When other, more rampant vegetation had swallowed the yellow flowers on the verges, he set out for the docks at the usual time, carrying all his possessions, but turned right, not his customary left, and soon reached the train station. One of the country’s diminishing branch lines took him to a village by the coast, where he and nobody else disembarked. At a post office, he bought bread, scissors, knobbly fruit and – with only an intrigued suspicion of what it might be – Marmite. It wasn’t just that the tunnelled lanes he walked along, with their floral specklings of pink and blue, merely seemed a simple, elemental contrast to the city he’d spent the last four months in; they appeared to have no topographical relationship to the small metropolis at all, to belong in a whole different country. He helped two men push a rust-caked pickup out of a ditch. Afterwards, they ran him a mile or two further down the road to their place and gave him a cold lager. They asked where he was going and, when he answered as honestly and specifically as he could, their only advice was to avoid Somerset because the people there weren’t right. The garden was full of retired machinery, fading gently into the earth. The younger of the two men pointed at two wooden structures on the hill above them that he’d taken for some kind of hutches. ‘Bees,’ the younger man said, rolling his eyes, but did not elaborate. The sun broke through the clouds after he left, drying him out for the third time that day. At a payphone, he inserted a coin and dialled a number beginning with an international prefix, but when a woody male voice answered he hung up. Further on, in a steep valley where everything hid strategically from the wind he appropriated three cucumbers from a garden and planted a kiss on the nose of a sceptical bullock.