Roddie put his hands on her shoulders and leaned her into the hedge. ‘There are no jokes about child abuse.’

‘That’s nine syllables.’

‘Chi-ld, chi-ld – two, that adds up to ten.’ Roddie consolidated his shoulder-hold as well as the hate in his eyes. She’d lost him again: the second time in years, both times today, and she would not have it.

‘So I should have posted “me too”? I nearly did one night because I couldn’t remember how to play solitaire and I couldn’t work out why I wouldn’t post it, then I imagined myself three hours hence, hovering over the laptop on my fourth kitchen Sangiovese and at last, someone likes it. John Anderson. Who’s John Anderson, I wonder? Lil’s partner’s unemployed actor brother who lives in London with a cat he says he loves but is killing with too much fresh tuna. And maybe after three hours like that, hovering, nine people I don’t know will have liked the story I told, names and all. Because, if I’m gonna do it, I said to myself earlier, then I’m gonna do it. Brother Kevin Smith, I posted. Mr Ronald Kinnaird, I told the world. And I told the world about the cold lino of the gymnasium floor, and the cold ceramic of the bathroom floor, because they were on my mind for a moment thanks to hashtag me too. And so there I am hours later, me and my nine likes, pacing the flat wondering how to reply to inevitable messages from cold-floor children, hundreds of them by now, probably: why didn’t you tell someone about Brother Kevin, Mary? Why didn’t you save me?’

‘Will you just fuck off!’ At some point Roddie had let go of her shoulders. He was now yelling at the two women at the park’s exit.

‘My niece was raped,’ said the smaller of the two.

‘Did you ask your niece if you could tell two complete strangers that?’ Mary said.

The smaller woman – thirteen-and-a-half stone, Mary reckoned, but she was prone to underestimation – looked to her far-larger pal for help. After some headache-inducing staring it became obvious that her pal didn’t understand anything about anything, leaving Smaller Woman to think on her feet, which she was not good at standing on, let alone while thinking.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ she said to Mary.

Roddie’s mission was probably the same as Mary’s at that moment – to get across the road, inside, and lock, lock, lock. But somewhere between the lane and number twenty, a twenty-metre diagonal journey at most, their missions diverged in a very unlikely way.

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