18
For the first half hour or so he allowed himself to believe he might come back one day. He had the keys in his shirt pocket and he regularly checked they were still there. He daydreamed about coming back this way in the next week or two, visualising himself walking through the pouring rain, finding his car where he’d left it, alone like the last car waiting to be claimed in a once-busy car park, the glass smashed and the wheels up on bricks, all his stuff gone . . .
It was the road atlas which helped him accept he was almost certainly never coming back. He’d carried the whole book of maps to begin with, an awkward, large-format publication designed for spreading out on car dashboards, not trekking like this. He started tearing out pages, first getting rid of the cardboard cover, then
