Most of the known world says that people my age are hard to communicate with, but really? They should try getting through to my mother when she’s driving. The silence that descended was familiar, well-worn, the wonder-what-(insert name here)-is-doing-now-and-who-with silence. I looked the other way out of the window after that, kept my mouth shut out of principle, missing home—the phone shops and the flower stall, the dry cleaners and the tube station and the fried chicken place whose window was always broken, never fixed, not for long anyway. The view from the road felt spare and oddly empty. There wasn’t much else to look at on the way down but fields and other cars and clouds and sky.

•   •   •

It didn’t rain, and the car got us there in one piece, and even though I wasn’t grateful, I could see straight off that the street was way tidier than we were used to, another level—quiet and wide and tree-lined, high up in the town with a view of the sea, pure blue that day, same as the sky. No traffic jams. No autopsied mopeds or abandoned fridges, no weatherproof all-season dog shit or stained mattresses or boarded-up windows. A sharp salt smell and this strong bright light and palm trees. Palm trees. The wind leaned hard against the car like it didn’t want us to get out, knew right away that we didn’t belong. Turn back, it said, big mistake, don’t even think about stopping, and I still wonder sometimes what life would be like if Mum had heard it, if she’d turned the car around and just obeyed. I let out a low whistle and watched her force the dark back down in her eyes. I know she felt it suddenly, the impact of her decision, right then, middle-aged and anti-climaxed, with me in tow. Not what you’d call triumphant. Not exactly a lap of honor. If I’d known what to say to her then, what would have helped, I like to think I might have said it. But then again, maybe not. We should all be given a manual at birth for that sort of thing.

I started fishing around under my seat for the steering wheel lock, and she said, “I wouldn’t bother, Jude. No one’s going to pick on our heap-of-crap car in this ocean of high-quality metal,” and she had a point. The low-budget new neighbors had definitely arrived.