I eyed the track. Three more miles. Up a hill. ‘I should get going now.’ I took a deep breath and began to squelch over the tyre-grooves.

‘I’ll drop you.’

I stopped and put my little finger in my tooth-gap for a second. He was standing in front of the door, cradling the back of his head in a hand. ‘It’s cool. I’ve bothered you enough.’

‘You’re no bother.’ His voice was so quiet and low that I hardly heard the words.

The backs of my legs felt like they’d had pieces of shrapnel inserted under the skin but I spoke super brightly. ‘I think you’re just being polite. It’s fine. I’m getting quite into it, really.’ I slapped my thigh twice, loudly. ‘Walking.’

He looked at me like he was impressed at my gusto but didn’t believe me for a second. ‘I’ll drop you.’

We bumped up the track, me managing not to puke unceremoniously, which was a bonus, until the pine needles brushed against the windscreen before the main road. I opened the passenger door.

‘Polly.’

I let the belt slide up over my shoulder. Jim wasn’t wearing his.

He scratched his temple. ‘I don’t …’ He swallowed and made a sound like he was lifting something very heavy. ‘See people much. I forget.’ He looked away, out of his window, and at the windscreen, and I thought he’d finished his sentence. ‘How I’m supposed to be.’

There was a tiny fissure crack in the glass, almost all the way to the bottom. Like the rivers coming off the hills.

I shrugged at him and smiled and shook my head, all at once, and got out of the jeep. ‘See you.’

‘Aye.’ He leant over and pulled the door shut.

Well, that was different. The polar opposite of my normal life. Fish heads. Communing with lobsters. Taciturn wild man of the hills or whatever he was. I hitched a lift back to the village with a man on a tractor whose patter seemed gak-fuelled by comparison, and imagined Benji hooting with delight at being so high up and trundling along so slowly.

I described the tractor, noises and all, when Lottie and me Skyped him that evening. He kept putting his finger on top of the laptop camera, like an inquisitive giant eel, and his tongue, too. A virtual Benji lick. Nice. Dad told us he’d been hanging upside down from trees and had even made a friend, a French girl with Down’s, and they’d sat around together in Velcro suits without speaking a word of each other’s language. I wondered if Benji had licked her, too.

Lottie hid in her wine afterwards. She felt guilty for not having him here. It was a strange dynamic without Benji pulling at hair and clothes and doing his little tuneless hum with that smile that made his face look like a walnut shell. The smile he did when he wanted to assure us that he really, really meant it. I tried to distract her with a trashy online dating site and soon enough we were pissing ourselves laughing over men roughly her age calling themselves TwilightCruiser and AdAstraAdUltra, or wizened yoga freaks, and a guy who had decided the best way to enamour himself to the ladies would be to whack up a picture of himself playing acoustic guitar while standing on a dry stone wall. In a cloak.