Back when social services were still trying, they’d tried to make Mary do one of those adventure holidays – they said it’d be character building. The pictures they’d shown her to encourage her, the ones of stark rock ridges and barren, boggy moors where the wind and rain spotted the camera’s lens, had the opposite effect. She wasn’t doing that. Why should she? What possible purpose would it achieve? She’d started with a hearty ‘fuck off ’, and it escalated from there.

She hadn’t gone.

Perhaps the mistake they’d made was making it too safe for her. Where was the challenge in climbing a hill thousands had already climbed that year, and getting roped up to abseil a few metres down a rock?

Now, with no one to plead with her, cajole her or compel her, she was walking and camping out, foraging for food and eating with her fingers, all the things she swore she’d never do, because she wasn’t a fucking animal.

She didn’t even want a cigarette. She couldn’t normally make it five minutes after waking without one.

With slow inevitability, they became strung out. Spotting each other was easy enough, though; there was nothing that particular shade of orange in the forest. Stanislav was always out in front, Dalip not far behind as if he had something to prove – which perhaps he did, if only to himself – and her third. Elena and Luiza walked close together, with Mama in the rear.

Mama really didn’t like the idea of the journey, let alone the journey itself. Every step was further away from her babies, as she called her seemingly endless collection of children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews.

She could remember all their names, and their birthdays. For someone like Mary, that seemed astonishing enough, but Mama knew every part of their lives, too. Mary would have found it all too claustrophobic and oppressive, but apparently the kids were all fine with it, voluntarily surrendering every intimate detail without the threat of sanctions hanging over them.

Mary was happy being on her own, happy that no one was questioning her, happy that her life which had swung between chaotic to strictly ordered had found a third path she’d never actually known existed.

Stanislav stopped. Dalip caught him up, and the older man pointed at something ahead of them. They looked behind them and saw her approaching, and together they waited for her too.

She saw it before she had to have it explained to her. It was a house. Or at least, it was a corner of one, deep green with moss, the same colour as the forest. She moved her head this way and that. What had been a complete structure, four walls and a roof, was little more than sagging timber uprights being inexorably reclaimed by nature.

‘I don’t think anyone lives there,’ she said.