“I never said that. Maybe it wasn’t a lion. Maybe it was a flash-flood. Or a fall from a mountain. The point is, their parents were gone. But the big sister was always ready for something bad to happen, so she grabbed her brother and together they ran and ran and ran, all the way back to their brick house in the brick street in the brick city.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“The story doesn’t end there, though.” Finn shone the torch onto the opposite wall. “Because when they got home, they discovered their house wasn’t made of bricks at all. It was made of paper. Every night after the children went to bed, the parents had stayed awake, covering the walls in layer after layer of forms and money and receipts and doctor’s appointments and permission slips – all to keep the walls strong and stop them from falling down. And without the parents to paper over the cracks, their house crumbled into dust and blew away on the wind.”

“But that’s not the end of the story, is it?” Alicia asked.

“Isn’t it? I don’t know. Do stories ever end? Or do they just get to a point where someone stops and says, right, that’s my point made, I can stop writing now and go and make a cup of tea?”

“You should know. You’ve written a book.”

“Anyone can write a book. Now it’s your turn.”

“My turn to what?”

“To tell a story.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.” Alicia shook her head. “It doesn’t have to be about you. Make something up. Besides, I can’t tell anyone what you tell me, because if you tell a secret you heard in a cave, you’ll be struck dumb for the rest of your life.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s true if we both agree it’s true.”

“Can you put the torch off?”

The switch clicked, and they were sitting in the dark.

“Once upon a time,” she said, “there was a little girl who lived with her dad. No, I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“Tell it about an animal. Animals are often easier.”

“What kind of animal?”

“What kind of little girl was she?”

“I don’t know.” She tried to remember what it had been like to be her younger self. Inhabiting a body that went straight up and down, harbouring no strange desires. “Something small and dull. A rabbit. No, a mole. No, a mouse.”

“All right, a mouse. What happened to her?”

“The mother mouse got eaten by a cat.” Finn tugged at her hair comfortingly. “So, this little girl mouse lived with just her dad. Then one day, the little girl mouse went looking in her dad’s filing cabinet. And she found out her dad wasn’t a mouse at all. He was a rat. A big fat horrible evil rat with red eyes and sharp claws. He’d been stealing things and selling drugs and running some sort of, of, of lap-dancing club, only it wasn’t just a lap-dancing club, it was a, you know, a brothel I suppose. And he’d got all these photographs, stashed away in a filing cabinet. Pictures of girls doing things. To men. With men. You know. With the men’s names written on the back, and dates. Not the girls’ names, they didn’t get their names written down, so I suppose maybe they weren’t important. And one really old one of someone’s hand, only it didn’t look like a hand any more, it looked like it had been cooked – and one of a girl – she was dead and she was all in pieces and there were other men in the picture, messing around with her… ”