‘Oh, you know, hours.’ I snuck a glance at him.

He shut one eye and squinted at the sun for a moment and I realised he was telling the time, old-school style. He sat up and looked at his hands. His knitted jumper was a murky blue, with purple and white mixed in.

I poked the handle of the wheelbarrow with my toe. ‘I came for that beer. But …’ He looked creased up, face and body. ‘Maybe you’re beered out.’

He rubbed his eye. ‘No.’ The word was soft and drawn out. ‘Just tired,’ he said to his feet. ‘I don’t always sleep well at night.’

Maybe the air didn’t affect you once you’d lived here a while. Unlike me and Lottie, both dead to the world by ten o’clock every night, like eight-year-olds.

‘I didn’t have your number,’ I said. His palms were still upturned, his head down. Maybe it had just been a throwaway comment, back at the garage, anything to make a break for it. ‘Not that there’s any reception up here.’

He eyed me like I was something quite small but also quite dangerous. A rabid puppy. ‘You can get them if you like.’

I went to the front door, pulling my skirt down over my arse.

‘They’re not in there.’ He tilted his forehead towards the river.

At the bank, in a slight dip, water coursed around some clear plastic boxes wedged between rocks. The two beer bottles lolled on their sides in one of them, next to a couple of cans of low-rent lager and some wormy-looking apples. I peeked under another lid – a mass of leaves, some wide and ribbed dark-red, some small and stringy. Nettles, too, hairy ones.

I came back and whacked the lids off on the lip of the wheelbarrow. They made two metallic, shuddering twangs and a tiny sliver of dark blue paint fell off.

He took the Beck’s from me, his elbows resting on his knees. ‘Unless—’

‘Oh, I’ll drink anything. Is that, like, your fridge?’

He nodded.

‘Your actual fridge?’

Another nod.

I sat down. My ale tasted like trampy Coke. He picked at the corner of his bottle label.

Me first, then. Again. ‘Did you build this place?’

‘I put it back together, aye.’

He told me, with lots of pauses for beer, that it was at least a hundred and fifty years old and had probably once been owned by a farm further away. Men would live here when looking after sheep or cattle, and more recently deer watchers used it as shelter during the summers.

He was actually more chilled out today. Maybe he was still half asleep and hadn’t quite remembered to be all scratchy and serious.

‘What do you do, then?’ he asked.

Do. What did I do? Hung around feeling useless. Wished I lived in London. Enjoyed over-exciting my brother. Thought about sex more than I thought about love. Tried to write poetry but never got further than three words through crippling shame. Left boys on the road to die. ‘I’m a student.’ I tapped the mouth of the bottle against my unchipped front tooth. ‘A rubbish one, at the moment.’