Suddenly the phone in my hand pinged. It pinged a few times, rapidly, one ping crowding in on the next. Two bars. And lots of messages, hovering messages that had finally found a way to land. A number of missed calls, all from Nassim. Hang-up messages. And two texts.

The first text read Tried to call a couple of times. Obvs.

All the second one said was, Swing? with love hearts following.

I let the phone drop again. That was a thing that Nassim and I did. We swung. Not in the seedy seventies key-party kind of way, but in the kindergarten way. There was a playground at the end of my street – he’d send me a message and we’d meet there and swing and talk and then fumble together on the grass for a bit before I’d walk home to more study. I never knew when he was going to ask – it could be late at night, or in the warm afternoon; he said he was mixing it up for me, keeping my thinking ability fresh and adaptable. I wasn’t sure if he’d read that one somewhere too, or if he just said it because it suited his purposes. He’d sent this one last night, according to the time stamp.

The wind whooshed about the plain with nothing to trouble it, and nothing for it to trouble except the three sad trees and the clouds it sent racing across the bright blue sky above me, clearing them suddenly, like a broom sweeping them out of the way. The sun beamed, enlivening the green grass on the plateau beneath. And suddenly it was a beautiful day. The blue above, the green below . . . it was like a picture from a storybook.

And out of nowhere I felt sadness welling up. From nowhere, or everywhere. It seemed to come at me from all around: from the sorry little house, the shortened grass, the ragged stones, the sky itself, from the old derelict mansion across the way. The clouds swept back in and the two windows that remained there in their sockets were like two wonky, sightless eyes, reflecting the shifting low clouds. I watched them passing across the upstairs window, and I caught movement there. A crow. Just a crow, reflected.

The crow was flying towards me, and as it passed over me, it cocked its head, as if it was strange to see a human so high up in the flat landscape.

Wah, said the crow, as if telling me to hurry up and sort my shit out. Wah.

Basil arrived, teetering on the rocks, sending a smaller boulder tumbling. ‘Holy shitting hell,’ he said. ‘We’re going to die.’

‘Oh come on, it’s not that bad.’

‘Oh yeah!’ he said, and stood up and did star jumps.

‘Stop that!’ I cried, grabbing his arm. ‘You’ll fall!’

‘Oh, you care. Sweet.’ And he sat on the rock next to me. He looked suddenly spooked. ‘If Mum saw me up here, she’d freak,’ he said, and he dropped another smaller stone and watched it clatter to the bottom.