‘There’s a man. Outside. He’s coming in.’

Fraser looked at me, his nose next to my cheek. Blinked. ‘Um, right. OK.’

Do you remember how we lay underground, blinking at each other? I would tell you about the rocks that men cut out of the dark. I know them all.

Corantee, Clashgorm, Bellsgrove. Places bruised by air and water. The sound of rocks, shifting. Ancient pressure. Liquid, hardening.

Around me, time is strange. I get stuck in its folds. Seasons, too. Autumn might stretch and stretch, or the leaves rash and redden and fall in a blink. Sometimes the snowdrifts bank up at the pace of a breath. I bask in summers, as summer as we get up here, or miss them completely. And I would curse them, then – another season gone. Another season in which I hadn’t talked to you. Made you hear me.

The one I wait for, over summers and winters.

I was cut out. A bullet is lodged in my breast. Just here. An acorn-shaped jewel. I wear it, a heaviness that weights me unnaturally. An awkwardness, like a fishbone at the back of the throat. A tiny fleck of grit under an eyelid. A mineral speck.

Even cut-out rocks can speak. They speak in colours. You have to know how to turn them, just so, until you can see it. The gleam.

They speak in light. Perhaps I can too.

To her.

A yellowy shimmer on the long wall opposite the door. Growing brighter. Maybe the moon was coming in.

Or a man.

He stood just inside the doorway, blowing on his hands and stamping his feet on the stone, a torch as big as a rugby ball under his elbow. ‘Christ on a bike, it’s cold up here at night, eh? My fingers are falling off.’ His voice was slightly too high and loud for the room. He flung his fingers downwards before blowing on them again. ‘All right, fellas?’

He definitely didn’t seem like the man in the moon. He was in his early thirties and had a shaved head apart from a wide stripe of hair a centimetre long in the middle. Quite short and probably pretty keen on the beers. I had just put my hips back down on the bed after pulling my shorts up. Becca had shuffled into the corner and was squeezing the wax of a candle between her fingers.

Fraser stood in the middle of the room, his hands in his pockets. ‘All right, mate.’ I could sense all of us wondering the same thing. ‘Have you walked here, then?’

The man was looking about. ‘Aye, ’course. Nice set-up you got.’ His eyes grazed over the fire, up to the roof and, I swear, from my crotch down to my ankles.

Fraser had said something about the rules being that anyone could come in and you had to all bunk up together, but he hadn’t suggested for one minute that someone would actually come.

He didn’t look much like a walker. They all had Gore-Tex and super-grips and breathable hoods and toggles. This guy was wearing shiny grey tracksuit bottoms with electric blue piping, white trainers and, I could see as he unzipped his jacket, a matching tracksuit top. No rucksack or anything.