4

In Whitethorn’s kitchen, Agnes stood frozen, the man’s shadow staining the glass of the door.

The door was unlocked but he didn’t trust this or he knew he only had to wait, for whoever went in to come back out. Was he afraid the alarm might sound if he stepped inside? No, he knew the alarms were disabled. He knew all about Blackthorn Ashes, from its first brick to its last bloodstain.

His head turned in the direction of the path behind the gardens, where Christie was waiting for Agnes. Had he heard her brother running to the path? She pictured a heavy hand on Christie’s shoulder. Her mouth was dry, evil-tasting. She stepped into the light.

‘Hello?’ She said it loudly, as Emma or Val might have done, seeing a stranger outside their window one morning before it went bad, before they all began jumping at shadows. ‘Hello?’

He took his hand off the glass and stepped back, body language bristling. He hadn’t seen her until now, she was certain. Just for a second, he was the one on high alert, caught off balance. She reached for the door and hauled it open, looking into his face.

‘Oh, it’s you.’ Her voice was a shrug, dismissing him. ‘I thought it was a trespasser.’

Trevor Kyte made an incredulous sound, not quite a laugh. ‘Like you, you mean?’

He was Dad’s oldest friend. She’d known him her whole life, felt him in the bones of her, the way she felt Ruth as dusty knees and nettle stings, pink cream on her scratches, a cool hand on her head, even though it was years since her mother had touched her like that.

‘I’m not trespassing.’ She framed a smile. ‘I’m just checking on stuff for Dad.’

Trevor started to speak but stopped himself, sucking at the inside of his cheek, trying to be the same man he was a week ago. Everyone who’d lived through what happened here was the same – trying to get back to the person they were before. Trevor hadn’t lived here, not properly. He hadn’t owned Redthorn, just used it as a deluxe squat while he was working on-site. All the same, he’d changed, like the rest of them. His eyes were wary, pale as pencil beams in the dark of his face. His tan was fading, skin greyed by the beginning of a beard. Not shaving enough, like Dad. It took a steady hand to shave. Trevor still dressed like a cowboy but he no longer looked at home in his own skin. There was a new tension to him, a watchfulness. Agnes preferred him like this; he’d been too smooth before, like trying to scale an ice sculpture. Now she could see a dozen places to put her fingers and her feet. She held on to her smile. ‘What’re you doing here?’

‘Same as you, checking on stuff.’

His shoulders blocked the sunshine, chilling her. ‘You have keys?’

She shook her head. ‘You have the only set, don’t you?’

‘But you’re inside the house . . .’

He reached into his pocket and drew out a metal tin, battered blue and gold. Tobacco and cigarette papers. ‘How’d you get in?’

‘The door was open.’

Christie was waiting in the lane, wondering what’d happened to her. ‘I came inside to check.’

Trevor opened the tin with his thumbnail. He began pinching shredded tobacco into a paper, not taking his eyes off her. The tobacco smelt sweet and leafy.

‘You weren’t afraid?’ He ran his tongue along the paper. ‘You’re trespassing, you know.’

‘Makes two of us. But no, I wasn’t afraid. It’s always just kids, isn’t it?’

‘Not always.’ He rolled the cigarette with two fingers. ‘Not today.’

She could taste the cigarette, a scorch of paper against her lips.

‘We must be mad,’ she said. ‘To come back here.’ She waited a beat. ‘To keep coming back.’

‘You’ve been back before?’

Every inch of him was steady now, no trace of the earlier scare in his face or fingers. He put the cigarette between his lips. His hand went to his pocket, came out with the lighter she remembered. Heavy scratched silver, worn at the sides by his thumb.

‘A few times.’ She glanced across his shoulder, squinting at the overgrown lawn. ‘Not here. Our house.’ She nodded in that direction.

He flinted the lighter, its yellow flame leaping. He was made of dry sparks, dangerous. Other people saw a solid man, capable, always happy to help. But she knew how near the surface his temper lay, coiled like an adder. He held the flame to the cigarette. The air was staticky, lifting the hairs at the back of her neck.

‘You want it?’ He took the cigarette from his tongue, holding it out.

She shook her head.

‘Christie with you? He loves it here. No way he stays home and lets you come digging around for whatever you can find.’

‘I’m not digging, I’m checking.’

‘Yeah, that’s what you said. But it was a lie, same as mine.’

He sucked at the cigarette, its paper sizzling red. He was still afraid, she realized with a jolt. He was smoking because he was scared and it made him feel a bit better, less sick.

‘Christie loves it here,’ he said again.

‘He did.’ She bent to scratch at her ankle, keeping her arms loose, letting him see she wasn’t the one who needed nicotine to stay steady. ‘Before everything that happened.’

‘You should ask him’ – hardness in his voice; he resented her show of calm – ‘just how much he loved it.’ The sly lick of a pause. ‘Ask him how much he got out of it.’

Agnes moved from his shadow, letting the sun onto her face. ‘You’re not making much sense.’

He smoked until the cigarette was ash, flicking the final shred towards the decking.

‘Ask your mum what I’m on about. Or your brother. He won’t be too happy to find out you were round here without him. This’s his private kingdom, comes and goes as he wants. I told him, “That’s going to get you in trouble, mate,” but he wouldn’t listen.’ Trevor wiped his hand on the thigh of his jeans. ‘I tried to be a dad to him when Ade stopped stepping up.’

He was talking about his best friend, her father. The fear was hers, now. He’d sneaked it back into her somehow, as if he’d slipped his hands into her pockets and filled them with scribbled scraps of paper and pebbles, gritty against her skin.

‘Heading home?’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a lift.’

‘Thanks, but I like to walk.’ She started to move past him.

He shifted to stop her, until a noise from the end of the garden made him glance that way. She could’ve dodged in that second and run. But if it was Christie at the end of the garden and if Trevor chased her and found her brother with his rucksack filled with whatever he’d stolen upstairs . . . She didn’t want to give him that hold over them, not over Christie. She stayed still, facing him.

‘Remember.’ He was angry now, for whatever reason, perhaps because the past had him in its clutches and he hated to be held. ‘What I know about your dad and your brother. About you.’

‘And you.’ She brushed past him, whispering the next words: ‘What I know about you.’

Christie was sitting picking stones from the path to fling at the blackthorn hedge. The sloes were bruised, their blackened taste hanging in the air. The backpack was squashed into his lap. He looked up when Agnes approached, scowling with every inch of his face. The legs of his jeans were dusty, a dark patch on the right knee.

‘Are you hurt?’ She crouched at his side. ‘What happened?’

‘I tripped.’ He hunched away from her. ‘What happened to you? I thought you were never fucking coming.’ Anger helping him to hide the pain.

‘It was Trevor.’ Agnes sat at his side. ‘The man outside Whitethorn.’

‘Trevor? What’s he doing there?’

‘Same as us.’ She put her palm to the path, rolling it over the sharp pebbles to placate the itching in her skin. ‘He can’t stay away.’

‘I can stay away.’ Christie threw another stone into the hedge. ‘I’m just bored because there’s fuck all to do in the caravan.’

Agnes waited a moment before saying, ‘We need to stop coming back.’

He snorted but he’d fight, she knew. Her and anyone else who tried to stop him. One day it wouldn’t be Trevor who found them. It’d be someone who wanted to teach Christie a lesson, as if he hadn’t learnt enough in the last six weeks.

‘We need to stop,’ she said again.

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re hurt.’ She watched the sloes shaking and shivering as she tried to find the right words to make him listen. ‘And I’m scared.’

‘Of Trevor?’ He moved his head, looking at her.

‘He knows what we’ve been up to. He says he knows.’

Christie drew a quick breath. A taut second passed before he scoffed his tongue at his teeth. ‘He’s screwing with you.’

‘Yes. Maybe.’

‘So tell him to piss off.’

‘You said you don’t need to come here. If you’re bored, we can go into town or to the beach.’

‘You never wanted to come here.’ Another stone launched at the hedge. ‘To Blackthorn Ashes. It freaked you out, before anything even happened.’ He dragged himself upright, dusting his hands on his jeans. ‘From that first day at the show house, you hated it.’ His anger was like Trevor’s, full of smoke and sparks. ‘You said you’d never come back but you did and you ruined it.’

She stayed down, letting him be the bigger one, towering over her. ‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘Yes you did! You always do.’ He bunched his fingers into fists. ‘You only came back because you’d nowhere else to go. You said you’d never come back, that you’d rather be dead. You think I don’t remember because I was only a baby but I do and I wish you were, I wish you were dead!’

‘Okay.’

‘You’d nothing else, that’s why you came back. You’d nothing. But we had this’ – pointing over her shoulder to the abandoned houses – ‘we had everything. Until you ruined it.’

Let him burn through it. Better he was angry at her, better than being scared.

‘Mum’s right about you! She said you’re sick. You ruin everything.’

‘I’m not sick.’ She didn’t want him thinking that, it wasn’t fair. ‘I’m autistic. My brain works differently to yours but it’s not broken.’

His face creased in confusion. He looked ten, not thirteen. ‘It was you.’

‘People died.’ Agnes climbed to her feet. She felt battered like the sloes. ‘How was that my fault?’ She turned in the direction of the sea, away from the caravan park. ‘Come on.’

She didn’t stop to see if he was following but after a bit she heard his trainers grinding behind her. He knew where she was headed. It was what they both needed.

It took four minutes to reach the bend where the path sheared away to scrubland at the cliff’s edge. Here there was no shelter from the wind that beat in from the sea, cold and solid, making rough crops of gorse creak under its pressure. Buried in the thickest part of the hedge, in a thorny tangle of branches, was a big trampoline. Blown from a garden at Blackthorn Ashes on the night of the storm. The night before the police came, evacuating everyone left alive.

Seven days ago, only seven. She couldn’t believe it.

The storm took out the power and ripped tiles from the roofs of the houses, upturning garden furniture, tearing down fences. It set off car alarms and burglar alarms, and it lifted this trampoline from Maythorn’s garden, carrying it over the trees to bury it in this hedge.

Wind tugged at Agnes’s T-shirt, like hands.

Below them, the sea ran into the rocks, its salt stinging her scalp. The trampoline looked as if it’d been in the hedge for years rather than days, its frame the same colour as the branches that held it, with its black rubber mat facing out towards the path. She walked up to it and drew back her fist, punched as hard as she could into the heart of the rubber. The impact rippled up her arm, jarring her elbow. She did it again, harder. Then switched to her left hand, tucking her thumb inside her fingers. Punched. Her feet skidded on the grit of the path, wind whipping at her clothes.

Trevor’s stupid cigarette. Punch. His smile. Punch.

‘Hey.’

His threats.

‘Agnes!’ Christie was yelling, the wind taking his words away from her. ‘My turn!’

She fell back to let him take her place, watching as he thrashed his fists into the rubber mat over and over again, a tortured squealing coming from the hedge as it held on to the trampoline’s metal frame. He didn’t stop for a long time.

Agnes walked away, looking out to the horizon, sucking in the scent of gorse and water. As long as she could remember, the sea’s scent had brought her back. Its wildness stirred a stick inside her head that somehow helped when everything was muddled and murky with distress.

In London, she’d missed the sea so much she’d wept. Laura took her to the coast one weekend, to a seafront hotel, pebble-dashed, net-curtained. Their room had a sea view but it wasn’t the sea as Agnes knew it, barely moving, a limp dishcloth shoving at dirty shingle. They shared a white bed in a blue room. As Laura slept, Agnes stood at the window, watching the sea. She hadn’t known it could be so flat, so . . . nothing. A child’s first drawing of the sea, pale as a plate. It hurt her head, having no stick to stir there. Her thoughts fused, nothing breaking free. She leant her head on glass the same temperature as her skin. Another non-thing. She began pinching at her wrist just to feel something, to try and sort out the blah-blah-blah in her brain. Bring herself back.

Behind her, Christie panted, bouncing his shoulder into the trampoline, muttering under his breath. He was calm at last. They were done. They could go back to the caravan, to Dad.

Christie was limping by the time they reached the duckboards at Indigo Park. Agnes checked her watch, needing to know how much time she had to wash the blood from his jeans before Mum saw it. Hiding his limp would be harder. The wind tracked them, the tug of it agitated and remote.

‘Shithole,’ Christie said under his breath.

He swerved when he saw their caravan, heading out past the trailers to the edge of the park where plastic awning sat around the roof of the biggest trailer like icing on a collapsing cake. To the left of its steps, a curling rectangle of AstroTurf was implausibly green against the boiled brown of the field. At night, a blood-red neon pistol flashed above the trailer door, its muzzle firing the word ‘Bang!’ A banner with the legend Graceland 2 showed Elvis with a half-eaten burger in his fists.

At the south-west edge of the field, sun glittered on the felted roof of an old groundsman’s shed. Christie’s hiding place.

The shed had been treated for age and rot, would be standing long after the decking in the gardens at Blackthorn Ashes had turned to mush. A group was seated outside the Elvis trailer: two men in football shirts and jogging bottoms, a woman in a white bandage skirt and a red halter-neck. None of them looked at Agnes or Christie as they passed.

‘Come on.’ Her brother was nearly at the shed, keys rattling in his fist.

Someone was hefting chain behind the big trailer – a heavy, slinking sound.

Agnes shivered, the sun damp on the back of her neck, like breath. She slipped into the shadows where her brother was waiting. Christie pulled the padlock from the shed’s door, pocketing the keys as he went inside. Agnes followed, leaving the door open a crack, to let the light in.

Inside, the shed was dusty but dry, no tang of mould or damp despite broken garden furniture stacked under windows blacked out by dirt. A dented filing cabinet stood under the nearest window. Padlocked, like the door. Christie had found the padlocks with the keys in Dad’s toolbox.

The sun stirred at the windows as Agnes moved deeper into the shed’s shadows, her wrists clammy and stinging. Delayed shock, she knew, from what had happened at Whitethorn. She watched as Christie squatted in the dust to open the bottom drawer of the cabinet, letting out the smell of Blackthorn Ashes: unripe wood and rot. All its soft-closing drawers were crooked open now, nothing flush or fitted, the houses slowly slumping to one side like bodies after a shooting.

Her brother shrugged off his backpack and unzipped it, hunching his shoulder to hide whatever he’d taken from Whitethorn. Something more than the scatter diamond, since he’d let her see that. Agnes left him to it, looking through the window to the open sky. Their caravan was out of sight at the other end of the park. Temporary, but Agnes had seen it in Ruth’s face: the full stop of their lives. They’d no money, no means to recover the losses at Blackthorn Ashes. Dad faced the threat of prosecution. Corporate manslaughter fizzed in her skull like language from another place, words whispered in the sand dunes whole summers ago as she smoked her first, stolen cigarette. She rubbed her thumb at the dirt on the shed’s window, inspecting the tan stain on her skin.

Behind her, Christie straightened, locking the cabinet. ‘Done,’ he said.

Agnes wiped her thumb on her jeans. ‘What about your leg?’

‘What about it?’ He was always at his cockiest in here, with his stolen treasure close at hand. Thirteen going on thirty. He fixed her with a glare through his fringe. ‘What?’

‘What’ll we tell Mum?’ She nodded at the stain on his knee.

He shrugged. ‘I tripped.’

She followed him from the shed, waiting while he padlocked the door. Indigo Park was a sea of squat roofs, choppy and rain-ruined. They picked their way along its margins, staying wide of the family in the big trailer. Agnes kept her eyes on the ground where the strange shapes of the mobile homes were replicated in shadows, the stain of each one a grey bar on her skin as she walked and Christie limped back to their caravan.

They’d nearly made it when Odie tore across the duckboards, barrelling into Christie’s shins. Her brother yelped and would’ve lost his balance but for her hand on his elbow. He shook her away. The dog kept jumping, snapping at the straps of his empty backpack.

‘Odie!’ Bette came down the steps of her caravan, wiping her hands on a blue cloth. ‘Back up!’

Christie hopped away from Agnes then reached a hand to rub Odie’s head. ‘He’s okay, aren’t you, boy?’ He was catching his breath, hurt.

‘He’s pleased to see you.’ Bette’s eyes narrowed at the stain on his jeans. ‘Casualties?’ She glanced at Agnes, her sharp stare like a tack.

‘I tripped,’ Christie said. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘It’s your good jeans,’ Agnes said. ‘Your best ones.’ Her palms were sweaty. She wiped them at her sleeves then kept wiping because the friction helped to ground her.

Bette took it all in, their stiffness and the silence between them that grew and grew in spite of the words they spoke. ‘Come along.’ She looped her hand through Odie’s collar and scooped him into her arms, nodding towards her caravan. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up.’

Christie went ahead of Agnes up the short flight of steps to the door that matched theirs. It made the same sound when it shut behind them, a muffled thunk of plastic on plastic. Bette’s caravan smelt of fried bread, washing detergent and tortilla chips. Agnes hated their caravan but she loved Bette’s. In the kitchen, the floor was yellow lino. Apple-green cupboards with black handles, a white stove under a triangle of shelving where brightly painted pots and pans were wedged. Bette had lived all her life in Cornwall, taking odd jobs over the years to pay the bills without tying herself down. She’d worked as a hairdresser and in an antiques shop, been a secretary and a teaching assistant. At Blackthorn Ashes, she’d dressed the unsold houses according to instructions left by the interior designer, polishing windows, picking stray leaves from the floors between viewings. She set Odie down on the yellow lino. He settled with his chin between his front paws.

The sitting room had corner sofas covered in orange and brown zigzags, and flowered curtains in different shades of the same colours. There was a low round table with books, and an ashtray filled with a litter of sweet wrappers. A high shelf running above the sofa held mugs with carved faces, woven dolls, straw donkeys, seaside souvenirs. The carpet was thin and hairy and dark brown. A picture hung on one wall, of a leopard prowling in a velvet jungle.

‘Sit yourself there.’ Bette nodded at the sofa. Christie sat. ‘I’ll get my first aid kit.’

‘I can do this,’ Agnes said. ‘We have a kit.’

‘I know. But now you can go and see himself.’

Errol, she meant.

Christie was poking at the bloodstain on his jeans, his bottom lip turning out the way it did when he was about to cry. He wouldn’t cry, not in here. Maybe later with Mum, or maybe not at all. He’d changed so much in the years since Agnes went away. The backs of his hands were filthy from punching the trampoline. They’d missed lunch. Christie could have Dad’s sandwich, if Dad hadn’t eaten it. The thought of making another sandwich was suddenly overwhelming. Agnes could picture the slices of bread and ham, butter in a plastic box, cheese in a hard block. She could see the plate, and the knife she’d use to spread the butter. But she couldn’t fit the pictures together, not in the right order. It was a warning sign, she knew. Her brain was telling her it’d had enough, needing a dark room somewhere quiet and safe; it was done for the day. She left Christie and went to the kitchen, where she found Errol in his paisley bathrobe, smelling of peppermint tea.

‘You look thirsty.’ He reached for a cupboard, silk sleeve slipping to show a forearm sleek with muscle. ‘Tea? Or coffee?’

‘I can’t stay. I’m only here while—’

‘Bette fixes up Christie. I heard. Plastic walls.’ He brushed his knuckles at the nearest wall to demonstrate. He had the hands of a supermodel, long-fingered with perfect, polished nails.

‘Tell you what.’ He put his hand into the cupboard, brought out a pair of shot glasses. ‘It’s late enough for cocktails and I’m running low on gin so . . .’ The hand that wasn’t holding the glasses swooped for the freezer box, bringing out an electric blue and pink bottle. Absolut vodka.

‘We’ll manage with this.’ He turned, holding the bottle and glasses over his head, as neat as a dancer in the narrow space. ‘Keep me company?’

In the sitting room, Agnes could hear Bette fixing Christie’s knee: a murmur of voices, her brother sounding less tired, happier now. She followed Errol into his bedroom, the beaded curtain chiming as she moved through it, metal beads tapping at her cheek.

Being in Errol’s bedroom was like standing inside a jewellery box: watery blue silk on the walls, pink velvet cushions on the bed, animal print rug on the floor. A battered film star’s dressing table stood against one wall, its mirror studded by silvery lightbulbs. Errol patted the bed next to him and she sat, taking the shot glass she was handed. He chinked his glass against hers. The vodka filled her whole mouth with vanilla and dried apricots. She drank it off in a single swallow.

‘So . . . Agnes.’ He pronounced it the French way: An-Yes.

‘Errol?’

‘Didn’t I tell you my friends call me Jackie?’ He refilled their glasses.

‘Yes, but you’ve yet to tell me why.’

He arranged the shoulders of his robe, sending her a look through his lashes. ‘Jackie O?’

‘Oh . . . Of course.’

‘Errol was for Errol Flynn, so it could be worse. But I’m more of a Jackie, don’t you think?’

‘Maybe . . . I like Errol.’

‘I might start calling you Sinead. Strictly eighties, of course. Your cheekbones give me the envy.’

Agnes ran a hand over her head, where the pelt of hair was growing back. Its electric feel shocked her. She’d half forgotten the buzz cut, expecting to feel the curls she’d had when she was sixteen. ‘It was a mistake.’

‘A beautiful mistake.’

Errol lay back on his elbows. His gaze brightened but not like Trevor’s, not like anyone’s. He wasn’t like anyone else. She should have hated that, the lack of cues and clues, but she didn’t.

‘What happened to Christie? I suppose you were back there.’ He balanced the shot glass flat to his chest. ‘Blackthorn Ashes.’

‘Can’t keep away.’

She used a light voice, trying to pass it off as a joke. But Errol had been at the street party, even if he wasn’t in Quickthorn on the night of the storm. He knew how far from funny it was. She gazed at the poster above his head, of a black man in a green shirt. She recognized him vaguely, a movie star or a singer. She concentrated on his easy smile, pushing the words Blackthorn Ashes away.

‘I keep thinking,’ she said. ‘That afternoon with Iris, the street party. When the ambulance came for Luke after he burnt himself on the barbecue . . . If we’d asked them to look at Chloe, check she was okay after cutting herself in the sandpit, they’d have known from her blood, how bright it was. That’s what carbon monoxide poisoning looks like. Or if we’d told them Val and Tim were ill . . . They’d have known the danger we were all in. No one need’ve died. We could’ve saved everyone.’

Errol sat up, reaching for the vodka bottle. The bottle was cloudy with coldness. His fingers left marks on it. ‘Maybe.’ He sucked the frost from his fingers, frowning. ‘But it still isn’t your fault. Or anyone’s, really. No one set out to kill anyone, did they?’

The beaded curtain made a sort of music before settling into silence.

‘Trevor knew. About the corners they’d been cutting, to save money and time. He knew but he didn’t tell Dad.’ She tested the shape of the words in her mouth, like probing for the cause of a toothache, needing to know she wasn’t telling a lie, fooling herself. ‘Maybe Dad knew. Trevor definitely did.’

‘From what you’ve told me about Trevor, that fits.’

‘I haven’t told you anything. Have I?’

‘From what you’ve not told me about Trevor,’ Errol corrected, ‘that fits.’

She couldn’t hold his gaze, looking instead at the fake tiger skin on the floor. ‘I saw him today.’

‘Trevor? At Blackthorn Ashes? What’s he doing there?’

‘Same as us. Same as Christie.’

Errol didn’t ask what that meant. He knew, or he’d guessed.

‘Is that how he hurt himself?’

She shook her head then nodded; Christie wouldn’t have run if Trevor hadn’t turned up.

‘Is it safe?’ Errol asked. ‘To keep going back?’

‘It’s never been safe. But it’s what he needs to do, and I need to go with him because it’d be worse if he was alone.’

‘I could go with him,’ Errol offered. ‘If it would give you a break. I’m not being rude but you’re starting to look a bit . . . see-through.’

‘They call it autistic fatigue. It’s all the rage in certain circles.’ Her attempt at humour fell flat, like an arrow fired from a faulty bow. She massaged her temples. ‘Ignore me. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’

Well enough to lie to Mum about staying home and then to walk the cliff path with her brother, standing aside as he raided houses where people died.

‘Have it your way. But I’m right here when you need me . . .’ Errol rolled sideways to refill their glasses. ‘Not just for Christmas.’

‘I know.’ She did.

He was the only person she’d been able to talk to about her autism. Even with Laura it’d been hard. Plenty of people thought they understood but very few did. Too often she was met with vigorous nods and sage advice about essential oils and going non-dairy and had she tried noise-cancelling headphones? Hardly anyone sat as Errol sat, and simply listened.

‘Christie thinks I’m crazy, by the way. In case he mentions it . . . He’s found my meds, now we’re sharing a room.’ She smoothed her fingers over Errol’s duvet cover. ‘I take anti-psychotics to manage my mood and because sometimes I see or hear stuff that’s not there. It happens quite often with autism but it’s not really understood.’

Ruth hadn’t understood it when Agnes was sixteen. Christie didn’t understand it now. What was it doing to him being made to share a bunk with someone he believed to be crazy, even dangerous? A lot of his anger was fear but how much was fear of her? Her skin crawled with self-reproach.

‘What I’m doing right now, explaining all this to you, being factual and personal and oversharing . . . that’s my autism, too.’

She took the refilled shot glass from Errol’s hand. ‘Of course, sometimes I clam up. I’m going to try that now, let you get a word in edgeways.’

‘I like listening to you,’ Errol said. ‘And getting a word in edgeways is my superpower. Nice to have a day off, frankly.’

That made her laugh. ‘I shouldn’t drink this.’

She drank it. ‘Okay, I’m ready to go back. I love you, so you know.’

‘I know,’ Errol said. ‘And same.’

Back in their caravan, Dad was on the sofa, a ball of cling film at his feet. He’d eaten her sandwich. He looked like she felt – far away from everything but somehow still too close. Everything was touching her, all the smells and sounds, the stretchy fabric of the sofa, the plasticky ball of cling film. She pushed through it to her bunk, dragging the duvet over her head. Blacking out, or trying to, needing to black it all out, wishing she was in London with Laura, that she hadn’t ruined everything there and here, that she could go back and fix it. Back to before she came home, when Christie and Mum and Dad were happy and excited and Blackthorn Ashes was just a brochure and a first brick with her brother’s name written on it.