold a phone to your ear while eating, and the guy, who had scoured cheeks and a Saxon T-shirt stretched over an impressive belly, began opening out a huge accordion on his knee. The girl just had a little tin whistle, and she and Fraser launched into a tune with the accordion heaving away underneath. The few people in the bar stopped talking for a bit and looked at their glasses, before picking up where they’d left off. The brown leather seats gave off a roasted smell.

They seemed to be playing to themselves, really. As though it were simply another conversation. The girl tugged her tin whistle to the side, her mouth dragging outwards. The way the accordion player pulled out the folds and pushed them in again made me think of those chest expanders that were used by men from the 1920s with handlebar moustaches. Their tunes just went on and on, notes unspooling. You got lost trying to follow them.