He was exhausted, but something in him was forcing him on. He climbed a steep, narrow street – barely wide enough for a single car – and opened the whiskey bottle, now nearly empty. A woman walking her dog glanced at him in disgust. He tried to apologise, but his mouth was too dry. The double yellow lines were like those on the floor of the hospital, guiding bewildered patients around the labyrinth.

I’ve got to get up high.

He was clammy with sweat and his head and his legs were agony. The sun had filled the harbour with molten gold. He could smell himself, a vile blend of vomit, sweat and alcohol; but he could also smell the coconut of the gorse bushes.

… He flung himself recklessly over, relying on his clothes to protect him, getting scratched as he tumbled down the other side. Then he was behind the wall, looking across a vast expanse of scrubby moorland towards a pink-walled house that stood alone on a ridge. His head cleared and he thought, Yes! That’s where I was going, that house, that light…

Instead of getting closer, the house merely got bigger, disclosing a whole private landscape surrounding it. He thought of the word grounds, and then the word acres. The sun was almost out of the picture now, and his body had achieved the clever but uncomfortable trick of being both sweaty and freezing. He wondered what else was out here with him in the twilight, and made his feet move faster.

Surrounding the rosy house was a rosy wall. It was high and smooth, and even if he wasn’t starving, dehydrated and drunk, he’d never climb it. Still, it almost felt like enough, to have got this far, to have made this strange, difficult journey to another place, another world, another life. Keeping his hand against it, he began to skirt the perimeter of the grounds.

Why had it been built so high and so strong when the house was already so isolated? Periodically, the house hid behind trees, but the wall was his faithful companion, guiding him onwards and onwards. The dew began to settle, and he knelt and licked unashamedly at a clump of grass.

Then he was suddenly clinging to a tall pillar. Its identical twin was perhaps twenty feet away. Between them, a gravel driveway shot through with primroses led to a wide wooden door with a deep tiled porch before it.

Oh, thought Davey, blinking. Oh. Yes. That’s what, that’s where I was going, that’s exactly where I was thinking of – my God, I made it, I actually made it…

He journeyed up the driveway on his hands and knees, barely conscious of the stones bruising his hands. His entire self was focused on the doorway, which he thought perhaps he had seen in a book, or a dream, or a photograph; it looked welcoming and familiar, planted long ago in a secret part of his heart, and waiting for all of the nineteen years of his life for him to arrive.