There was just the bus, the night that was coming to an end, his sleeping mother who wanted to get away. Anyone with an ounce of sense wanted to get away. Away from a place that looked like 80 percent of the places in the world where people lived. And all of them yearned for TV cities. Someplace where people sat on stoops in front of town houses, whistling, drinking coffee from paper cups while bent over their devices.

And so, England. It was as good as any other country one didn’t know anything about. The English prime minister had welcomed well-educated Polish workers. But for god’s sake, not so many!

Now there were more than two million of them, and they were hated. Poles. It was their fault. Along with the Muslims. Or the hedgehogs. Some group of poor idiots had to take the blame so there was a vent for the apoplexy of the masses that resulted from the overestimation of their prospects. Blah, blah, blah. You know how people are.

Peter and his mother had no idea about the attacks on Poles, the imminent Brexit, the Nazis. They had other things to worry about. Used to have. That was then.

Hello, England.

Hello, you idiots, did you really think we were waiting for you? Then have a look around! The area around the bus station, it looked as if a war had just been lost. There were fire pits, campgrounds, plastic tarps, and hundreds of people standing against the walls of buildings and squatting on curbs. Peter had learned that it didn’t help things to follow his impulse to throw himself to the ground and scream, so he walked behind his mother, staring at the ground he’d liked to have been lying on.

Peter had wanted out of himself ever since he could remember. He was imprisoned in his own body, and it was impossible to make contact with those outside. The situation made Peter so angry that he occasionally slammed his head into walls or began to scream. He wasn’t angry at other people but at himself and his inability to break out of this millimeter of skin that separated him from everyone outside. From people who laughed. For instance. He never laughed about anything beyond the scope of himself, he laughed only at jokes he told himself.

Not long afterwards Peter and his mother arrived in Rochdale, where some acquaintance of some drunk from their village had been living for the past few months. Rochdale was a place that with its bad roads and dilapidated buildings was only marginally different from their village in Poland. Their. Ex-village.