On a wet Saturday morning in mid-July, Dad announces he’s going to Heaton’s Scrap. Mum says, ‘Are you taking Shane too?’

‘Why not?’ asks Dad.

Shane sits himself in the car before me and Dad have even got our shoes on. ‘I’ll stay here,’ says Mum. ‘But you go.’ She’s probably itching to get to Old Buggery’s place. As if I don’t know that they have a thing. She’s always popping up his shop for a sliced white, full make-up and earrings. She’s gone hours. And Dad knows about it. ‘Your mother’s a trollop, Joanna,’ he said to me one day when we were sitting on the front step in the sun. He likes to have his tea on the front step if the sun’s out. He always takes his shirt off, too, and fingers his hairy nipples. ‘Your mother’s a trollop.’ Slurp of tea. Finger of nipple. ‘Don’t you be like that, will you?’

Heaton’s Scrap is full of puddles with bits of car and gate and fireplace sticking out of them. The scrap’s everywhere. Skeletons of machines and odd wheels and bike handlebars and bits of engine lie about. And there are loads of men, calling to each other. ‘Nice bit of stuff here’; ‘How much for an exchange?’; ‘Look at the rust on that. Completely buggered.’ Stuff like that.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ says Dad. ‘Hold her hand, Shane. Make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.’

‘Dad!’ I protest. But Shane gets to my fingers before I can put them in my pocket. And Dad just laughs.

Shane’s hand is big and heavy, and I keep running my finger over a wart on his thumb. I want to pick it but I don’t. I just rub the edge of my nail over it, scratching at the ridged skin.

We walk through puddles and round bits of machinery. Shane’s silent. He holds my hand tight. He’s got holes in his grey plimsolls. His feet must be getting wet but he doesn’t say anything about it.

‘Look, Shane.’ Dad points to the remains of a motorbike on the other side of a puddle. ‘That’s a Norton frame.’ He jumps over the water. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

Shane nods.

‘Want to touch it?’ Dad runs his hand over the rusted metal.

Shane looks at me, then he steps into the puddle and reaches out to pat the frame. He keeps one hand holding tightly on to mine, so I have to lean over the puddle with him. My feet teeter on the edge of the muddy water. My fingers are crushed in his grip.

Dad smiles. ‘You’ll have to let go of her eventually,’ he says.

August is so hot that the underneath bit of my hair keeps sticking to my neck. I lift it up and fan it around, trying to get air on my skin. Mum says I should put it up, but I’ve always hated ponytails – who wants to look like a horse? And besides, elastic bands give me a headache. I like to feel my hair there, around my face. Except today it’s like an itchy blanket, it’s so hot.