A car slammed by, shitty house music lumping out. I wondered what would happen if I hitched and went wherever the driver was going, to the middle of nowhere or maybe some grey-arsed town. And stuck my thumb out again. A whimsical hitchhiking lottery, not having to make any decisions myself. I’d end up on a ferry to Ireland, or France, or as far as Russia, Mongolia, China. I could just keep going, a sort of snakes and ladders over the world map, drifting on the wind like hare-fluff. Chased by my own guilt.

For now, I had to drift on a smaller scale. I vowed to take the next right off the main road, no matter what. A brown signpost for a cave four miles away was my turning. I kicked at clumps of mushrooms that tore into strings of mozzarella, and weaved between the dark drops on the road.

Dark drops. New tar or engine oil, I’d thought. But the sun shone on a couple, and their edges reddened.

There was blood on the road.

I stopped and looked back. The drops trailed from the signpost at the corner, got bigger by my feet and continued past me. There was a bend in the road a quarter of a mile further on. Maybe Rocky was up there. He’d come back to get Fraser properly. And I was next.

Something on the verge up ahead. A dumped armchair cushion or a blanket or – no, something else. I walked very slowly.

Semi-camouflaged in the grass, large and still, lay a deer. A deep graze on its back and more blood swiped on the grass. Eyes open.

It blinked.

I let the weight of my boots power me back down to the main road and waited five minutes for a car, waving my arms madly when one came. It swerved and didn’t stop. Almost three whole tunes had played before another approached.

I ran up to the window. ‘Can you help? There’s a deer up there. I think it was hit by a car.’

The moustachioed driver flipped up his sunglasses. ‘Oh.’ The woman next to him turned the radio down, argumentative voices smoothing to a murmur. ‘Um, I wouldn’t know. Can’t you call the RSPCA or something?’

‘Can you come and look at it? Or maybe put it in your boot? Take it to –’ What, a vet? What the hell did you do with an injured Bambi?

‘It’s just …’ the woman leant over, a box of chocolate fingers on her lap. ‘Sorry love, we’re late for something. I would try the RSPCA. Or the police.’

The man gave me a watery, guileless smile and they drove off.

It knew I was there. Its belly rose when I stepped nearer, its neck shifting slightly in the grass. It was all the colours of curry spices, apart from where the fur had ruffled the opposite way, showing scrubby black-brown underneath. One of its back legs was bent the wrong way, like a broken umbrella spoke.