A car waits for me outside. It’s not swanky or long with tinted windows, it’s actually pretty normal: silver, seven-ish years old, a Cortina or a Nissan or something, a daddy’s car. ‘Are we going to the airport then?’ I ask the driver. All I can see of him are his bulges of angry neck flesh hanging over his too-tight collar.

‘Something they’ve not told me?’

I don’t have a passport or a bikini, but well, all that can be arranged. ‘Not heading to the sun then, mister?’

He shakes his head, the fat wobbling, chuckling. Oh this is a funny one, to be sure. ‘Am I on the news yet?’ What started off so promisingly then becomes a bore; the guy won’t tell me a thing. ‘Where are we going then?’ He turns the music up louder and some moonshine shite fills the space: 108.3FM in that phoney English voice. Some crooner is singing about love in a broken voice. You’d think they’d learn.

‘Can we stop for a loo break?’ I ask, after an hour or so.

‘We’ll be there soon,’ he says.

Sure enough, half an hour later we pull up at a semi-D in a housing estate in the middle of nowhere. This place is shit-ugly: unfinished, bits of builders’ stuff left behind. Hardly Las Vegas.

‘What are we doing here?’ I ask.

‘Your new home.’

You’re shitting me. A woman comes out, this one looking more like a tart, with her over-done face and short skirt. She’s young and speaks in a weird accent.

‘I think there’s been a mistake,’ I say to the driver. ‘This isn’t the right place.’

He ignores me and talks in a low voice to the woman. The man leaves, and she takes my rucksack, hoists it on her back like she’s used to carrying extra weight on her body. ‘Are you coming?’ she says.

I stand in the doorway. ‘This is a mistake.’

The woman does not acknowledge me.

‘Errr, excuse me … there’s been a mix-up.’ We’re standing in a kitchen, all Jeyes-lemon-cream smell, gingham tablecloth and dead carnations in a fat-bottomed IKEA vase. Fucking carnations.

‘No, no mistake. Kathleen sent you here.’

Kathleen. Hatchet?

I’m allergic to these places, these estates, like where I live, only ten times worse. Fields all around. Concrete. Nothing: no pubs, no restaurants, no shops, no peeps, no churches even. Zombie towns. Who the hell would come out here? Where the feck is this dump anyway?

‘Sit,’ the woman says, ‘eat.’

She places a sandwich with economy white bread, lathered in easy-spread butter and cut-price ham in front of me. Mother would approve. This is not where I’m supposed to be.