‘So, you, er…’ Lol thought he was beginning to get the picture. ‘If Eirion does well, you won’t see as much of each other, will you?’

A grey squirrel scurried up a fir tree ahead of them.

‘I just don’t see why,’ Jane said. ‘I mean why? Why do you have to waste precious years being lectured to by all these hopeless losers so you can wind up with some totally meaningless qualification that everybody else has got. Why can’t you just do stuff? Original stuff. I mean… you did.’

‘You got something original in mind?’

They climbed over a rotting stile on the edge of a decaying copse at the foot of Cole Hill. Jane waited for Lol. She was squeezing her hands together.

‘I want to find out things for myself – like, not formalized curriculum shit that just qualifies you to be like every other-’

She spun away. She might have been in tears. She moved rapidly through the trees and out to where another stile had been strung with barbed wire. When Lol reached her she was bent over the wire, breathing hard. The canvas bag was at her feet.

She had both hands around a pair of wire-cutters.

‘Jane?’

‘It’s supposed to be a public footpath. Nobody has any right to-’

Two ends of barbed wire sprang apart and Jane stepped back.

‘Jane, where did you get the wire-cutters?’

‘Gomer.’ Jane clambered over the stile. ‘You coming?’

All his foreboding becoming justified, Lol climbed over the stile and stumbled after Jane through tall grass, holding his hands up above the nettles. They came to a five-barred gate set into an overgrown hedge, strands of orange binder twine hanging loose from it.

‘I pulled that off last night.’ Jane opened the gate. ‘Now. Look at that.’