Edie looked out across the sea. The sun bounced off the water in a corridor of light and fell across a boat so it glowed like a beacon.

‘What’s up with his lungs?’ she asked as she sprinkled tobacco along the crease of a cigarette paper.

‘Silicosis.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s fucking nasty. From the mines. Means he breathed in too much dust and shit. It’s what’ll kill him.’ She handed him back his tobacco and he slipped it into the back pocket of his jeans. ‘Fucking mines,’ he whispered under his breath.

‘Sounds horrible.’ She rolled the cigarette and ran her tongue along the paper.

Jago lit it for her and looked back out to sea. ‘We all have to go. He just knows what’ll take him.’

‘Is he scared?’

Jago sucked heavily on the cigarette and shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Maybe. I know I’m scared of finding him. Every day I think I’ll go up there and he’ll be dead.’

Edie kept her gaze locked on the horizon in the distance.

‘Everybody should see at least one dead body in their lifetime,’ she said.

He snorted. ‘Man, that’s fucked up.’

She glanced at him and caught his smile.

‘Are you laughing at me?’ She smiled too, relieved her nerves had finally begun to ebb.

‘No. It’s just…’ He hesitated. ‘You’re different. We don’t get many girls round this way who dress in black and want to see a dead body.’

‘Nice girls then.’

He shook his head. ‘They’re boring. Like everything else around here.’ He dropped his cigarette and trod it into the ground. ‘I’ll get the bike and meet you back here.’

A few minutes later he was revving the engine beside her. She hitched her skirt up and swung her leg over the seat of the bike. When she wrapped her arms around his waist, her body fizzed at the feel of his stomach, hard and muscular, beneath his T-shirt. She rested her chin against him and breathed in. He smelt amazing, musky with deodorant and smoke, fresh sweat and the hint of joss sticks.

He let the throttle go and with a roar they sped off. When they reached the open road – moors on one side, farmland on the other – she shouted for him to go faster. The wind raced past her ears. She tipped her head back and screamed, loving the feeling of freedom coursing through her veins. At the top of the hill he pulled into a gravelled lay-by and stilled the engine.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘So incredible! If this bike were mine I’d keep going. I just wouldn’t stop. Not ever. I’d keep riding, as fast as I could, until I was five hundred miles away from it all.’