I stumble off the single-track road often – blaming the wind over the wine – and invariably into thick sucking mud. I’ve forgotten where Kelly warned me the worst of the peat bogs are, so am constantly searching for the white fluff of bog cotton with my inadequate light, convinced at any moment I’m about to sink so deep into the mud that I’ll never be seen again.

I hear something behind me. A sound gone before I can properly place it, but somehow I know it was a sound that didn’t belong. I spin round.

‘Hello?’

My torchlight barely penetrates the last few yards of night. My ears rush with the wind and the white noise of trying to hear that sound again. Like footsteps maybe. Maybe. Goosebumps that have nothing to do with the cold shiver along my arms. When I’m caught inside a sudden crosswind, my light veers left in a wide arc that flashes over long grass and stony mountain and the darker shadow of another path maybe thirty yards away. The Coffin Road.

It’s just the darkness. The utter darkness of it. I’m not used to it, that’s all. I feel blind, and it’s more than just unnerving, it’s frightening. It makes me feel vulnerable in a whole new way, when I thought I’d already felt just about every kind of unsafe there was.

Still. As far as birthdays go, I’ve endured worse. I barely remember the one I spent in hospital with a fractured skull and broken arm courtesy of that silver Lexus like a roaring wall – I was too young – but a dozen other birthdays flash through my mind. Chaotic, noisy parties always on a razor’s edge that invariably ended in tears or parental complaints. The friends who had loved my mum in primary school – the fun mum who sang rude nursery rhymes and sometimes turned up to the school gates in full evening dress or loaded down with bags of goodies – did not love her in high school. Or me. The last birthday that I chose to spend with Mum, I also spent with my only remaining friend, Becca. A far younger sixteen than me, quiet and sweet, her mum had died only two years before, after a long, never-talked-about illness. At my request, we had a quiet picnic in the garden rather than the big party Mum would have preferred; she’d begun sipping large G and Ts that she insisted were only sparkling water, before Becca even arrived.

A creepy clown turned up after an hour – dressed in denim dungarees and a canvas sun hat, face-paint smudged, his left canine more than three-quarters gold. I was pretty sure he was drunk. And then Mum had looked up at Becca, eyes dangerously bright, her smile wide as she glanced beyond her shoulder. Your mum approves of your new haircut, but thinks you need to lose a few pounds. I never saw Becca again.

It takes me a long time to reach the blackhouse. So long that I start panicking that I’ve somehow marched past the headland, heading for God knows where. And then I see it. I must have left the mudroom light on; it floods out from the door’s small window, illuminating the path. I leave the road and glance across at the farm, but it’s in darkness. I’ve resolved to only think about that – about him – tomorrow.