After the planes, a boy we all called Mac the Kid scooted round the concrete blocks and went as far as Monkton and back on his dirt bike. He never wore a helmet, just a backwards cap done up two further than the tightest ring because his head was so small, and when he came back, he said he’d seen what the sites had been building.

There was a group around him. Davey pushed into it.

‘It’s big boy, mate,’ Mac told us. ‘Three of you,’ he said to Davey. ‘Fuckin’ eight of me.’

‘You’re a madman,’ Davey replied. ‘What if they’d had guns still?’

‘I kept my distance,’ Mac said. ‘Snuck up, stayed far. Kind of like that spy way,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t even that what made it weird.’ He made this sound, like the back of his throat was itchy and he was trying to scratch it. ‘Do you know if they had them dig? Our boys down there? Do you know if they made them dig much?’

Because on our side of the wall, Mac said, it had been dug out. It was muddy, but more than that, it was deep. All along the wall, and that the water was only going to get deeper. He’d gone at low tide. I thought about what that boy Kent had said about the sites. That it was grunt work; foundations, a reservoir.

‘That’s mad,’ Davey said, as we walked away. ‘That’s fucking mad. I knew it, though.’

‘Knew what?’

‘What I drew in the sand.’

‘The skull thing?’

‘It’s not a skull thing. It’s us. Here,’ Davey said. ‘What we’ll be here.’

I looked at him. Dead was what I thought.

‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘It isn’t just a wall.’

‘Sea wall,’ I said. ‘Sea protections.’

‘Well, whatever you call it. It’s not just a wall.’ He looked at me. ‘They’ve made a channel. They’ve dug the channel back.’

‘What channel?’

‘Don’t you remember history?’ he said. ‘Roman days. Isle of Thanet.’ He threw a pebble in the air and kicked it like it was a football. ‘It’s an island. We’re going to be an island again.’