Footsteps. Jim was coming back, fast and purposeful, but looking strangely nonchalant – he was chewing something. He was going to tell me to get a grip. Maybe slap me round the face a bit. I tried to bite my tears away. Alarmingly close, he snatched my hand up, his thumb pressed into my palm, still chewing. My hand appeared to be the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. For a second I thought, deliriously, that he was going to kiss it.

And then he spat on me.

A load of soggy, dark-green gunk landed below my thumb and dribbled onto the sting. Warm and mulchy. Jesus. I tried to pull away but he was holding on tight with the hand he’d used to get the insides out of the hare. He spat again, to the side this time, a sound like a shuttlecock being thwacked, more green mess hitting the ground. Still gripping my hand in the air, as if about to whirl me around a dancefloor, he dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a long scrap of grey-blue material. He pressed it over the gunk and wrapped it twice around my thumb and between my middle fingers, tying it tightly.

He put both hands in his pockets and we watched the cotton darken.

My thumb throbbed. The rag – and my hand – were sticky with hare-blood. ‘What is that?’ I said very quietly.

‘Ribwort.’ He looked at me. There was a tiny speck of it on the corner of his mouth. ‘Should help a bit.’

I swallowed. ‘Thanks.’ I put the heel of my other hand to the side of one eye, wondering how much my make-up had run. My underarms were sweating like mad.

He dug the edge of a fingernail between two teeth, eyed it and blew a leaf-bit away. ‘I’ll drive you back. Should probably get some proper drugs in you all the same.’

Somehow, I didn’t think he meant what I hoped he did.

We walked to the jeep, a strange little pulsing going in my damp thumb. Underneath the bottom of his jumper, his T-shirt was torn. Grey-blue.

Jim pulled up outside the shop. I really needed to calm down. High on pain-fuelled adrenaline, I’d jabbered on at him about the only time I’d broken a bone – shit retro pop night, massive rugby-playing dickwad, two fractured toes – and about my tooth. He hadn’t said a word the whole time. Obviously.

‘Do you smoke? Tobacco, or … anything else?’

He shook his head. ‘Not really.’

Damn. No blagging weed off him, then. It would have explained the monosyllabic vibe.

My hand wasn’t burning so much now. ‘I thought for a second that maybe I was properly allergic.’

‘You’d have dropped dead by now,’ he said, and smiled at me.

One antihistamine overdose and an ice-pack of frozen chips later, my heart was finally slowing in front of vanilla local news items involving broken-down ferries and debates about gas reserves.