Upstairs, Sam slid a game of Covert Tour into his Xbox.

‘Sam, it’s boiling in here,’ I said. ‘There’s no way we can sit and play that.’

He kept his back to me and flicked at his controller, and a horrible feeling crept into my stomach.

‘Sam?’ The air up here was even heavier than outside, as if a thunder cloud had crammed into his room and was ready to crackle. ‘Why don’t we go out and see if Whizzy follows again? Because I’ve got a feeling she’s somewhere close. Might be best if we get her away from the house, just in case.’

Sam didn’t even look at me. His mouth was a thin mean line, and the dread in my stomach doubled.

‘What if Whizzy got out of control in here and turned the electrics lethal?’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s go outside. It can’t be any hotter than it is in here.’

‘What’s the point? She never shows herself to me.’

‘Well, it’s cos I let her out,’ I said. It felt funny speaking to his back. ‘So she thinks I’m her rescuer …’

He shook his head. ‘She only latched on to you because you were there,’ he said, tossing his controller down. It bounced and hit the wall. ‘Nothing about you is special, so I don’t know why you think she’s yours.’

And then he muttered ‘Loser’ under his breath, and I lost it and called him a loser back, and then he said it again, and the word loser flew around the room like an epic torpedo, and time seemed to slow down. The air felt far too close to my face and I was stuck with him in a horrible, hot cloud of crossness, just like the one at the concert.

I felt outrageous myself now. ‘I’m going to look at your rabbits,’ I said, ‘and then I’m going home!’ I spat my words, and that felt great, and blundering out of his bedroom felt good too, but he followed me, in a crashing, stomping, mad way, and somehow got ahead of me so that, suddenly, he was at the top of the stairs blocking my way.

‘You’re not allowed near anything on this farm without me,’ he said. ‘Farms are dangerous.’

‘Huh! Rabbits aren’t.’

‘There’s dangerous machinery in the rabbit barn.’

‘As if I’d set that off!’

‘There’s the slurry tower in the yard—’

‘As if I’d fall in – you have to climb a high ladder, and I’m not going to do that by accident.’

‘You might do it on purpose.’