He looked extraordinary. He looked overblown. He glistened and bedazzled and the sweetly sick scent of vanilla poured out of him.

Alessandro whispered, ‘I had a daughter, Giulia, and a son, Giulio – a lovely golden boy of four years. He was my life. I lost him.’

He shook his head. ‘He lost his father. It was terrible.’

‘Absent fathers,’ Stanley said to the sky, as he started strolling down the empty street to where it narrowed and joined the main road – people, cars and mopeds could be seen hurrying to get somewhere.

‘The world is full of them.’

Continental Shift, Turkey

1

Customs officer at the Port of Izmir,

with his cocky cap, motorway-cop sunglasses

and bushy black moustache a la Atatürk,

was either vaguely threatening

or vaguely Village People. Kept expecting him

to launch into a Turkish version of ‘YMCA’,

break into a butch line-formation dance

(could use that gun in its holster as mike).

Instead, he raised his hand for us to stop,

directing us to pull up/engine off.

Smile and act friendly, I’d warned Stanley,

as we edged our way off the Blue Star Ferry

behind a juddering line-up of juggernauts

(what wouldn’t pass their MOT back in Blighty).

‘Can’t believe we’re here,’ he yawned,

stretching out in his seat like he’d done

nothing more strenuous than sleep

the entire journey, jammy bugger that he is.

’Course, I’d planned on a Greek Island like Crete,

but the boats from Ancona were stalled –

a strike, they said, no end in sight, they said –

so we headed to the port of Venice in the north

and found ourselves bound for a country

neither had visited before: the Republic of Turkey.

2

Was getting nearer to that wayward son of mine

who’ll either hug me with surprised arms or …

Not a day goes by but I don’t dream of him –

he’s on a raft and I’m on the rescuing ship.

What can he do but climb aboard,

forgive the mum who gave him everything,

who couldn’t bear to see him leave –

the only thing she’d ever called her own.

‘Off to seek my fortune,’ he’d said.

‘In a sea full of stingrays and pirahnas,’ I spat back.

Look, he were only sixteen. I was counting

on his company another five years at least.

He’d save on rent, bills, food, clothes,

and, to be honest, he’d no idea how to tidy

his own mess, wash his own smalls,

make a decent sandwich or even his own bed –

so how was he going to manage living

at the farthest ends of the known world

without his personal secretary, housemaid, chef,

financial adviser and chief exec?

3

That customs officer fingered my black

United Kingdom passport at length,

glancing up to compare information to person,

as if he couldn’t quite believe … something.

When he asked for our vehicle documents,

my lips went dry, armpits moist,