I hadn’t answered him because what was there to say? Once you lose the power of communication with someone, nothing makes sense between you any more and months were exactly what I was counting on.

Unhappiness is a dangerous thing, like carbon monoxide. You don’t smell it, you don’t taste it, it’s formless and colourless, but it poisons slowly. It seeps into every pore of your skin until one day your heart just stops beating. And I’ve been wondering. How did my mother put it? The summer she took off? A wind was rising over the Orkneys the day she upped and blew out of my world forever. But before there’s any debate about repeat behavioural patterns and the hereditary nature of bolters, I have to point out one significant difference. In the summer of 1983 my mother didn’t take her children with her. She didn’t pack their favourite chewed teddies and leaking finger paints and Emmy’s clock with the cat’s eyes, whose tail wags along in time with the seconds. No. My mother left me behind, sitting on the beach, the underside of my trousers packed down with cold wet sand as I dug for lug worms, happy, oblivious, dreaming of beans on toast while my father knelt behind me and cried fat salty tears into a pile of nearby seaweed.

Sleep must have somehow come then, because when I open my eyes, the truck has stopped. I unclip the seat-belt and feel stiffly for the door handle. The Mexican is hauling suitcases out of the back and tossing them to the ground, small puffs of smoke gusting out of his mouth at the exertion. Even unconscious, Jack is not an amenable child, his limbs remaining obstinately rigor-mortified. I shake him awake and push him out into the cold night air, then scoop Emmy into a fireman’s lift and the three of us stumble towards the cabin’s deck where the Mexican stands silently, holding the fly screen open. Once we’re safely inside he nods his head curtly and climbs back into the truck, leaving all the luggage in a sloppy pile outside the cabin door. I bite my lip in irritation as the ignition fires into life.