The door opened and Jim walked past me, dropping something onto the ground. A pan. He went to the shed, the bigger one, and left the door hanging open. Seconds later he came back, holding a vicious-looking weapon in one hand and the rabbit by its hind legs in the other. Its front feet grazed the grass. Without a word, he crouched down by a flat log, laid the body on top and whacked it once, hard, at the neck.

One rabbit, suddenly headless.

He was trying to freak me out. Frighten me. Well, I’d already seen it in the shed. And I’d seen Saw VI, too. I could watch this. Sitting up, I looped my arms around my knees, very deliberately rested my chin on them and stared intently at the decapitated rabbit, hoping it would piss him off.

Chop. One front leg. Chop. The other. Startlingly bright and loud, like rifle shots but with a slight grittiness against the bone. I thought about the cleaver coming down on my fingers. The tail came off, a streak of shit on its underside.

‘That’s one big rabbit,’ I said, trying to ignore my curling stomach.

‘It’s a hare.’ Jim gave me a darkly amused look as he flipped over the body. He pulled a small knife from the pocket of his jeans, unfolded it and sliced into its crotch, working upwards.

There was a glimpse of a coiled mass, an impossible amount of it. He pulled it out in one swift, stringy pile and I almost retched. It was the marine life of your worst nightmares. Alien spawn. Sausage-sized maggots. A greyish kidney and a deep red jelly-wobble coming with it. Its liver.

Jim held the hare up for a moment, his arm high, and gave it a shake, like a wet umbrella in a porch. A few drops of blood made flat clicks into the pan.

He put his thumbs in. There was a shock of mauve-coloured flesh and the fur loosened, really easily. I had thought you might have to slice at it, but Jim was just rolling it off. Its torso was so long. Pink and purple legs with a PVC shine.

Jim made an occasional nick with his knife, the skin snapping as he pulled it. The underside of the fur was brazenly white. I remembered being stuck halfway out of a too-tight jumper-dress in a changing room in Topshop, Lena and Jen and Alice hysterical and taking photos of me on their phones while I swore at them and banged blindly into a rail. TopshopTopshopTopshop. If I thought about Topshop, I wouldn’t throw up.

A quick, cricking sound and suddenly it wasn’t a hare any more. The whole thing came away and he dumped the coat to one side, next to the head. Its soul had been sucked out. It wasn’t in the fur, or in the gleaming, taut carcass remaining, which was the kind of colour you’d slick on your lips if you wanted to look vampish, and was marbled with paler parts that must have been fat.