Suddenly, there was a splash right in the middle of the patch and my heart caught, a little hook going right into me. Ripples spilled out and all at once the water was only black. As the ripples widened, a grey mist began to spread from that point, unfurling slowly, just above the surface.

The loch was alive. Alive and breathing.

It was too far to scuttle back round the rocks the way I’d come. I headed straight inland and walked very fast on pine needle-matted ground, the trees crowding in. The road would have to be up here eventually. God, everything looked the same. I had no idea where my joint had gone.

There was a big cleft, a sudden drop cut into the slope, veering round and pushing me further in the wrong direction. Further away from the cottage. A dribbling stream at the bottom made me think of Benji when he’d had one of his freak-outs. If he’d been here, I’d be charging after him pretending to be a knight or something. Benji wouldn’t have been scared. What was wrong with me?

I seemed to have been walking for ages. The ground was getting steeper, becoming lumpy, and I had to use trunks and branches to pull myself up to the next slope and the next, my calves tightening. The trees leant in heavily, looking like they might topple forward and crush me to death at any second. I’d lost all sense of where I was.

A dry-stone wall up ahead. I levered myself onto it, swinging my legs over. My feet touched something – a plastic yellow car, big enough for a toddler, grass growing through the windows and two snails on one tipped-up wheel. The bottom of someone’s garden, a long one, with a proper lawn I could walk on.

I jumped down, the backs of my legs feeling as though they’d been battered with gigantic chains. A big, plain house sat further up, its windows opaque. The back door was open. I kept to the inside edge of the wall, running my nails gently along the stones, my head down.

A little girl came out, white-blonde hair and a Spiderman T-shirt, doing an erratic, hopping dance. She stopped dead when she saw me and put the fingers of one hand into her mouth. I gave her a small wave and went to climb back over the wall.

‘Georgie, do you want your toast or—’ A woman had come out of the back door. I was straddling the wall like a first-time horse rider. ‘Can I help you?’ Her voice suddenly scraped of warmth.

Nothing for it. ‘I’m really sorry, I got lost coming up from the loch,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

She came stalking past the girl towards me as I manoeuvred myself ungracefully back onto the lawn.

‘Could I go through your garden to get to the road?’

Her nostrils flared slightly. The weed. Her eyes were lasers. She gave a small, tight nod. ‘This way.’