I kept going this time, even when the road went over a motorway, layered bridges shocked by the thunder of heavy goods trucks. Concrete and metal and – somewhere, far away – the sky. This was the gouged dividing line, the place where house prices dropped, pristine medieval ornaments giving way to simple geometry: the flat line of a field of wheat, the squared-­off rolling of clouds. The cars passed me too close, indifferent to the way their wing mirrors came within inches of my handlebars. I kept pushing, kept moving, the hedges breaking at intervals to reveal the full evening light across the landscape, its deep yellow pinking at the edges, smoked by fumes.

I went through one village, and another, my legs raw with fatigue now, bruised-­feeling, overripe fruit before it drops to the ground. I considered cycling even further, until I reached the sea, perhaps, some two hundred miles. I would pedal until my wheels got stuck in the sand, until I had to lie the bike down on its side, lie beside it, let the beach be shaped by my body.

But I was not going to the ocean: I was moving towards a still and familiar point, back to what I knew. The next village was an opening of memory, framed images of lost life. The school gates, mute and mysterious in the dusk, the patch of green, darkened by tall trees, where I’d swigged neat vodka, its taste brutal against the leaves. A small shop, a church bell tower in the distance, and I was there: the turning that became too familiar, over the years, its reoccurrence only disappointment, by the time I left. But now it was something else: a sagging, collapsed version of itself, a picture of time.

I was unsure, at first, if this was even the same house: I did not remember its window-­eyes sinking towards the door like that, the grimace of its defeat, as though embarrassed, unwilling to look at me. A farmer had rented it to my parents cheaply, and since they’d left a series of even worse tenants – or squatters – had made their mark, scored a burn above the kitchen, a scrawl of graffiti across the door.

It didn’t take much pushing: the locks were old and rotten, loosened by those who’d been there before me. They had left themselves scattered: beer cans, a single shoe, the sea-­creature curls of abandoned condoms. My parents had always rented – like me – always managed to find places with problems. This one, the place we stayed longest, had mould and damp even when we lived there, and now it covered every wall, a deep black-­green reaching beyond itself, to the garden and beyond, places where there were no other walls for miles.