For a moment my head feels fuzzy, a good kind of fuzzy, the kind that lets you forget everything, and I wonder why my chest feels so tight. And then I remember. She came to see me. She wants me to help her. And I don’t know if I can.

It was early evening. I was having a kip in my spot under the oak tree as I’d been up since dawn, after a night dreaming of the doe and the dead mother in the desert. I was so shattered the next day that by teatime I was dead to the world. My doss bag was pulled up tight round my ears so at first I couldn’t hear the crying, and if I had it would have sounded like the beginning of another strange dream, which in a way it was. Then I felt a weight on my arm and that woke me up. Someone was shaking me, violently. I was under attack and I had to act fast so I pulled the cover back, all set for a fight, but there was no enemy there, it was just her. Just Isobel.

She looked terrible. Her face was all red and puffy and her hair was all over the place, like she’d just got out of bed or something. I’d never seen her like this. She looked so bad that for a moment I forgot that I’d been angry with her. I just wanted to give her a cuddle. But then she opened her mouth and it all came back to me.

‘First things first, you shouldn’t have done what you did yesterday,’ she said. ‘It was so embarrassing. Poor Steve nearly had a heart attack.’

That name again. Steve. It felt like a stone in my throat. But it jolted me awake too and once I was awake I started to feel angry. I told her that if that’s how she felt she could bugger off, go back to Steve and her stupid house and her stupid dad and leave me the hell alone. Then I lay down and pulled my doss bag over my head again.

I thought that would be it but she started tugging at me again. I pulled the bag tighter so it was so far over my head I could barely breathe, but she wouldn’t let up. Eventually I threw the bag off and leapt to my feet with my fists clenched beside me, ready to fight, to take her on. Isobel looked terrified and stepped backwards into the bracken.

Then she put her hands out in front of her, defensively, and said that she was sorry, sorry for shouting at me. She said she hadn’t come to argue or fight, she’d come to ask for my help.

Well, that surprised me all right. Help? What kind of help could this girl with her perfect life and perfect home want from someone like me?

But I was curious so I unclenched my fists and told her to sit down. She looked at the doss bag and wrinkled her face. It was covered in bloodstains and bits of mud and bracken, a world away from her immaculate bed with its crisp cotton sheets, but, give her her dues, she sat down all the same.