Five different events, taking place over thirty years, confirmed our singularity. In 1978, at number 27, a thirteen-year-old boy massacred his two parents and his four brothers and sisters in their sleep with a garden tool. When he was asked why, he replied that he’d needed a change. At number 47, in the ’80s, there was a particularly sordid affair involving an old man who had been locked up and tortured by his own family. Ten years later, at number 12, a “marriage agency” set up shop; in fact, it was a prostitution network of Eastern European girls. At number 18, they found a mummified couple. And just recently, at number 5, a jihadist weapons cache was uncovered. It’s all in the papers. I’m not making any of it up.

How come all these people had chosen to live in that particular spot?

For some of them, my parents included, the answer was simple. Money likes the shadows and there are shadows to spare along the edge of a motorway. As for the others, it was the road itself that drove them mad.

We People of the Road were different. If we were at the dinner table and heard the screeching of tires, we would stop talking, forks suspended in mid-air. Then would come the extraordinary sound of crunching metal, followed by a remarkable calm, as other drivers, with an air of funereal restraint, processed slowly past the tangled mess of chassis and flesh those people had become; people who, like themselves, had been on their way somewhere.

If it happened outside our place, around number 54, my mother would call the fire brigade and we would leave our meal unfinished to go to the accident, as she would say. We would bring out our folding chairs and meet the neighbours. On the weekend, it would usually happen around number 60 where the most popular nightclub in the area had set up, with its seven different dance zones. Nightclubs mean accidents. Lots of them. It’s crazy how often blind drunk people would pile into a car only to die there, carrying away with them those happy families who’d set off on their holidays in the middle of the night so they could wake up at the seaside.

So, the People of the Road witnessed up-close a considerable number of tragedies involving the young and the old, dogs, bits of brain and bits of belly . . . What always surprised me was that we never heard a single cry from any of the victims. Barely a muttered oh là là, even from those who managed to stagger up to us out of the wreckage.

During the year, my parents would go to ground like rats within their four walls, devoting themselves to tax-saving schemes of avant-garde complexity and closely monitoring the smallest external display of wealth. In this way they hoped to keep the Beast off their scent, luring it away to fatter prey.