One large stone stood out. It wasn’t mottled and baggy-looking like the others. It sat upright, on its own, in a way that didn’t seem possible, facing out to sea. When I got closer, I could see that it was glossy, polished black, the shape of an egg sitting on its smaller point. Two long sweeps of pearly white on it, like crescent moons back to back. I ran my finger along the rough texture of one moon and then along its twin. Three very thin stripes of the same jewelled white ran around the whole stone. It was attached, though I couldn’t see how, to a base of more jagged rocks that were nestled in among the others. It was a sculpture, a marker of some kind.

I felt ridiculously tired. I jiggled around in the stones until I found a way to fit with them, and looked at the cuts on my wrist. Drying already. I couldn’t even do that properly.

Midges gathered above me. God, they were fuckers. I put my jacket over my face.

A trail of burn-water gurgled near my ear. There it was. Rustle-click.

‘Ow. Fuck.’

‘Sorry.’

I had one hand in a bag of kettle chips and the other – with three plasters on my wrist – around Fraser’s neck, my foot lodged between his legs. His palm was underneath my thigh and his other thumb was on the remote control of the film we were definitely not watching at his place. He was attempting to perform some sort of deep-sea rescue mission in my gullet, but it was all right. I could almost forget.

I pulled away and picked up my beer. ‘What’s that?’ I nodded up to a picture of a red shield with three white wolves’ heads, tongues wagging. It was only when Fraser had texted me his address that I realised he didn’t live in the house with the garden I’d climbed into. His mum childminded that little blonde girl, and Fraser’s family lived instead on the most residential street in the village, which wasn’t saying much.

‘Oh. My da’s into all the family history, clan stuff, you know. That’s the shield of the Chief of the Robertsons.’

‘What do the words say?’

‘I can’t pronounce it. Don’t speak Gaelic. But it means “Fierce when roused”.’

I snorted and almost spat my beer on him. He put his fingers into my sides and I squirmed away, disentangling myself, taking a slug of Sambuca to wash it down. ‘Where’s your loo?’

He pointed, gave me a salty kiss and turned up the sound again.

I leant back round the doorframe and jabbed a finger at him. ‘I will be back for you. You are totally going to get roused.’

It was all set up, really. He’d invited me round. I’d shaved my legs and had a condom in my pocket. If weed wouldn’t blot everything out, maybe some earnest humping on the sofa would.

I opened the bathroom cabinet. Nothing too seedy. Witch hazel and Herbal Essences and plasters and tweezers and expensive de-wrinkling face cream – no matter how poor you were, every middle-aged woman could afford that. Earrings with curving silver shapes and the number three on them in a glass bowl.