I wiped condensation off Elizabeth’s bedroom window. She had a crow’s-eye-view of the lawn and hedges, the cul-de-sac, the neighbours’ gardens lit by security lights. Uphill, out of sight, was my own house. Past it lay the woods, the field, the school. Dominic was out there somewhere. Dominic was a boy I fancied. He sat behind me in History and kicked the back of my chair. His blonde forearms in my peripheral vision were a torment. Once I’d overheard him saying loudly, triumphantly, ‘Mate – I came like a fucking fountain’, and felt a flame roar up in my chest. He lived on the other side of the valley. I knew he had friends from other schools. I knew he smoked. What else did I know? He wouldn’t stay on for sixth form. Once he’d said he wanted to be a tattoo artist. His copies from H. R. Giger, very beautiful and steady, were pinned to the wall in the art room. And once he’d talked about metalwork. He meant belt buckles, bracelets, things like that, but still I pictured him labouring, like a blacksmith, in a forge.

Our interactions were abrupt and entirely on his terms. He would throw a biro at the back of my head, and when I turned around he would say, ‘There’s a helicopter crash. Everybody dies except you. But you’ve got to lose something. What is it – your hands, or your feet?’ There was a rage at school for concocting dilemmas that forced the listener to choose one terrible option over another: drink some piss or eat a spider, fuck a pig or fuck a cow, always smell of cheese or never earn much money. You had to choose quickly, as if the answer was obvious, and once your decision was made it had to be defended at all costs. Usually that was the end of it, but then Dominic pushed me under the stairs outside Biology and asked me what I was doing that night, the night I was due at the Harmers’. I’d told him I had to babysit. He’d told me he’d be there at eight o’clock.

We were playing when the doorbell rang. Elizabeth leapt from vacant dreaminess to vindication. ‘Scarlet! It’s her!’

I tore the hat off my head. ‘Stay here.’

The door opened on one blue eye, half a black sweatshirt and a dirty green Van. ‘You’ve got some freaky black flowers out here.’

‘You mean the poppies?’

‘Are they poppies?’

He vanished.