The hours turned into days and he couldn’t remember how one was different from another. He began to make mistakes. He would set off with the first cracks of dawn, compelled to go towards the emerging light, regardless of whether or not it lay in the direction of Berwick. He argued with his compass when it pointed south, convinced it was broken, or worse, that it was deliberately lying. Sometimes he walked ten miles only to discover he had travelled a large looping circle, and was back almost where he had started. He took diversions to follow a shout or a figure, but they led to nothing. Near the crest of a hill, he saw a woman calling for help, but after an hour of climbing he found she was a dead tree trunk. He frequently lost his footing and stumbled. When his glasses snapped a second time, he left them behind.

Deprived of rest and hope, other things began to slip from him. He found he couldn’t remember David’s face. He could picture his dark eyes, and the way they stared, but when he tried to conjure up the fringe that flopped over them, he could see only Queenie’s tight curls. It was like fixing a jigsaw together in his mind, but without all the pieces. How could his head be so cruel? Harold lost all sense of time, and whether or not he had eaten. It wasn’t that he had forgotten; he no longer cared. He no longer took any interest in what he saw, or the difference between things, or their names. A tree was no more than another of the things he passed. And sometimes the only words in his head were the ones that asked why he was still walking when it would make no difference. A lone crow passed overhead, its black wings beating the air like a whip, and filled him with such inhuman fear, he went scampering for shelter.

So expansive was the land, and so small was he, that when he glanced back, trying to gauge the distance he had travelled, it seemed as if he had not advanced at all. His feet fell on exactly the same place where he had lifted them. He looked at the peaks on the horizon, the waves of turf, the boulders of rock; the grey houses tucked among them were so small, so temporary, it was a wonder they stayed up. We hang on by so little, he thought, and felt the full despair of knowing that.