He started out west again and walked until he joined the next river, then followed it until it branched and widened to create a calm subsidiary pool, which he swam in. He examined the peeling skin on his feet, neither of which ever seemed to have dried out from the day he walked back to the ruined house. A new area of purple-black on one of his heels. He walked some more, until he came to another river, with a viaduct over it. He reached a quay and dark buildings, below a Tudor mansion with great sprawling gardens and a domed dovecote. Boats and parts of boats were everywhere and even a mile later, parts of boats could still be seen in numerous gardens. He crossed a stream and sat on an abandoned tractor tyre above one of the gardens, on the opposite side of a small valley and, having seen no sign of life in or near it, picked apples from its trees, and took lettuce and an artichoke head from its beds. The garden thinned and snaked on into woodland until it ended at a rusty gate, and next to the rusty gate was a small orange bus on bricks. He managed to force one of the windows of the bus open and that night slept inside the bus, stretched out along its ripped back bench. He woke up and felt like somebody had performed origami on his face in his sleep. He climbed a hill and took a small train to the grey city where he’d worked on the docks then he changed and took another train east, guessing at when he might be level with the point where the cliffs began to turn red and getting off at the first station after that. Cars pulling caravans were struggling up the tall hills that broke away from the coast in threes and fours, and he walked against the flow, flattening himself against nettles and brambles to let the vehicles pass. In many of the fields there were huge rocks and corvids could often be seen on the rocks, making their withering assessments of the day. The land was thrown audaciously together, had no order or mathematics to it. ‘Dogs in field,’ said a sign on a gate. ‘Please keep your sheep on a lead.’ He penetrated a long crevice between cliffs to the sea, which turned out to be further away than it looked, and corkscrewed down a gorse-lined path to a beach where he waited until the tide had gone out, then hooked around a jutting rock and walked east along the shingle while the sun fell softly into the salt. The tape had long since come off his shoe, the sole barely hanging on now, and its loud flapping cut through everything like an embarrassment.