‘Did you hear me talking to your dad?’ asks Lamont.

I nod, avoiding his eyes.

‘I’m sorry to hear about your baby brother,’ whispers Beaky. She touches my arm softly. I yank my arm away from her; for some reason her kindness just makes me cross.

‘Sorry,’ she mumbles.

Nero whines.

‘You’d better go back to the hospital, Charlie,’ says Lamont.

I stare at him angrily; who’s he to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do?

Beaky and Lamont look at each other. It’s a secret look, like they’re suddenly in a gang I’m not part of. The ‘Pity Charlie Club’. Now that baby is here everything has changed. Even my friends.

I grit my teeth in rage and turn away. I focus on the lumpy old tree root I’m kick-kick-kicking with my toe. Shoving my hands in my pockets, I find the deertooth and I squeeze it so hard it proper hurts.

Everything feels wrong here. I want to run and hide as far away as I can from all of it. Thoughts swarm about in my head like bees. Buzzing. Dara. His little lips pale blue. Mum’s puffy eyes. The camera flash. Dad’s fake smile. The squeak of my feet on the lino. The wall of heat. The ambulance siren. I swallow and squeeze the deertooth harder. What if Dara dies? My thoughts are so muddly they’re making me dizzy.

I close my eyes. Beaky and Lamont are talking to me, but I try to block them out, let their voices go blurry and fade. I concentrate on my thumb as I press it on to the sharp tip of the deertooth in my pocket.

Behind me in the forest, something screeches.

I spin around, opening my eyes just in time to duck as a jay dives straight towards me.

I lift my arms to protect my head. The jay shrieks again as he twists mid-air, then swoops fast and low back past me, his wing feathers flashing blue like a beacon.

Too blue.

I look down; there is a tiny bead of too-red blood on my thumb tip. And all around me the colours of the forest are too much themselves: too green, too blue, too red. All shimmering in the heat. I shake my head hard to clear my ears, because all the sounds have gone muffled, like when you’re underwater. Then the jay’s back; his shriek cuts through the fuzziness and fills my ears.

The sunlight dapples yellow through the trees; I gaze into the leafy greenness and I can just glimpse the jay, diving towards the distant shimmer of the river. I can’t resist. I forget everything and take a big breath and run into the coolness of the forest, following the jay.

I run fast. My feet thump thump on the softness of the mud and mulch. My heart quickens. I lift up my arm and I leap to grab at a dangling leaf. I run, Dad’s bag bumping softly on my back. In here the air smells damp and mossy; I gulp it in. I reach the turn where the path slopes down. I run faster still. So fast my legs feel like they aren’t even mine; so fast I can hear the thud of my own heart. The path bends, twisting down to the water. I leap a tight turn and my foot skids in the mud. But I don’t fall. I run faster. Bracken tickles my hands, nettles too, but I’m so quick they don’t even get time to sting me. I can hear it now: the sound of the river trickling over the rocks. I race around the last bend and the sun pours into the dell and flashes silver on the water and it looks so cool and beautiful and I’m so so hot and I leap over the long grass and down the ridge and keep running across the sand at the water’s edge, running, splashing right into the river.