I met her only once. We went on the train to a grand building with a long private driveway and thick, sticky air inside. A lot of woolly looks from the other residents.

When she was still at home, you told me, she would have strange fits in her sleep. Clutching the bedclothes, arching up, cries like foxes in the night. There were things you couldn’t explain. Eggshells, floating in milk. A thimble full of dull grey powder, finer than chalk. You once walked with her past a row of moles hanging by their noses from a wire fence, and she’d sent you back for a teacup and a knife and refused to say why. Crystals – you brought me one and I didn’t recognise it. It wasn’t local.

In her room, I sat on a chair so she could get a better look at me. There were dried leaves on a saucer, a spider in a jar. Her stare was as sharp as a glugful of whisky.

After that, I felt like she was always watching. I imagined her eyes on us as we walked. I saw her stitch her lips up tight at my laugh, which was loud, a barnacle goose overhead. The hiss of disapproval in the oak leaves. The tut of branches in the wind.

She was everywhere.

I hear her still. My own haunting. She is in my bones. I think I understand the darkness in her more than you do now. How someone can pull another to them, can move them like liquid silver.

As the light stays longer in each day, I can feel it in me.

The rain was even worse when I came out of the shop, three packets of Jaffa Cakes tucked under one arm and a soggy dishcloth version of Tyger hooked over the other. I’d carried him most of the way up the track before getting a lift with a guy whose car was filled with empty crisp packets, baby bottles and chewed-on plastic toys.

I propped a fag in the corner of my mouth and waited in the porch, reading the notices. Maybe the rain would stop, peel back like a theatre curtain. Kayaking courses. Mobile cinema – showing some Pixar movie this month. A ceilidh. Shoot me.

‘Shall I spark up that wee one for you, lassie?’

The old guy with the wine-stain birthmark had just emerged, a high sheen on his forehead that might have been sweat or rain. He carried a canvas bag of groceries and was already bringing a lighter out of the inside pocket of his mac.

I put my fingers to my roll-up. ‘Thanks.’

He stretched his shoulders back in a grand movement, his chest coming out as if he was about to yodel, and faced the sheets of rain.

Tyger, still crooked over my elbow, made a sudden jerking movement towards the guy and nipped him on the arm.

‘Tyger! What the fuck?’

The man raised his eyebrows at him and they were like hats being chivalrously lifted by two country gents.