Fraser shrugged and put the glass on the shelf above him. ‘I wouldn’t know. She’s not really speaking to me at the moment.’ I made a sound like a terrified pirate and he leant a hand on the bar, finally looking at me. ‘She’ll come round. In about a hundred years.’

I thunked my forehead into my wrists. ‘Oh God.’ I peeked through my arms to find him grinning at me bravely, like he’d just come out of battle unharmed. ‘I am really sorry.’

‘No matter.’

No chewing lamb with a throbbing jaw necessary, then. He kept his grins coming from behind the bar and Lottie winked at him and me conspiratorially. Yeah, she wouldn’t be doing that if she’d seen my Highlands-porn crime scene last night.

Fraser came to clear our plates. ‘There’s a pool table next door.’

Lottie put her palms up. ‘I’ll leave you two to it. I think the last time I played was in 1991.’

I shut an eye at him. ‘Only if you don’t mind being totally destroyed.’

He smiled.

Fraser knew the boys in the pool room, two fourteen-year-olds with a high-energy, grungy thing going on, as if they only listened to emo-metal while writing mopey, coded whining in their diaries and wanking off to anime. Finn was Becca’s little brother, just as pale, but twenty times as talkative.

He motormouthed on at us while we played – I gained a wine-pumped confident streak and delivered the promised destruction – and took the pool cue off Fraser. ‘I’ll show Polly how it’s done, you able-bodied loser.’

Fraser crossed his arms and angled back against a shelf, shaking his head mock-ruefully.

Finn’s left arm was shorter than his right, I noticed, and more spindly looking. His hand was curled in slightly, like he was cupping a ciggie away from the wind. When he leant over the table the back of his hand rested on the felt. He slotted the pool cue between thumb and palm and deftly potted a red, talking all the while.

‘So, you know she was always a bit of a bitch, mate, yeah? And she hated me, she marked me down on purpose, definitely, and she made me and Devo sit at opposite ends of the room, like we’re five. But it just made us worse, right, and Dev’s like, real good at making stuff, he’s like Dr Frankenstein or something, white coat stuff yeah, and I helped him make a smoke bomb at home – it’s like, made out of sugar and potassium nitrate, you sort of cook it up, right – and he brought it into the classroom and when she dissed him, which he knew she’d do and she did, he started talking about cursing her, that he’d do something she’d really regret, you know, and all the others are going what? Shut up, man, and he works himself up into it, you know, stands up, and does this hilarious like, magician hand thing yeah, and lights it, and this great big brilliant cloud of smoke starts going up, and he’d put stuff in it to make it go purple, and everyone starts screaming and running out of the room, and he’s laughing like, I don’t know, like he’s some evil nemesis or something and I’m pissing myself in the corner, and when it all clears yeah, there’s just us two in the room and the smoke alarms are going off, and she’s like, standing there with her arms folded like, totally unimpressed, and Dev’s got like, three weeks of detention for it, and he totally took it for the team, you know, didn’t say I had anything to do with it, so now I owe him. Big time.’ He potted the black. ‘There you are, Polly.’