I grinned at him. ‘Sick.’

We sat with our shoulders touching and a mini-headphone each, passing the vodka between us. A bird circled overhead, letting out small cries the same shape as itself, fine curving strokes. Cream-coloured stone streaked the black rock. I ran my finger along it and let my boot rest against Fraser’s trainer.

Tyger was at the end of his lead, pissing on a rusty milepost – the lettering sunk into the metal, the distances ambiguous. I pulled him in, poured vodka into my cupped palm, and let him sniff it. His tongue came darting out. He gave a garbled snuffle-cough, and lapped some more.

‘You, Tyger, are a dog after my own heart,’ I said.

‘Why’s he called that, then?’

‘My little brother. His mind works in a different way.’

It had taken me a while to see that Benji wasn’t like the other kids his age. I’d assumed all toddlers were like that, me included. I hadn’t known that children didn’t usually jam their knees against the skirting board, banging their heads on the exact same area of wall until they were hoisted away to the sound of the neighbours pounding back. I hadn’t known that children normally talked more by the time they were two and didn’t just scream so loudly that dogs in the next town were probably chewing off their own paws. I hadn’t known that children didn’t normally look blank when their own name was called, or find cuddling tortuous. But my ears were trained to the conversations Lottie and Dad had downstairs at night, and I began to understand. The long minutes of low murmuring would give way to sudden bursts, dropping to almost nothing in the middle of a word, like someone turning the volume up and down on them.

We got on to vodka dares, downing a capful if we failed our challenge. Fraser had already sung, extremely badly, and I’d flashed him, which hadn’t made him blush in the slightest. I was almost disappointed. He was definitely a lot less inhibited without a roof over his head.

My turn again.

Fraser nodded to a distant mound. ‘You have to go underground.’

‘I can go underground,’ I said, offhand. ‘I am underground. I’m my own subculture.’ I stood up, wobbled slightly, and stamped off to the brow of the hill, dragging Tyger behind me.

On the other side was a man-made archway and a gate with rust like eczema. The stone swelled around the metal. Beyond that, nothing but serious, no-holds-barred darkness.

‘You want me to go in there?’

Fraser shrugged, nonchalant, and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Not if you don’t want to.’ He leant over me and took the vodka bottle.

‘It’s locked, anyway.’ I pointed to a padlock the size of an orange.

He rolled his hand into a fist and bashed the top of it. The clasp clanged open and the lock thudded to the ground.

‘Oh. Bollocks.’ Tyger sat on his back legs huffily as I tied him to a log. ‘Back in a sec, little man.’ I bunched his cheeks between my palms. ‘Tell my family I love them.’ He coughed at me and looked the other way.