He turned. ‘Can I kiss you?’

I tried very hard not to laugh. Failed. ‘You don’t have to ask.’ Fraser blushed and looked down. ‘You’ll just have to lunge at me and see if I try and hit you with anything.’

He put his elbow on the back of the sofa and leant in. I bit his lower lip not entirely by accident and let him come at me some more. His hair had the texture of an itchy woolly jumper. The kiss was getting a bit washing machine-like so I grabbed the nearest thing – an angry, out-of-proportion bronze buffalo on the table next to me – and pretended to whack him with it, just to get him to take his tongue out. He’d gone all sleepy-looking, like he’d just woken up.

I moved closer, slinging my legs on to his lap, and Fraser’s eyes darted over to the door.

‘What?’ I said.

There was a red patch on his neck again, like someone had given him a slap. ‘I should probably go. I’m feeling pretty wasted.’

‘You can stay here if you want.’

He took in a lungful of air and his mouth went goldfishy. ‘Thanks, but – another, yeah, another time.’

I thought of Lottie finding Stef in my bed when we were fourteen and trying to give us a hippie agony aunt talk over cups of tea. ‘She won’t mind.’

‘No, it’s cool, my da needs the car first thing,’ he said. I carefully slid my legs back off him. ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

I shrugged. ‘What are you doing?’

I got a few more kisses out of Fraser in the hallway and on the driveway before he left. The stub of the first joint was on the table. I picked it up and put a handful of Lottie’s chocolates in my pocket on my way back through the house.

The whole garden was rustling. Different layers of it, a blanket of fast-whirring sounds and louder, intermittent ones on top. I stood in my tights, feeling the soft clutch of the grass and thinking of Fraser and Becca and Gray’s instruments weaving around each other.

I wanted to know what the real darkness felt like. I wanted to wear it. I turned the garden lights off and let it envelop me. It hardly made any difference when I shut my eyes. There were a few lights over on the other side of the loch, making morse code signals, but otherwise it was just me and the darkness – and the wind, making everything rustle. My curl of smoke was erased like chalk on a blackboard.

I shut my eyes again, crushing a strawberry cream against the roof of my mouth, its cheap taste – the Claire’s Accessories of confectionery – all mixed up with the peaty greenness of the weed. When I opened them, my tongue halted, stuck in the chocolate.

A little cloud was there.

Three metres to my left, head height. Bizarrely low. At first I thought it was the last puff I’d exhaled, but I had watched that disappear. Hadn’t I? And it was whiter, too. I waited for it to dissolve, but it hung there. It just – hovered.