Some days he was more engrossed in what he saw. He tried to find the right words to describe each shift; only sometimes, like the people he had met, they began to jumble. But there were days when he wasn’t aware of himself, or his walking, or the land. He wasn’t thinking about anything; at least not anything that was related to words. He simply was. He felt the sun on his shoulders, watched a kestrel on silent wings, and all the time the ball of his foot pushed his heel from the ground, and weight shifted from one leg to the other, and this was everything.

Only the nights troubled him. He continued to seek modest accommodation, but the inside world seemed to stand as a barrier between himself and his purpose. He felt a visceral need to leave some part of himself outside. Curtains, wallpaper, framed prints, matching hand and bath towels; these things had become superfluous and without meaning. He threw the windows open, so that he could continue to feel the presence of the sky and the air, but he slept badly. Increasingly he was kept awake by images from the past, or dreamed of his feet lifting and falling. Getting up in the early hours, he watched the moon at the window and felt trapped. It was barely light these days when he paid with his debit card and set off.

Walking into the dawn, he watched with wonder as the sky flamed with strong colour and then faded to a single blue. It was like being in an altogether different version of the day, one that held nothing ordinary. He wished he could describe it to Maureen.

♦

The problem of when and how he would reach Berwick receded into the background, and Harold knew Queenie was waiting, as certainly as he saw his shadow. It gave him pleasure to imagine his arrival, and her place at the window in a sunny chair. There would be so much to talk about. So much from the past. He would remind her how she had once produced a Mars bar from her handbag for the homeward journey.

“You’ll get me fat,” he’d said.

“You? There’s nothing on you.” She’d laughed.

It had been a strange moment, not uncomfortable in an un pleasant way, but it marked a shift in how they spoke to one another. It revealed she had noticed him, and that she cared. She carried a piece of confectionery for him every day after that and they called each other by their first names. They spoke easily when they were travelling. Once they had stopped at a Little Chef and, face to face across a laminated table, they found the words dried up.

“What do you call two robbers?” he heard her ask. This time they were back in the car.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s a joke,” she’d said.