You said your goodbyes, shivering in the frosty air, the cousins milling and jostling in a pack of skinny limbs, then strapped in the children, wearing cardigans over their pyjamas, the boy with his neck-pillow shaped like an elephant, the baby in her backwards-facing carrier. It was just gone six; the satnav said you should be home by midnight. The sky glittered with stars. It felt later than it was by hours, years. The light you saw now had left the stars aeons ago, long before you, before any of this. You pulled the car doors shut and waved, the others briefly silhouetted in the orange square of light between wide flagstones and heavy lintel, before the field dipped and the car lurched and they too dropped out of sight. 138

The snow began to fall on the outskirts of Doncaster, as the A1(M) became the A1 and then the M18, the first signs for The South somehow less beguiling. Past Sheffield and Chesterfield and Nottingham and Grantham, the heartlands of this country you barely know at all. Birmingham is the Midlands, and Peterborough the hinge between north and south, but despite your years here you would struggle to place them on a map. The voice of the satnav, set, half as a joke, to a Northern Irish accent. The accent, in places, is meant to be as close as English gets to the way that Shakespeare spoke it: the quirks and rhythms of the Planters, the Tudor noblemen given swathes of land, forbidden from marrying or even employing the dispossessed, preserved in certain pockets for centuries. Continue straight ahead.

The children, who had fallen asleep soon after the journey began, slept on as the miles unrolled. The little blue arrow creeping blindly along its preordained line.

Music, then no music. Talking, then slipping into silence. The intimacy of driving at night, outside of time. Long journeys of your childhood coming back to you. Coming back over the Glenshane Pass, after holidays in Donegal. The yellow grass of the blanket bog, slashed dark brown when you passed peat workings. The scree slopes tumbling down the highest of the Sperrin Mountains. Coming back from Ayrshire, the slow, familiar roads to Stranraer; the briny smell of diesel in the ferry’s bowels; keeping your balance on the slimy, salty deck as it stubbornly shunted its way across the Irish Sea and into the mouth of the lough; 139piling into the car again, the gangway heaving and clanging open, and those final miles home, wanting to be back, not wanting the journey to end.