She took her wallet out, shaking her head. I’d have to tell her at some point. Just – not yet.

Operation Cactus-Giving. I dug out an ordnance survey map from a kitchen drawer, the corners teddy bear-soft, and spread it out on the table. It was funny, looking at my soggy stomping ground drawn so precisely. The village was reduced to squares and rectangles, and the roads looked ridiculously dramatic, pink and yellow lines of civilisation cutting through the vast swathes of nothingness.

There were surprises, too. Pools hidden up on higher ground. Remains of a fort. Waterfalls. Cairns. Caves. Settings for a dozen twee fairy tales. Cute names – some in Gaelic, words that probably sounded like you were coughing your phlegmy guts up.

My blood turned to gazpacho when I found the party bothy. It was just a barely there oblong with two meandering dotted lines spinning away from it. I imagined a stick-figure version of Rocky, with a round belly and a tiny L-shape for a gun, hiding behind the little grey swipes on the map that meant rocks, his torch swaying. I still wasn’t sure if it had been his torch I’d seen, in the night. What use would it have been to hunt me down? Actually, I didn’t want to think about that. Part of me wondered if the light had just been my fevered, über-high imagination.

Those hills. The benign curved lines on the map gave no proper hint of what bastards they were. I couldn’t believe I’d walked all over them, in the dark, and not fallen into that looping bit of river or skewered myself on one of those spiny trees. The birdman’s place had been somewhere between the bothy and the road, although that left a few gaping miles to choose from. I really had no idea which way I’d gone. This map would have come in bloody useful.

I ran a finger along the road that went from the village, around the side of the loch and into the hills, looking for a turn-off. Nothing. It was strange – even half-arsed paths that you could probably only shuffle down sideways were marked on here. That was probably his river, though, a fluttering thread. Probably. Maybe I’d got it wrong. I had been a fountain of vomit, after all. Or maybe I’d imagined the whole thing and really had floated home.

I stuck my thumb out for a ride at the far end of the village. Didn’t really feel like asking for a lift from Bev in order to deliver a quite odd present to a definitely odd man. The frostiness in the bar when he’d come in with Tyger – you could practically hear the icicles forming.

Five cars passed before one stopped, three bikes stacked on the roof – a tourist couple and their son, who had the most impressively futuristic-looking braces I’d ever seen. We chatted about the weather – I could easily dash out five-thousand-word essays on that, even if I couldn’t scratch one together on Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the female utopia – and I attempted to sound super interested in deer sightings while watching the kid deposit a globule of snot from his nose onto the window.