I took one step away from him. ‘You can go now.’

When he didn’t, I left him standing on the mat, and shut the door very precisely in his stupid, bruised face.

7

The orchid was blooming again.

I’d watered the plasticky stalks and had woken up to find two of the buds had burst, their petals like Marilyn Monroe’s skirts in that old photo. They had a whisper of a smell, something delicate and translucent, and were cool on my cheek and lips. The smaller set of petals on each flower had three jagged, deep crimson lines on each side. I held my wrist up to them. Three lines, deep crimson.

Lottie, trying to smooth the annoyance out of her voice, insisted I get a new house key. The nearest locksmith: twenty-four miles away, obviously. This was not the kind of place you could get a kebab at three in the morning, or only wait ten minutes for a taxi to anywhere you wanted. A gun in the face, midge-attack, or avian open-heart surgery, on the other hand.

We got the bus–ferry–bus to Fort William, had a new key cut, and did the sights, all one and a half of them. I watched Lottie try on oversized woollen items and drank lots of coffee. My insides hadn’t quite recovered from the bothy yet. I swear it wasn’t just Fraser’s little pick-me-up. I kept seeing Rocky’s gun lolling at Becca’s shoulder, and his look when he’d said that word I hadn’t heard before.

God knows how long I would have been stuck out there, lost and freezing and with all the bits of my brain slowly drifting apart like icebergs, if I hadn’t found that guy’s place. He’d let me sleep in his bed. I had totally destroyed his covers and he hadn’t said anything about it. Maybe I owed him, even if he was unnervingly quiet and had a tendency to eat raw bird. He’d found Tyger, too. I thought of his kitchen table and pulled Lottie into a gardening shop.

We met each other at the counter, Lottie holding some psychedelic primroses she had picked up for Bev and Adam. She looked at the cactus in my hand. One stout, three-sided stem, and a bulbous top. Sort of dark and thorny. Like him.

‘To keep the orchid company,’ I said.

We got outside and got pelted. The rain couldn’t decide which way to go, so it went in all directions at once. Lottie pushed me, near-kicking and screaming, into a camping shop, a living hell of spikes and base layers and socks that go over socks, and stood over me while I clumped around in walking boots that were like the shoes Lego people wear.

‘You are buying them,’ she said.

‘Can’t you?’ I drummed my nails on the bench. ‘I’m a bit brassic.’

‘What about your dad’s money?’

‘You know, rent and travel and stuff.’

She was frowning at me. ‘You’re not paying rent any more.’

When I’d moved back home my story was that our landlady had terminated our contract early, was selling the place. Rather than that I’d fucked Lena’s boyfriend against a chip van after eight too many Jägerbombs. ‘Yeah, no, I mean, bills and that. Quite a few are only just coming in. Nightmare.’ I gazed earnestly at a rail of multi-coloured cagoules. Yeah. My relationship with my housemates had pretty much imploded after that.