There was a smattering of applause as the players got up. At the bar, Fraser put his hand on my back and introduced his bandmates. Becca reminded me of a bedraggled crow. Her hair was very long and straight apart from an irregular fringe, and she wore tons of black eyeliner, even more than I would ever lash on. You could have snapped her dull white wrist like a bit of Kendal mint cake. She nodded at me without making eye contact, her shoulders up around her ears, hands in her pockets. I turned on my best glittery smile and talk-show host chat and aimed it over her head to Fraser.

A guy tapped him on the back and Fraser held up a finger at me and disappeared. Becca was scraping her nails along the bar.

‘Um, do you want a drink?’

‘Coke. Ta.’ Thanking me was clearly as bad as swallowing acid.

Of course – she was under the drinking age. ‘Oh yeah, I forgot, sorry.’

She scowled and took out her tin whistle, gripping it tightly at both ends. I watched Fraser chatting to the guy in the corner, both of their heads down, and tried to think of something else to say. Becca glared at the beer mat as I slid her Coke over. She didn’t look like she needed any more caffeine.

I pointed to the door. ‘Gonna get some air.’ Before you stab me with that fucking thing.

She nodded viciously, her knuckles going white.

After several gulps of lung-lacerating Scottish air, I came back inside to find Fraser playing on his own, staring fixedly at the table. He made me think of a seagull hanging out on the wind, calling stroppily.

Becca sat down and the fiddle swayed around the whistle, sometimes joining it on the tune, or straying on to gently see-sawing chords. Neither of them ever looked at the other. It was like a desperately shy eighteenth-century courtship. Finally, Gray, who’d called me pet and excreted sweat and beer, great big man smells, sat down again and stacked up bricks of notes on his accordion. I got out my book – I didn’t think they would mind seeing as no one else was paying any attention.

Once they’d finished I headed outside and looked at the loch. There was a word in Swedish, untranslatable, Adam had said during our first dinner, for the road-like reflection of the moon on water. Tonight, it made milky puddles in the shallows. A cobbled street.

I lit one of the two slim joints I’d brought.

‘That smells promising.’ Fraser was there with his fiddle case.

‘Who said I’m sharing?’

We leant against his car, more grey than white and with a dent in the side that made it look like bashed-in skull. A shuffling figure came towards us.

‘See you, Becca,’ said Fraser.

‘See you later,’ she said to him in her tiny, cracked crow-voice, scurrying past.

‘See you, Becca,’ I shouted at her back. She half turned before scurrying on faster.