On the train south, I’d held an Evening Standard on my knees, unbelieving and hollow, looking at the compact report of a man in his early twenties who had been taken to hospital in East London and was fighting for his life after being found alone on the street. I hadn’t told Stef. And we hadn’t talked since.

I put my forehead on the conservatory window and felt for the feather again. He was dead. Or he was not dead. If he was dead, we had killed him. I had killed him.

And now I was here. Where everything was greener and greyer. The fag-end of nowhere. Not much evidence of the new fighting spirit, you know, Scotland for the Scottish, Labour out on their arses. The sky looked smeary, as if someone had wet a tissue, wiped at it and just made it ten times worse. Who the hell could live here, miles from anywhere? Yodellers. Meditation experts. People wanting to practise their thousand-yard stares. I sat down and dug my toes underneath Tyger. He shifted and slumped his head onto my foot.

Lottie brought a tray in, spoons and milk and sugar as though we were in a Georgian salon and not a conservatory infested with wicker. My mug had a cartoon lipsticked fish on it and the words ‘Master Baiter’.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time. The only solution. The further away I was, the less I’d have to think about it. Initially, I’d said no thanks to Lottie, but after two days of shitting myself, taking the train a few stops into town to get the free paper and speed-reading it with a lump like a gimp’s ball gag in my throat, I changed my mind. Green, grey escape route. Quick getaway. Lottie hugged me hard in the kitchen at home and said that we were going to have a real catch-up, quality time together, a laugh.

I had stood alone on the deck of the five-minute ferry to the bit of mainland just over the water, looking at the little gobs of spit flecked on the loch, wanting to add my own, feeling us pull further and further away from humanity. You couldn’t believe that anything was beyond that line of hills, just an aching void of mizzling sky. Everything had gone soft focus. Well, no one would ever be able to find me up here. I was being swallowed up.

Lottie sat down, sighing too loudly, her smile too wide. When I didn’t give her one back, the laughter lines were chased away underneath her chin and up to her ears. She raised her eyebrows at me instead and tipped her head on one side. I shifted my headphone off again.

‘You’re not going to be like this the whole time, are you?’

I shook my head and picked up the milk jug.

Dead. Not dead.

The cottage was owned by someone that Bev and Adam, her old London friends, knew. He was away for a couple of months in South America catching really big fish and comparing them to the length of his dick, probably. Tucked away off the village road – you could just see the roof from the driveway gate, AN EALA BHÀN written in blue paint on the paddle of an oar at the top – it had been pressed deep into the ground with a giant thumb, bending sopping pines and tropical-looking palms down towards it. Everything was wet and spongy. You could probably leave an imprint the depth of your calf in the grass.