Calais looks like a town that has been discarded too. According to the guidebook I picked up in Dover, it was pretty much destroyed during the Second World War. It has the look of a place that was rebuilt by people whose hearts weren’t in it.

Or maybe it’s the dark and the rain and the metal spikes that’s creating this impression.

If I tell Iris that I am terrified about driving in the dark, on the wrong side of the road, in a foreign country, she’ll say it’s fine. I don’t have to drive. I can go home. She’d rather I go home. That much is clear.

So I don’t say that. Instead, I drive.

The good thing about driving in the dark on the wrong side of the road in a foreign country is the intensity of concentration I have to employ, leaving little space in my head to fret about the situation. Which seems a lot graver now. I have this vivid sensation of having crossed a line.

Mostly I’m worried about getting lost. I won’t even realize that I’m lost because I don’t know where I am to begin with.

I’m already lost.

That was one of my biggest fears when I was a child. Being lost. It happened once. In Northside shopping center. I was with Dad. Which was unusual in itself. I can’t remember why I was in a shopping center with my dad. I concentrate. It seems important to remember. I think it’s because of the dementia. I need to know it’s not contagious. Was it my mother’s birthday? Yes, that was it. No, it was the day after. He’d forgotten her birthday. He’d gone to the pub after work. She’d baked herself a cake. A chocolate cake with sprinkles scattered on the top. Like a child’s birthday cake.

I don’t remember thinking that was sad. Baking your own birthday cake. I helped, as far as I remember. Which meant getting in the way and licking the bowl. But Mam called it helping.

She was such a positive person, my mother. She never lost the ability to hope. To hope that Dad would come straight home from work. Hope that he wouldn’t drink too much. Hope that he might remember her birthday.

She had such a capacity for it. Hope.

Dad must have felt bad about it because there we were, the two of us, in Northside shopping center the next day. He said I should help him choose something nice for Mam for her birthday.

“What does she like?” he asked me.

I don’t know how I got lost. But I remember how it felt. The realization that I was alone. That nobody was in charge.

I was seven. I remember telling the security guard that when he found me, wandering the car park, crying.

It is Iris who points at the hotel on the outskirts of Calais and suggests we see if there are any vacancies. I glance at the hotel, one of those generic, custom-built ones, low-slung and dimly lit so that it has the look of a photograph, dulled by time.