‘Cool, OK,’ I said, my voice drowned out by the engine.

The bottles clanked together as he drove off.

Hitching was my new special skill. Putting my hair in two plaits seemed to help – an overgrown Girl Guide vibe – and less smoking probably didn’t hurt. Rucksack, too. This time, I climbed up into a massive truck driven by a girl with a long tattoo of a squid coiling along her arm. She told me about the plans for her wedding to her rock-climbing instructor boyfriend in Inverness and about fixing up her powerboat, all the while hurling the truck round impossibly tight corners.

Today the sun was being drained through a broad-bottomed colander over the opposite hills, lemon and lime streams of it, widely angled. Somewhere, a clump of grass and mud was getting its fifteen minutes of fame. There was a smell like burnt caramel and the ground underfoot actually crunched rather than squelched. I whacked up my music, strident, punchy voices soaring over synths.

It had been two days since seeing Jim in the village, long enough, according to the rules, to go for my beer. One day for gays, two days for straights, Stef had always said, usually with his tongue in the ear of some boy he’d just met. Not usually a boy he’d then abandon on a cold, wet pavement at three in the morning.

Obviously this wasn’t a date date. I just needed some serious distracting after protracted arm-wrestles with nineteenth-century feminist history. Playing Dinner Spinner on my phone, taking tilt-shift photos of the tribal tat around the cottage and browsing new music by bands no one except three people in New York had ever heard of hadn’t quite done the trick.

When I emerged from the pine trees, my toes thudded into the front of my boots. There was something lying on the ground near the house. I pressed pause, quick. It wasn’t something. It was someone.

I looked at my phone. Zero bars.

Keep walking. I carried on down the hill, eyes on the prone body, never wanting to arrive but knowing that I had to. A tug in my gut, pulling me towards it. It was him, or it was someone he’d offed, and either way I was stumbling on a terrible scene and probably about to make it a lot worse. As I got nearer, I could see that it was definitely him – Jim, I mean. He wasn’t moving. His ankles were crossed, his hands folded on his stomach. There was something on his chest.

A book.

Polly Paranoia Vaughan. Really had to work on that. I couldn’t even blame it on the weed any more.

I got all the way down to the house, treading only on the softest mounds of grass. It seemed wrong to disturb him when he was so asleep. He looked different. Less scribbled on. His head was tipped to the side, exposing scraps of beard and two raised veins on his neck. A reddish pink ear. No boots on, just socks. The book, which had a woozy picture of a rainforest on the cover, was splayed page-down.