My mum used to sing that to me when I was tiny.

Did she though, Melissa? Was it really your mother – or just your fantasy of life before the beginning of care?

My poor mum. Couldn’t cope; couldn’t stop running. Ran right off the edge of the world in the end, it seemed.

Or maybe – just maybe – she was living in a nice house on a hill somewhere, drinking coffee, still waiting for me to find her, just like the Orphan Annie always dreamt her mother was…

Leaning against the tent, I closed my eyes, exhausted from the drama. Actually, I never stopped being tired these days; Rex was so demanding, I daren’t switch off anymore. My sleep patterns were completely shot.

The birds were in full dawn mode, the sun on its first ascent into the day, when my eyes snapped open again.

‘Hello?’

A tiny rabbit froze beside the brambles, alerted by whatever had just woken me.

I was sure I could hear someone nearby move away, a scuffling, tiny twigs breaking beneath feet, but when I stood, stiff and sore, and crept around the trees, there was nothing but the tents of the rest of our party camped some way off to the right, and the woodland: all quiet apparently.

‘Fin?’ I ventured – but there was no response.

The rabbit had gone too, whisked its white tail into the undergrowth.

Time to leave this bucolic hellhole.

Unnerved, I fished the cooking equipment out, banging the Primus stove around as loudly as I dared, just in case.

I woke Ruby with a tin mug of tea. ‘Shall we do a runner before someone shoots us too? I could really do without dissecting last night.’

‘Sure.’ Ruby blinked groggily over the steam. ‘Happy to go if you are.’

We packed up quickly and quietly, collapsing the tent around the still sleeping teens, only waking them at the last minute to creep down the track to the car.

As I pulled off, my eye was caught by a flash of blue through the trees.

And for a moment, I thought it was a bike, someone pedalling fast down the parallel path – but when I looked again, there was no one there.

Ruby

In the back of the car, the two teenagers were as subdued as I felt. Their phones both being flat, there was little distraction other than the viciously jolly DJ on the car radio, a rural view – or real-life chat.

The song in my head vied with the radio pop: the song of exhaustion, true siren call of the middle-aged woman: I want, no, I need my bed.

‘Feeling better?’ Melissa glanced at Ceci in the rear-view mirror. ‘Are you hungry? You must be pretty empty now.’

The girl’s nose was pressed against the glass, watching the hills roll by, her voice small. ‘S’pose.’

We pulled into the next lay-by and bought tea and fried-egg sandwiches from the kiosk, and sat to eat them in the early sun, truckers speeding by, only the occasional blare of a horn interrupting the birdsong.