Rain again. Our first proper day on the west coast, further north than I’d ever been or ever cared to go, before, and it had done nothing but rain like a bastard. Scratching itself with a penknife onto the glass, idle but insistent. Slipping among the layers of the tune I was listening to, making loads of little extra hi-hats, filigree beats. Getting into my brain, folding in with the words.

Dead.

I ran my nails along the edge of the feather.

Not dead.

And back the other way, the fronds separating, little gaps between them like the one in my teeth.

I’d come here to get away from the dark. From the thin, serrated line of fear I felt when I swallowed. From the words, hurling themselves round and round my skull like bumper cars.

He might be dead. He might not be dead.

‘Polly?’

I turned from the window and took a headphone off.

‘I said, did you want some tea?’

‘Yeah. Thanks.’

I’d only gone into London because Stef had insisted that he would make everything better. Come be my hag, u lil deadbeat. ILL RESCUE U. Everything had gone wrong. A cascade of mini fuck-ups falling like dominoes behind me. Fuck-up One: my brain going into meltdown and me becoming the worst student in the year, maybe in the whole English department. Fuck-up Two: finding distraction in the valiantly jerking crotches of a few boys, including my housemate’s boyfriend. Fuck-up Three: moving back home early following housemate shitstorm, but still paying rent on my empty room. And then Fuck-up Four: running to Stef, my real friend, and doing the thing that made all previous fuck-ups seem like something on CBeebies.

We’d gone dancing in Dalston, me wearing Stef’s pork-pie hat and totally surrounded by gayboys, and Stef, with one of his classic, chipped-diamond smiles, had picked up this Spanish boy. He was cute, in a high street, touristy sort of way. Earnest head-nodding and peering at the coins in his cupped palm at the bar. A total drugs virgin – as far as we could make out with his Catalan and our half-arsed Spanglish with French bits mixed in – something we both found completely hilarious before force-feeding him an E.

We hardly prised his jaw open, but there was a hefty dose of cajoling. And faux-whimpering. And acting out that he was a wuss with street entertainer-quality mime. The night was hard and bright and brilliant until he had an epileptic fit at the bus stop. He went jump-cutty, like frames of him were being missed out. And we ran away. Just freaked and legged it, with him juddering there on the pavement, his head next to a load of scattered bits of fried chicken. We ran. Left him.

The next day, sober and pale, we’d gone back to scraps of chicken and a strange, sulphuric smell. And, right beside the overflowing bin, the ‘I heart London’ badge that had been pinned to his bag the night before.