There was no light for there was no window. 

There was no darkness for there was only black. 

I curled up and kicked out and curled back again. Days and nights passed without each other, and I listened to the extractor fan suck the moisture out my skin. The dizziness lessened without dimensions, and my eyes were cooler without light. Eyes have lids, and their default position is down, shut, closed. The head behind them took on the role of a room, of space – a space in which one could wait, and there was nothing to do but wait. 

Emptiness is not quiet, even if it has no wave. How could this room have been projected? The bed was too big for one body, yet I knew there was an edge to this flat world somewhere and I pictured falling: boats fell out of the picture. The sheets hung, they smelt of fever. My mind was slowly coming to – I thought I heard a seagull – and I ventured further. Beyond the bed would be the dull, white walls, and screwed into one of them would be the reflective black hole that had replaced the window, the street here redundant for all the infinite, remote-controlled streets elsewhere. 

Somewhere somebody was vacuuming.

I was desperate for air. Pulling myself up I felt around with blind limbs, my mind lurching from the movement, until eventually I came across the metal of a door handle. I took some time to hold it, feeling the shape of my unused hand in the process, my thumb tucked under my fingers. I squeezed down slowly until a crack of light gave outline to the door, bringing just enough dimness into the room to grant days of absent dreaming some basic structure.

My legs were fawn unsteady and my eyes agape, but by now I was resolute, absorbed by the impulse: I was coming out. I took another stale breath on the edge of the bed and tried again, pulling clothes over skin until I looked less thin, and a hat over my dirty hair and forehead. 

I emerged from my anti-womb, lips pressed together in defence, and concentrated hard on each next step. Clammy and weak, I left smudged fingerprints along the chrome bannisters as I made my way down into the hotel lobby. There was nobody at reception. Three clocks told the time in three different cities. It was morning. 

The cry of the street called for me, a shaft of wintry sunshine streaming through the open door along cool glazed tiles ablaze, pulling me forward, drawing me out. I stepped into the light, blinded by sight, and felt a water move deep inside me. Euphoric and overwhelmed I had nothing to grip but myself, but my face was now one of many, and I sucked in the oxygen and carbon dioxide greedily. The world struck me as impossible, but I was alive, and I bit down with determination as I signalled for a taxi.

My first words were the name of the highest hill, a little way out from the city, a bell of earth upon limestone slopes – the reason I was here. I had intended to walk, a kind of pilgrimage, but the yellow taxi seemed a fitting midwife, conjuring from the beginning that city of arrival across the ocean, dreamt of by so many from afar: the brink of a better place; a better future beyond the horizon. I allowed myself a small feeling of westward destiny, and closed my eyes as we sped around the first roundabout.

The road finished and I unfolded myself from the taxi to complete the ascent along a stone path, the motion subsiding as my eyes began to adjust. The light bounced off the pale rock and shone in the dry grass, but each step was a shadow, each step was a weight, my standing leg trembling as the other reached ahead. The summit didn't seem far, but it didn't seem to be getting any closer either. My limbs felt loose, my muscles memories. I relented, and let myself veer off the path to collapse down on the warm face of a flat rock. I looked out down the hard relief of the broken foreground into the bleached horizon of what had once been MESOPOTAMIA, and allowed myself my birth. 

Out there beyond my feet was the land between the rivers. The very first cities had been built in a crescent moon of fertility that unfurled from this most northern point. Here, among the grasses, we had found the plants that would become the crops that gave rise to those cities: wheat and barley still grew wild on the banks of the dormant volcano off to my left. But the rivers no longer flooded and the earth was dry. The seeds long exported were the food now imported. The cities had been destroyed, the last remnants of their ancient temples wired with explosives and detonated in a moment for the cameras. There was to be no past. Yet I was born with a memory of things I hadn't witnessed: images of experiences I didn't know. Bombs fell from that thin, cold sky and people were on the move, abandoning homes that were no more. Through the dust I saw the holes of skeletal buildings and joined others in the search for those who'd been hiding – but all I could see with my own eyes was the white haze of distance. 

I kept looking. A couple of the grasses twitched beside me in that infinite present, un-narrated. There was peace in their movement, and in focusing I noticed a dog a little further down the slope, padding west between the boulders – something to read. I squinted, trying to track, but its fur was the same sandy grey as the stone, and was quickly lost between the rocks. Its evaporating path had taken me into the curves of two incisions that curled towards one another, waiting for the rain that had cut them: two fallopian waterways in the limestone, to be joined by many others as they made their way down into the great basin where clay had been cut into the first writing. 

I had the strangest feeling I recognised the landscape, and after a while I realised the form of the land replicated a view from the chalky hills where my parents had met, an elevation whose own incisions took the water down into the haze of the sea directly. It was uncanny, but then we project the landscapes we carry, and I wasn't sure whether the image in my mind's eye was genuine or just a malleable construct, cast for comfort out of the bare topography in front of me while I floundered about my liquid mind for something homely. The picture grew more vague the more I tried to remember it, and in the end I had to accept I didn't know the landscape I pined for much better than the one in front of me. I was looking up into a night sky for some sense of origin, and plucking stars out of a hat to navigate by. A young couple had gone to a city whose own constellations of light were too bright for astronomy.

The air was healing however, and I managed a sip of water. I was growing more confident that there was nothing more to come out of me, that my body had taken its form, and I picked up a small, round stone to hold as proof in my pocket. It was time. I pulled myself up and pushed on to the top – to the meeting place. Finally I'd arrived, even if many thousands of years late. A gentle breeze whispered between the soft hairs that grew out of my static body as I let the sight sink in. 

In front of me stone people faced each other in rings of rocks, carved into tall Ts and engraved with the animals they shared the Earth with. Amongst them was a lion, a boar, an ox and a cat. A simple fox was described with its length, a line from open mouth to wide tail, its short legs bent at the knee, sprung ready. There were ducks and cranes and lizards and scorpions, snakes went writhing down their smoothened slabs. Almost all the animals had big mouths. They were hungry, like us. 

Most of the twenty or so stone circles were still buried, the careful excavations ongoing. It was the oldest sanctuary ever discovered and quite inconceivable, its weighty multi-tonne megaliths shaped and erected before both the agriculture and the first settlements that should have been necessary for such colossal cooperation. Perhaps it was all the other way around after all, the mystical inducing the empirical? For how had it felt to realise such a vision? Had the sacred hill allowed us to feel sacred ourselves? 

I stared into the arrangements of stones, created over vast tracts of unfathomable time, and sensed that even then before settling we had felt the need to belong. We had gathered here and dreamt here, we had shaped our world. And we had given birth to gods. 

Humility corrupts so easily into pride; the painful need to belong somewhere mutates. Even now, as the stone figures looked quietly inwards towards each other, I couldn't help but glance outwards from the highest point at the world at my feet. Maybe it was just easier to believe that the world belonged to us instead, the truth inverted? But out there in that blinding hot-white haze, people from all over the world were gathering to kill each other in the name of belonging, identity reduced to negation and demarcation, every connection expressed as a separation. The stone statues had grown self-important faces and would be pulled down, while the other animals had long been wiped altogether from the story, as if the mystery had overwhelmed us. The ancient sanctuary was rightly fenced off, my history protected from me. I couldn't enter the circles of stone, I could only orbit them.

So like everyone else I turned away from the past and began my descent west, my shadow already lengthening behind me.

Luckily the taxi was still waiting. The driver was smoking a cigarette with a warden, and puffing out slowly they watched my leggy approach. 'Beautiful?' asked the warden. I'd been gone for hours. 'Today beautiful,' I replied: apparently their language had no words for 'to be'. The warden smiled and asked where I was from. The driver jangled his keys.

Ignition, liftoff. Our descent was fast. This time I held my eyes open. It would be some time before I could eat, but a child's hunger had awoken within me, and I sat forward as we snaked our way down the bare hillside, slaloming past the last scattered herd of hairy goats – bells ringing. Things were changing. As the road flattened off I saw new irrigation channels bringing water, and with it industrial corn, evidence of the huge damming projects upstream. Hundreds more villages were being inundated along with the region's other prehistoric sites, their own megaliths already transferred to the safe, spot-lit darkness of the city museums. Water would be creeping into gardens and seeping into kitchens, working its way up the walls just slowly enough that you could convince yourself nothing was really happening. 

We came to the junction with the main road, and I saw the first shade in this open world: a gentle mottling of the light, a weeping willow. Beneath it a single cow lay resting beside a mouldy armchair which had taken on the same yellow-green as the tiring leaves above, its smooth neck tied by rope to the rough trunk. The taxi pulled away into the traffic, and I craned my own neck back to watch them disappearing.

We plunged into the first city. A song of horns went up as the traffic ground to a halt in a motley babel of encounter and exchange. Grey pumpkins the size of boulders were being unloaded from a stranded truck, enabling an old rag-and-bone cart of battered, bartered objects to be wheeled once more into the fray. A family of four zipped through the closing gap on a scooter before everybody else on foot took their chance too. I did the same, recklessly abandoning the taxi for the last of the afternoon light. The driver gave me his business card, hesitantly.

My path was haphazard, my way not really my own, and at first there was little time to digest the many impulses that dropped my shoulders and swung my hips as I dodged and swerved those with clearer intention. But I adjusted, as we always seem to, and my emptiness began to feel a lightness, my sickness a clarity. I sucked in the dry smell of rough tobacco that lingered just above the action, and stepped in behind the headscarves of two elderly men in diverging costumes as they parted the crowd arm in arm, animated in their negotiations and deliberations: nimble feet navigating a city that was old but youthful.

The children were playing fast, screaming their own youth as their blood pounded, racing giddily through the streets to claim them, while those a little older with a little money did the same on motorbike, their small, open engines wild and noisy. They were intersected by those with direction – sacks on shoulders, boxes on trolleys – a boy darted through the market stalls with a chicken under his arm, neither of them looking anywhere but straight ahead. 

The city was made of deliveries, built on what came from elsewhere: it was inherently kinetic. Yet for all the speed and movement there was little in the way of haste. Teas needed to arrive hot, an impromptu plate of baklava clean and intact, but there was still time for that tea shared, and still time to craft such extravagance out of nuts and honey. For while everything needed counting, it also needed recounting: there was as much to be told as to be sold – the two often hard to distinguish. Birds chittered in their cages. Mouths yelled into megaphones. Dice rattled like teeth. Everything was up in the air, and everyone was jostling for position. Above the throng, stacked rings of sesame bread glided by precariously as if levitating, balanced without hands over a face that noticed my noticing: just the hint of a smile in acknowledgement.

I was stopped abruptly by a road sign pointing the way to another ancient city, its name now synonymous with the war. Many born there were making new lives here, and it was difficult to think of it as a real place, to recognise that all the images in my head did in fact belong to someone, indeed to many of those around me. I mouthed the city's name, reminding myself that for others it meant home, but it was hard in the middle of this vibrant, old city to contemplate that another one so close was gone. Beyond the sign the road forked into a Y, and between the two options an open space allowed a swathe of evening sky to rain amber-violet paint down on everyone who found themselves present. A clutch of pigeons turned through it, flapping hard, while children chased a ball beneath them in the football shirts of other faraway cities.

As the light dwindled and shopfronts lit up I continued with the crowd and felt myself appear amongst them, recalling my disappearance the first time I'd arrived. Then the fever had just been coming over me, my insides hot and churning, and by the time I'd reached the centre I'd been swimming through the city as if underwater, my head spinning, the current against me. The memories flitted about me today like fish, colourful but silent, and I remembered how invisible I'd felt, grateful to be avoiding contact in that intimate moment, but struggling as everybody walked into me so blindly. Now the intense physical need to empty myself had been reversed, and I was no longer the ghost of that parallel arrival: now people looked and smiled and waved, offering their wares and curiosity. But it was the little children in particular who couldn't take their eyes off me, following with smiles of camaraderie, as if they knew I was one of them in brilliant adult disguise.

We came upon the holy gardens at twilight, and I let my mouth fall open at their beauty. Two ancient pillars stood tall upon a great rocky crag, and beneath them grass and white marble flagstones opened out under heavy trees full of starlings. The people hushed and slowed, spreading out as a river does when it evens off and finds the space to meander. Enchanted, I followed the peaceful arcades of cool stone from one courtyard into the next until I came upon the sacred ponds, which, lit blue and green, revealed their treasured inhabitants. Dark, muscular bodies slipped past each other just beneath the surface. 

My thoughts were interrupted by the buzz and garble of a police radio passing behind me, and as I turned I noticed the bulky presence of a large, armoured vehicle waiting under one of the street lamps. That unavoidable feeling passed through me as intended. Families strolled past soldiers and their pointing, automatic weapons: toys were thrown in the air; a bag of groceries split. Nothing would happen, but anything could happen. Everyone needed protecting, for everyone was suspect, and I went to lie down in the inky grass, exhausted. 

The loudspeakers crackled briefly and a call to prayer pierced the sky, setting off silhouette explosions of starlings from the treetops above me. As they flew up into new murmurations, my eyes drifted over to the sheer cliffs which rose up over the gardens. This whole complex existed because a mother had once hidden herself in their caves to give birth in secret. The king, afraid of his own people, was letting no boy live, and her son, suckled by a gazelle, would grow into the shared émigré prophet-father of all three monotheistic religions, to all those sons of sons of sons with all their names and lands and battles. I let my body lay heavy, and wondered what her name had been: the holy books made no mention. 

By her cave had stood a synagogue, a church, and now a mosque, each built in praise to a god who offered peace, but a peace which needed proclaiming the loudest, and from the tallest towers. The muezzin's plaintive song echoed against the stone as the last few men finished washing their feet, and when it finished I climbed back onto mine. I passed the sacred ponds again on my way out of the gardens, and noticed that the water was agitated. One of the larger carp was being torn to shreds in a frenzy: the fish were eating their own. 

That night I dreamt my infant hand drawing a child upon a flat rock upon a hilltop in coloured pencil. The child was smiling, his father ready. I looked up from my desk for praise, but the chalk had already been wiped from the blackboard. On the wall above were three clocks. Their hands ticked, but the time never changed, and nowhere was it lunchtime. Nailed up with them was a wooden cross – another son spread out waiting, bare-chest. I pulled the sheets over.

The next morning I came down the stairs a little older. This time an impeccably dressed man was waiting at reception. He didn't move upon seeing me, but I saw his eyes change, a flash of concern giving way to calculation, his masculine care to be expressed through resolve and action. He asked if I was sick without question and listed my symptoms in the same way: he had the cure, he said, and called for the two ingredients he needed. I protested meekly that I was already recovering, but my mouth moved strangely and my words didn't travel, as if I were still asleep, or that life wasn't mine to decide. He told me to take a seat. 'Military solution,' he added softly, by way of encouragement. I watched my eyes widen and my body wince as he spooned a generous double helping of finely ground coffee into a cup. Solemnly he added the juice of one lemon, squeezing hard to extract every last drop, before taking a teaspoon to blend the bitter concoction.

As he slowly stirred he asked what I thought of his city, explaining that these were probably his last months here. He loved his home, he told me, but he loved his lover too, and she lived far off in the west. He tapped the teaspoon on the edge of the cup with a sigh and passed me the medicine: 'nobody wants to go east.' And with that the water rolled off the back of my head, a baptism for the journey ahead. My temples trembled as the caffeine shot through me and my stomach retched, but I held it, squeezing my hands together until the nausea passed. I noticed his cufflinks, discreet tulips, his own promise of the future.

At the bus station men were shouting the names of other cities rhythmically to my heart's continuing palpitations – 'Leaving now!' – and I watched as people collected and departed. The commotion was a weary one, as often at bus stations, and many of those present weren't travelling but simply taking advantage of the relative warmth after a cold night on the streets. I joined them on the benches, but came to realise they weren't really there with me, and watching their distant expressions I wondered if they were the ones travelling furthest after all. Eventually the old man opposite stirred, yawning before opening his pale eyes and lifting his gaze towards me. But I'd already gone: my coach was moving through the gears as it pulled out onto the road west. My seat was empty. 

Outside the scratched window was dust and rock. I was waiting for my glimpse of the great river, scanning the arid plains to see if any sheep were left out there, if a shepherd was still keeping watch of the flock. I pictured a bonfire on the ridge; I saw a smokestack. In the end it was a cement plant that briefly interrupted the monotony, the rock ground into powder for its kilns, the flames two thousand degrees hot. The coach accelerated into the fast lane past another stream of trucks. 

When the river came it came suddenly, and I put my hands up to the glass in surprise. The highway bridge afforded a sweeping view over the valley, but I was looking out at wall rather than water, the river's energy held back above us behind a wide dam. My eyes jumped in further shock: on the ground beneath the ramparts was another wall, the guarded perimeter of a refugee camp – lives held back. Those inside had fled the war where that water no longer arrived. My eyes flickered between the thousands of tents as I pictured the ruins and mosaics submerged behind them, but the highway cut into the hill before my pupils could steady, and once more bare rock flashed before me.

The vision continued to replay in my mind in staccato, a zoetrope impression of continuous motion I couldn't interpret, the planet was spinning too fast, the rotations sending grey rock up into the sky like a clay pot forming, the distance growing into something – we were approaching a great volcanic mountain, and at its foot was the second city.

Large drops of rain sploshed against the glass, and through them I saw a very different city to the first. The highway was taking us straight through the middle of it at speed, bisecting a grid of broad boulevards that divided the high rise apartments into blocks. They looked like they had been built at around the same time: an industrial city. Next to me a young man looked out at it without curiosity, and I asked him what the city produced. 'Sugar,' he said simply. 

The coach pulled in to stop where the urban tessellation disintegrated into unused lots. Each was for sale, no longer today's space but tomorrow's opportunity: the progress of dam-time. On the slopes beneath the heavy clouds I saw hundreds of new towers mushrooming out of the hard rock, glassless and unplastered, concrete grey on basalt black. The city was growing fast, the gust of a promise. The wind squalled, changing direction, and I began my walk into town.

The streets had no names. Each road, block, tower, stairway, floor and apartment had a number, and I pictured unrolling a paper map of numerical toponyms as I plotted course. The wind picked up further, blowing me further into the city as light poured down onto its rigid structures, lighting up first one block and then another as the cloud shifted and broke to reveal a spontaneous landscape of height and depth immeasurable. From somewhere white smoke billowed up into it, while in the other direction rain continued to wash down with the light. More and more little pockets opened up into the vertiginous sky, slowly conspiring together to reveal the heavens, and then, all of a sudden, the mountain. The massif stood alone, a ring of volcanic peaks visible from all directions and high enough to remain snow-capped – a great pile of sugar over the city. The two seemed to belong to different planes of time, each suggesting the impossibility of the other, and although the clouds dividing them were thinning into wispy evanescence, the dissociation remained strong. I had to keep looking from one to the other, from mountain to city to mountain again, until eventually the numerical city whispered the unambiguous question into my ear, and I wondered plainly how high the mountain might be.

The street was so straight that I was less and less clear about my direction. It felt as if I'd missed something. I came to another perpendicular junction and once more people passed me by at right angles. I looked down the different roads and finally registered there was no centre to arrive in. Millions may have lived here but the city was no longer a meeting place. Nobody smiled because they had nothing to sell. Their work was measured in hours, and its produce would be sold to me somewhere else by someone else. The relationship between us was no longer direct; our lives were now tangential.

The light was fading but the day wasn't. The factories wouldn't be closing for the night. The new logic was inescapable, from the very first traffic lights that held me, a dichotomy of stop and go replacing the ebb and flow in a way that allowed the city as a whole to run continuously. Every off implied an on, the countdown inexorable, the waiting inherent. It was a city of shifts. I began to notice the vacancy in the bodies around me, the way the arms hung unoccupied, the hands heavy and empty, off work. I thought of their colleagues inside on the production line at that very moment, waiting for the shift to start, waiting for the shift to finish. The streetlights turned on in unison. 

But had I smiled at anybody? What was I waiting for? Red man. I turned to the man next to me and said hello. He nodded back, waiting for my question, and we both realised I didn't have one. Green man. He asked where I was from and I returned him the favour. He pointed to the ground, clearly wondering why someone might have chosen to visit: I said the mountain was really very big, and he smiled in acknowledgement, wishing me a good evening. I felt liberated and began a series of little conversations with those around me, asking simple questions about their city. People were surprised by my intrusions but polite, asking each time where I was from but also where I was going. Yet it was always the mention of the mountain that allowed us a fleeting connection. They lived here and I didn't, but tonight we found ourselves under the same dormant volcano, a black presence in the hollow night sky.

The cold ate into me and I took a seat in a canteen restaurant to warm up. The tables were long and covered in rough paper, pinned at the corners, untaken. Only at one were a few men drinking some tea discreetly. I still hadn't eaten and decided to risk a little flat bread. The waiter removed my cutlery ceremoniously. The television was muted, the images of war looping silently to themselves while various heads of state got in and out of cars and tried to look the part between their flags and microphones. In the top right corner of the screen four numbers slowly increased, the news channel a kind of clock that my eyes couldn't help but return to, like waiting under the departure board at a station. The waiter did the same, having long given up watching me. I took another nibble. A heavily made-up woman stood in front of a map. Clouds with rain, clouds with snow. All the numbers reset, zero zero zero zero, and the war started over again. Only now the door sprung into life, the spring-loaded hinges squealing backwards and forwards as a train of workers shunted in one after the other, tired and hungry. The end of a shift. The beginning of a shift. The teas and soups arrived instantaneously; nobody needed to order.

Now the long tables were busy, but the men ate without conversation, enjoying the momentary respite of having completed the shift before the inevitable countdown became apparent once more. And while there weren't many words there was plenty of interaction, subtle hierarchies being played out, minor submissions and assertions as the salt was passed, nodded acknowledgements, the same smiles when the same old joke begged for them, that combination of annoyance and tolerance that came through spending so much time together – a family code, or perhaps that of a village. They weren't at work but most of them were still wearing their blue work jackets, the acronym initials of the factory a badge of belonging across their left breasts. I wondered how many of them had been born here, and whether there was anybody asleep back in the apartment with their number on it.

Men were still arriving so I gave up my seat and headed back out into the night to wait out the morning, walking to keep warm. I looked up at the windows above me. About a third of them were lit, lightbulbs hanging over tables, fluorescent white giving kitchens a cold-blue glow, keeping us awake. I approached plumes of smoke until I came upon plumes of poplar, a long line of bare trees, evenly spaced, tall like the chimneys behind them, proudly marking the front of the factory. A buzzy hiss squeezed out from within, incessant, and a kind of horn called out into the night at intervals. Trucks were arriving, laden with brown rocks the size of fists. I'd been stepping over them all the way down the road, and picked one up grasping my mistake: they were of course sugar beet. I turned it in my hand, the dusty earth on my fingertips, and I asked myself where so many sugar beet might come from.

A security guard was watching me, and while I wasn't trespassing I couldn't see his face so moved on instinctively until he couldn't see mine. As soon as I could I stepped off the street into darkness however, and began tracing the perimeter of the factory complex to see if I could get a better look. On the other side of the fence different shaped buildings emitted low hums  under that same high-pitched hiss from before, sounds that suggested heat and pressure alien to my cold world here on the outside. But there was nothing to suggest what was happening within, no windows to expose either the workers or the production. The sugar continued to refine. I continued to shiver. The ground was rough and unpredictable, and I felt my feet awaken as they probed their way across the invisible terrain. It was neither earth nor rock but some form of debris. I could tell by the edges, the edges that come from something being broken. I slackened my knees a little to cushion each footstep, my ears straining for more than a heartbeat. 

The complex was much bigger than I'd thought and I found myself surrounded by a series of dark warehouses, unsure anymore if they were in use or not. There was no longer any noise. The loose light from the city reddened the clouds, and in turn two iron rails reflected just enough to be visible in the gloom. I followed their shine, feeling out the wooden sleepers beneath, grateful for their direction. Eventually a light appeared ahead, dividing itself into several, and I realised to my surprise I was coming into the station. More surprising still was the sight of a large crowd of people in various huddles along the platform, facing in the other direction: nobody saw me step up off the tracks to join them. 

Here the waiting was different, expectant. People were pacing backwards and forwards, anticipating, willing the bright, single headlamp of their future towards them. But the night-train was late. I asked a man in uniform if there were any tickets left. 'Where to?' he asked. I gestured all the way, and he wrote out one more one-way ticket to the third city.

It screeched as it halted and the passengers pulled open the doors with a clunk. Nobody was getting off. Loading would take some time, but there was plenty of civility as people helped each other up into the warmth with their belongings. There was no rush. Now the train had materialised everybody trusted in their arrival, whatever the hour. This was no commute. I looked at all the bulging, taped-up bags and suitcases and saw that people had been anticipating this departure for much longer than the cold delay of the past few hours. Today's date had been marked onto hundreds of wall calendars across the city. Others would be waiting tomorrow's departure as well of course, and still others the next, but not all would be travelling themselves: there were plenty among us seeing off loved ones too, carefully wrapped food parcels passed at the last moment, arbitrary details of advice repeated, kisses and embraces. Another kiss. The guard's whistle blew a second time and there was a gentle tug from the front. 

I moved down the rattling train in search of the right seat, distracted by the many different faces. The carriages were divided into compartments and I looked into each one as people shook hands and took off scarves and jackets, arranging themselves for their journeys. We were young and old, rich and poor, but I couldn't help notice there were no families, no groups of friends, no couples: all of us seemed to be travelling by ourselves, together alone. 

Inside my compartment I found two men and two ages, one picturing where the train was going, the other where it had come from. Both were travelling because they felt they had to. The first had just boarded, and with excitement he saw that I was foreign: a part of his future, a part of the promise. The second had already been on the train for some time, and saw only another body he would have to share the tight space with. One more, he calculated, and he'd have to sit upright all night. But the seats faced each other directly and the constrained space afforded an intimacy which quickly brought us together. We were going the same way, after all. He offered his heavy hand in peace, which freed the younger man to start the conversation he wanted: 'Where are you from?' He added a new question I would hear more and more often, one that at first gave the impression of a new freedom: 'What do you do?'

He was an engineering student. He would be an engineer. He left behind trains in the minds of the people he left behind: there were no good jobs in his home city. He had studied hard, towards his destination, and spoke my language well, his enthusiasm making me smile even as it made me older, the other man older still at the words he couldn't understand, and even older once they'd been translated. What do you do? He had worked in textiles, he said, but the factory had closed. Now he was going to join his cousin in the big city: that's where the work was, even if there were no factories. He didn't know what he would do yet. He asked the student what kind of engineer he would be, and what he would do when he arrived. The young man stopped but his eyes kept travelling, and between two clacks of the tracks three boys allowed themselves their doubts and a little mystery for a moment. He would have to work hard, said the student, and we all nodded, men again. They shared their flasks of tea with me, and we passed around a plastic bag of dried fruit and nuts. I closed my eyes and felt the train curve one way and then the next. I thought I heard the beat of a drum, and opened my eyes with a start as my head fell. The two faces opposite were leaning towards each other, their mouths open, features soft in the first light, clouds furrowed and blue.

I turned into my seat, pulling back the tired curtain and resting my head against it so I could watch the landscape fall away from me. Our route was serpentine, the tail end of the train pulling in and out of my vision as we slowly climbed one valley then descended into the next. The engineer had told me an old joke about those building the railway being paid by the mile, but it was a work of great beauty, and its gentle exploration of the land, tracing each contour through a series of wide turns, was a kind of dialogue that helped give meaning to the lunar topography, a way to read its boundless waves so that they appeared naked rather than desolate.

The day quietly came to, and muted colour crept in beneath the grey blankets, rolling hills of dry grass mustard interrupted by hard, exotic streaks of exposed rock where the land had fallen away, seams of maroon, mauve, black bruise blue and silver. The highest humpback hills were dusted with fresh snow, and as I gazed up at them I saw a scattering of broad wings silhouetted, birds of prey too high to name, migrating in the opposite direction. I wanted to point, to express my wonder, overcome suddenly by the need to share, but even before they were out of sight I was caught instead by a glimpse of what was to come. Down in the next valley a series of hard, straight lines towered confidently out of the earth, challenging the landscape rather than conversing with it. We were still over an hour away from our destination, but high-rise blocks were popping up anywhere the land was flat enough, standing in rows like tombstones in the churned earth, occupying those few places where soil had collected, the plough replaced by the digger. The city was coming. 

This was growth; these were jobs. But as we got closer the strangeness of these towers' appearance intensified: most were unfinished and many looked as if they'd been abandoned altogether; there was little sign of that work after all, the empty structures almost hallucinatory. We were entering into the lands of boom and debt, and these were the first satellite markers of the greed ahead, far flung speculation of speculation. We passed under two great concrete pillars, smooth grey tapering as high as the hills on either side, the start of a new bridge for a new unswerving highway, direct from city to city, a flyover. The muddied waters of the river were flowing fast below.

In this new land of proximity were countless small mounds of material for which there was no space in the city itself. There were piles of sand and piles of gravel, but also piles of scrap metal, car doors, white appliances, plastic tubing and hardcore. Most were the same size, about what a van could carry, and occupied inconspicuous but accessible bends and corners along an ever denser network of tracks and roads. As we got closer they proliferated, and I let my eyes jump from one to the next, drawing dot-to-dot shapes from one colour to another. Between them appeared the first single-storey houses, built largely from what could be found around them, the discarded reappropriated, piles reassembled into more complicated configurations by those who had arrived with nothing. Each was poor and unique, the structures bearing their original verbs, the hands behind them implicit. The houses weren't new, there were too many details and touches that could only come with time, the need for shelter slowly projected into something more: the roof adapted to collect water, then extended to provide summer shade, then screwed into with hooks to hold pot plants that would hang with bright petals and a scent that might keep the flies away. 

So far the slopes were steep enough that only poverty could afford to build on them, and as the valley narrowed the arteries of rail and road converged, forcing the river underground beneath them. For a while a truck drove alongside us at the same speed, allowing me to study one half of the driver's face, the small muscles around his right eye forming his first wrinkles as he waited for the brake lights to light up on the car in front. His windscreen wipers slid from side to side, pointing first at me and then at the sky, as more and more DIY houses appeared to our left and right, covering the hills now in their happenstance formations as smoke rose from their chimneys and colourful litter washed down their banks towards the canalised water: a vomit of pinks, yellows and blues in the red-brown mud, whatever couldn't be digested. The rivers had always washed away our dirt, but the dirt was changing quickly. Poverty and habit were recycling and inventing while simultaneously renouncing themselves by throwing away and wasting. The fusion formed the outskirts of the third city: a landscape of becoming.

The traffic was increasing, and as we slowed a silt seemed to settle in my mind, as if a great homosapien delta was forming, the city an estuary. Had we arrived?

The train shuddered to a halt at a peripheral station, half-built, another invisible frontier in the exponential city. Everybody had their bags together but nobody was getting off. The train waited. I couldn't. 

I climbed down onto the empty platform and immediately sensed that something had happened. A single speck of rain hit my face and I licked my dry lips. The train pulled away, a conveyor belt of faces, and I realised why nobody was around. The highway roared but there were no voices to drown out: the entire neighbourhood was abandoned. The nearest house was missing its door and the wind whistled through it. Many others had been bulldozed completely, the ground razed. It looked like an earthquake had hit, and the epicentre was this unfinished station: it had brought value to the land. Further on I could see much taller buildings rising up into the damp, and I picked my way through the ruins towards them. 

My ankles twisted and turned over a cacophony of former meaning. From the clink of shifting tile fragments and the rocking clunks of concrete emerged scattered details: the brushstrokes of colour that someone had once chosen and the patterned prints, the gate hinges and the coat hooks. Between the teeth of splintered wood were a few forgotten possessions, and as the rain fell more and more of them materialised, shining as the rubble darkened. People had left in a hurry. Two armchairs surveyed the damage, inside outside, their stapled upholstery peeling in the elements. They faced in opposite directions. I sat down in one of them and made eye contact with two dogs who had been following my progress intently from a collapsing balcony further up the hill. They were sitting upright, statuesque, their ears pricked, keeping guard over a fallen kingdom, seemingly the only animals to have retained some sense of belonging in this sliding landscape. Dogsland, I muttered. An ear turned. The wires hung loose from the two telegraph poles that linked us. I submitted and carried on westward.

Climbing on further up the detritus I came across a gravestone, uncarved, the name scrawled simply across it in white paint. There were no dates. It stood precariously, saved temporarily by its somewhat sheltered location in a corner. I felt a little tall in front of it, and stooped apologetically. I couldn't help but imagine the moment the family had chosen the exact spot outside their house, unable to carry the body back to where it had once been born, and pictured the careful cemetery just outside the village where I wouldn't be buried. I saw the cypress trees and the bones beneath them, and remembered we'd once buried our dead in the foetal position. A cock called out over the empty din. Somebody was still living here after all. 

Sure enough I began to see silent bodies rummaging methodically through the rubble, scouring for the last small pieces of scrap metal or some other material of worth. Apparently even that of little worth was worth a little to someone. I watched from much further away than there was distance, and as delicate fingers worked their way through what had been bulldozed I had the feeling other times and other places were present with them, as if all rocks had the same weight. In contrast – perhaps in compensation – another boy was making as much noise as possible, a stubborn claim to existence as he ripped wooden planks from an open roof and snapped them in two with a fierce stamp of his foot. Firewood, I guessed. I guessed we were about the same age. I waved a greeting but he let his hair fall over his eyes, ignoring me to snap another piece with a crack that went through both our bodies. Instinctively I set off again in notional respect, but this time stopped myself mid-step. My own disappearance was no consolation to the broken homes around me. I crouched down and rolled a slab of concrete onto its side so that it stood up flat, then one by one balanced a series of brick pieces on top until a simple cairn stood precariously, marking my haphazard way. I picked up a glass bottle, half full with rain water, and placed it carefully on top. I knew the tide would wash it all away along with the gravestones – that there was nothing to do but recover some firewood for the cold days ahead – but before then the bottle would fall, and my response to the stamps of a lost brother would be expressed.

Eventually seven new towers stood tall above me, twenty storeys, each perfectly identical. Down the side of one of them hung a gigantic 'for sale' banner. Their pinnacles seemed faint as the rain bounced off the fresh asphalt that connected them to the jobs that would pay for the down-payments. But as smooth as their sides glided up into the wet sky I was surprised to see that the rough rubble at their feet had merely been flattened rather than cleared, the new homes simply stacked up high on top of the old ones. One island of rubble was marked by three trees, crosses on a mound, and I noticed a shack had been built discreetly within the wild vegetation. Staring at the improbable scene I realised suddenly that an old man was animating it, trying in desperation to lift a plank up onto his makeshift roof, and I ran over to help him get it up. He looked at me incredulously, taking me for a madman, but accepted the help, and we managed to heave it into place and pin down the plastic sheets underneath to slow the dripping he must have been suffering inside. I offered my hand and he shook it loosely before disappearing back within the shack, exhausted. I looked up into the rain once more at all the double-glazed windows above me, before fleeing myself in search of shelter.

The new road took me down to a bigger road and to other towers already half-inhabited, fast food joints appearing beneath them, compressed meat turning beneath neon suggestions. The valley had continued to tighten into a bottleneck, amplifying the noise of the traffic, but I could see that up ahead it fell away and opened out into the city proper: this was the gate. Its rocky slopes were decorated with a series of soldier effigies brandishing the national flag under a monumental eagle, while beside them a viewing-platform restaurant had been built in the shape of a windmill. Here the old houses had been demolished for a funicular park, laid out in steps with uniform shrubs and white, plastic goats. There was to be no going back. 

I stood looking at the bed in my boots, one lace untied. I was shattered, but for some reason the possibility to stop had paralysed me. The clean order of the hotel room didn't sit with my day at all, nor with the world outside, like a full stop to a sentence that couldn't finish. I needed a drink or something – anything but to stop. I'd aged once again, inevitably, and turned back into the roar of the wet streets and headlights.

I passed by a number of bars, unsure how to pick when all were more or less the same. In the end I chose the one playing the song I recognised. The man at the next table had already had a few. He pushed back his thinning hair and lit another cigarette, fidgeting, waiting, alone. It was Monday. The polyester of his blue suit shone a little as it crumpled through his impatient movements. I thought about starting a conversation – we were the only two by ourselves in an otherwise busy bar – but as I hesitantly ordered another bottle he span around and beat me to it, jumping at the opportunity my accent had provided. He flew headfirst into names, countries, stereotypes, football teams, the best actors, the worst food, the various hair types, until he stopped abruptly and said that he was tired, 'tired of everything', and he sat back to look at me properly as he exhaled. He was a manager, he said, 'I'm tired of managing.'

He told me about a friend who had left to live on the other side of the planet in one of the world's biggest cities. He had found a wife there, a different hair type, 'everything good.' Maybe he should do the same, he said, before admitting he didn't really like city life. 'I'm from a small town – a village almost!' I became aware the other tables were watching us, sneering and smirking at his loud attempts to speak my language, wondering why I would tolerate this older man's company. I asked him about his hometown and if he liked it there, if he couldn't perhaps return? He smiled sadly without needing to shake his head, 'the monkey has opened his eyes.' As if on cue his phone rang. He answered loudly with a big sweep of his arm, managing once more. 

It was a friend of his, he said, another manager, 'she hates her job too!' He implored that we abandon our drinks to join her at a concert – she was also by herself – and we hurried down the road to another bar. There we found a twenty-strong crowd, singing along at their tables to old rock songs of loss. They were drunk already, his friend especially so. Her face lit up when she heard which island I was from, and she asked immediately about the princess who had died. 'I love her' she exclaimed, her hands on her heart, 'good lady – very, very, very, good lady', and she let her head hang in shame without awaiting a response. When we ordered another round she said she couldn't take any more and asked for a tea.

The band played with weary dedication, performing songs requested through scribbles on napkins. It was first and foremost loud, allowing everyone to wail the well-known words without embarrassment, the urban beat of the snare offering guarantee and the crashing cymbals the chance to punch the air. There were no new songs. I wondered whether the nostalgia remembered a specific time when things were different, or simply harked back to being younger.

The next song brought the crowd to its feet. It was slower, the rhythm less mechanical, and arms swayed above heads until finally we were dancing, united together even if our minds were elsewhere, all of us remembering different places. I noticed my friend's dishevelled tie, and compared it to the mud on my boots. Bodies span. A glass fell from a table and smashed across the floor. Was this the last song? Out of the corner of my eye I saw the woman stop and bring her mug to her mouth, and then, as if in reverse, throw up her tea back into it. She placed the mug back on the table carefully, looking only a little surprised, perhaps more not to have spilt any. Nobody else seemed to have noticed and, not wanting to embarrass her, I pretended not to have seen either. But just as everyone was throwing themselves into the brief ecstasy of the final crescendo she grabbed her coat and left without a word, and I couldn't help but regret my decision.

Walking away afterwards the man said he lived far away in a distant suburb and asked if he might stay at my hotel. I told him there were plenty of rooms available but slowly it became clear he wanted to stay in mine, with me. He repeated he was tired, again and again, until finally he admitted he wanted to be close. I refused politely and flagged him down a taxi. I told him it was okay, and suggested meeting the next day in a different way, but he felt humiliated, embarrassed to have let me know the truth, and neither looked nor spoke to me again. I held up my hand to wave as the taxi pulled out into the night, but there was no glance back.

It felt like there was more in my small, heavy skull than there was space, my thoughts pressing hard against their own walls. The night before rang through me.

I'd awoken in an explosion, the piston in its engine, metal on metal, seven lanes of traffic in one direction and seven in the other, and all these petrol explosions took me deeper into the exploding city, spreading where it could as it pressed hard against its concrete coastline, as millions more continued to arrive with their bags and their hopes, a gold rush without gold. 

The explosions were fast and plentiful enough to become a continuous wash of noise, and my body vibrated to the sound that accompanied every childhood memory, the ubiquitous drone of the road. The bus hissed and jolted, braking and bouncing as the traffic ground on between the advertisements. The guy in front of me was learning the new words he hoped he'd now need, an international language for a global city, and from the little loudspeaker in his phone a computer-generated, female voice plainly announced each word twice with a pause between so that he could repeat them: '…baby… baby… share… share… breast… breast… thin… thin… screw… screw…  cheerful… cheerful… forgive… forgive… erection… erection… chemistry… chemistry… hairy… hairy… semen… semen… boot… boot… ready… ready… suck… suck… reach… reach… wet… wet… message… message… oral… oral… break-up… break-up…' He watched the words appear on-screen in his lap, his neck stooped, but remained silent, each pause pregnant. We stopped again; the cars behind hit their horns.

This time it was a horse and cart that had interrupted our progress and the bus jerked left to overtake. I watched the poor beast's muscles ripple as it pulled on up the hill into the headwind, time bending around its body like a daydream. Its mane glinted in the dusty sunlight while each driver inconvenienced by the apparition announced their hurry and their displeasure from within their metal shell: the uncivilised struggle didn't belong here.

We were no longer the peasants of before. We no longer lived in an endless present with a vast past, but in a momentary present with a vast future. The future was growing away from us, and our hopes and desires with it. Stability belonged to an outdated logic; the explosion was the new measure of things. Politics was upheaval, economics exponential growth, and history a big bang – a shattering expansion of miracles. There would be more and more of everything, for the winners, for the lucky, for those smart enough to know where the money was. At the side of the road I saw long queues for lottery tickets and pictured the oceans of chemically adapted wheat, corn and sunflowers that no longer needed weeding. I saw the famous statue rising up out of them over the horizon, her flame of liberty calling all who'd set sail hungry. 

The journey brought with it a new sense of distance as everything and everybody moved away from each other to dream their own dreams; each body and each life was now distinct and individual, free and fragmentary in an expanding universe. Yet here we all found ourselves in the mega city – we'd never lived so close together. We reached the crest of the next wave and I saw the road stretch ahead vertiginously. The tops of the cars gleamed like the scales of a snake, tight against each other. Could an individual dream survive colliding with so many others? Or would we all be left dreaming of a better car?

The city was built on promises. It was built on reflections. Each promise was the reflection of another. Here the towers would be built from glass. They would reflect the blue sky, each taller than the last. You would see your face reflected across their surfaces, and wonder what was inside – what the view was like from the top. I peered up through my dirty bus window at the tallest one with its extravagant penthouse crown in gold, and realised that theirs would be the only one that they couldn't see from their window.

The sky lit up with fire, the billboards with incandescence, and finally the road wound down to the great Narcissus' pool at the city's heart. The sunset was spectacular, warm reds and yellows giving way to greens and violets as they stretched up into the starless darkness above the silhouette skyline. The water's surface coolly sparkled, reflecting the pretty colours of both the city and its sky, the sky and its city. 

Beneath the show, out of sight, the underwater currents were strong, the rivers of the north discharging out through the natural plughole while sucking the heavier salty seas from the south back up underneath them. But the meeting went unnoticed, unmentioned, the gap between east and west preferred for its conspicuous drama, its invasions, capitulations and epic cannon explosions – two sides pulling apart, tectonically. I stood on the bank between the expectant fishermen and peered into the murky water: below the oily surface I could just make out the twin convulsions of a plastic bag and a jellyfish, gasping in unison. The light faded, time speeding up again, and I turned into the crowds to take the next boat, to make my own crossing from east to west. There between the ferry terminal and its adjacent food stands, undisturbed by the flabby pigeons and seagulls or the many hundreds of people marching through each other in chess diagonals across the paving stones, a dog lay curled up asleep, his grubby hide illuminated by the flickering colours of an LCD screen advertising the bloody battles of the latest fantasy TV series.

The ferry boat itself was loud, throbbing as it thrust its way between cargo ships and oil tankers, cruise liners and luxury yachts. Yet despite the din of the diesel there was an uncanny tranquillity to this wide glade in the middle of it all, like the liquid eye of a storm – I felt composed as I gazed through the vacuum, and took a deep breath. The air was turning cold and a little damp, sending the first single shiver down my spine as I span around to take it all in. At the other end of the deck were two teenage girls in torn jeans without jackets, children of the city. They were using the wind to blow their hair back as they videoed themselves miming along to pop songs, the bright city lights that surrounded them a pixelated backdrop scrolling across the screens of those who clicked yes somewhere else. They'd taken position at the stern of the boat in front of their flag. It was flapping hard, red as their lipstick. 

The megacity continued to unfurl impressively, human sediment spreading away from me in all directions. A film would have ended with a kiss just after this final budget-blowing explosion, but this was no film – life was no story – somehow things would just have to keep on going bang. We came in to dock.

Was there no shock? Did we adapt so readily? Working my way up the streets towards the main square, I looked into the faces of those who passed me by for sign of a blink. But if our expressions didn't betray any anxiety, the places we inhabited certainly did: when I arrived at the top that blink was palpable, manifest in all the contradictory tokens of assurance and security. There it was in the long queues for the same cappuccino and hamburger chains, the famous green and red signs guaranteeing the same taste wherever we were; there it was in the thousands of simple flags that positioned us somewhere nameable; there it was in the young soldiers' automatic weapons that were pointing at someone else; there it was in the construction of another huge place of worship at the climax of the main shopping street, the empty shell of unfinished concrete by proud floodlights. The sky was full of cranes, and the atmosphere crackled with tension. 

It was no place for stopping, and I followed the crowd as we were funnelled into a gorge of shop windows, a slow-motion stampede between the brands and their headless mannequins, our faces lit up by everything we could buy – by everything we could recognise. I'd been here before, for sure, it was just less and less clear where that might be.

But here it had been, in front of familiar shops selling disposable clothes, that a man had tried desperately to appear, blowing himself up with nails and shrapnel, killing and maiming those who happened to be standing beside him: people he'd never met, people from all over the world. Nothing marked the spot.

I fled.

Faster and faster I let my feet hit the ground flat, threading my way through eye after eye through a crowd of needles. Down I went past racks of postcards – saturated views of a city without people – and magic carpets that could be flown anywhere in the world if you had the money. At the bottom of the hill the buses hissed, their windows steamy, passengers tight against each other as they made their way home after a long day's work. I bridged the water with the traffic and we squeezed through the arches of an ancient aqueduct. Three men were sheltering under its old bricks by a fire they'd lit to warm their night. The flames licked green; they were burning trash. 

On and on I went westward, under spot-lit, high-rise building sites and concrete flyovers, past crumbling ruin walls and marble fountains long run dry. As the roads widened, the traffic sped up, and it became harder and harder to hold my bearing; there didn't seem to be anywhere to cross these new rivers. Following the bank I saw bodies emerge from the shadows to take their chance between the headlights, their faces lit up suddenly as they dashed halfway to the central reservation. I flung myself across to join them, but as I pulled my legs over the metal barriers they were already away. I'd missed the chance and was left with my toes sticking out over the edge for a dive I'd lost the nerve to take, caught between the two currents. There was nothing to do but take the crossing lane by lane; I told myself that behind each dark window flashing past was a driver who could see me, a driver with their own life and legs and story. I'd scrambled up the far verge and started across a pitch of fresh asphalt before I realised I was still holding my breath, and span around in surprise at the sudden diagonal freedom afforded by this novel expanse of well-lit black. The tight, white boxes and strict arrows that would render it a car park were yet to be painted. It was an extension of the next multiplex shopping mall, the latest in a series of colossal structures that made each nodal intersection of the drive-thru city a destination in its own right – landmarks to navigate by. 

Between these non-stop junctions were tower blocks full of doors that could be closed, the guarantee turn of a key, peace and privacy, clean relief. The most recently built were barbwire-walled and gated. By their entrances sat a security guard in his own little box of monitors; surveillance cameras witnessed my greyscale passing, the top of my head disappearing from one frame and reappearing in another, until I disappeared from a wealthy neighbourhood and reappeared in a poor one, a supermarket marking the meeting point, germs converging on conveyor belts, trolley bars and fridge door handles. Outside somebody was rummaging through the rubbish bins. The streets were quieter; for the first time I heard my own step. 

The night wore on and the soles of my feet curled tired, but still I couldn't stop. The city didn't either. Pavements came and went, streetlights flickered. I began to lose track of what I walked past, autopilot taking hold, until eventually the wide perimeter of an airport interrupted my direction. It had just been closed. The city had to finish somewhere, I remembered, because a new airport had just been opened somewhere beyond even the most far flung districts – they'd cleared a forest rather than a suburb. It was to be the biggest in the world, indicative of the need for recognition felt on this side of the border, however big the city. Circumnavigating the original airport I realised that in measuring the city's size I was missing the point: the world cities of the future would be defined by movement, conducting people rather than attracting them. The new airport would be the biggest in the world not because it had six sets of runways, but because it handled two hundred million passengers a year.

My diversion to the south brought me to the simple tracks of the old 'Express' railway, built long before in a time of slower connections. I listened out for a vibration. Only one train a day still followed the famous route west and it left under the cover of night, leaving behind all those who'd been forbidden from doing the same. By now tonight's train should already have been checked thoroughly by both sets of border police and sent rolling across the frontier into the lands closed to those born in the wrong place at the wrong time. I carried on after it through the bottleneck city and couldn't help but look up again at all the windows – I knew that behind some of them there were people hiding. It had become too dangerous on the streets. A vote had been lost and an election needed to be won. Papers were being refused and those found without them were being sent back east to the war. I was walking past stories I'd read as a child, hands in pockets, and sped up again as I pictured a young girl writing into her diary.

A fog was creeping in off the water, as if the sea were sweeping into the city; giant cranes unloaded tower blocks into new stacks as the ships slowly rose out of the water, unburdened. The containers' clank dampened in the dank air, low frequency waves emanated from an adjacent oil refinery, and little by little the night lifted behind me. 

Beyond the port I followed the coastline more closely. The first light was diffused, a misty sepia, and I heard the sea before I saw it. Various seaside developments were attempting the usual sandy alchemy, but much of the work seemed dormant, and I picked my way through a series of holes in fences cut long before my own trespassing. Some of the villas had roofs already, others were little more than a cement floor-plan, their first fortified pillars marking the corners with sprays of rusty red iron threads. One large plot had been bulldozed and laid with gravel but abandoned before the cement had been poured, and from this grey field now grew camomile. It had reached my thigh, but as I brushed past its dry flowers it reached my nose too, and I stopped for a moment to drink it in. The fog was lifting. It had begun to rain. I was being watched. Raindrops fell from the heron's beak and tail, but its beady eye contact with me didn't flinch. I didn't move either: the two of us dripping on our two long legs, shoulders hunched. The camomile meeting had broken my march, and I let the exhaustion seep through me, gratefully thanking the grounded bird as I bade it farewell.

Treading more steadily, I followed the freshest tyre tracks back to a road, which in turn took me down to the seafront. There was a half-finished park and a brief promenade of palm trees and dustbins, but it ended abruptly in a tangle of bush and long grass, and I clambered down the rocks onto the beach itself. The smooth, wet pebbles slipped and crunched against each other. They felt good under my boots, even as my hamstrings burnt against them. 

Only a few raindrops still splashed back into the water, but the cold was now biting and my face tingled, so I was surprised to see somebody else walking ahead of me. We were both going the same way, but whoever it was zigged and zagged and kept stopping and stooping, and I slowly drew closer. By now I could see that they were collecting the occasional stone into a white plastic bag, and I called out a polite greeting. A wrinkled man I couldn't age smiled back in his own surprise and came over to say hello. We struggled for language amid the waves breaking, but I gathered a few precious words from the many he offered, and he punctuated his sentences with the odd word he knew from my language too: 'boat'; 'fish'; 'good'. I had already understood that he loved the sea, and that he'd worked his whole life fishing, but what he really wanted to communicate he attempted in both languages with arms out wide: 'big boat … big … radar … RA-DAR!' And he gestured an arm swallowing everything in a closing spiral. 'No more fish', I said. 'No fish', he repeated, his stormy eyes calm now that I'd understood. I pointed at my own eyes and at his bag of stones, and he gladly opened up for me to see inside. They were all different colours and sizes, but each and every one was perfectly round. I nodded my admiration and we wished each other a good day as we went our separate ways. I stretched my own arms wide and pictured the heron's wingspan.

The beach finished but a new road continued, and gradually the roar of the waves was met by the roar of the highway returned, cars and trucks spraying streams of rainwater back into the air and round again. I gave up; I'd never reach the end of the city. There was a petrol station and, as if pressing the ejector-seat button, I stepped into its warmth to take a coffee. The radio played a song I'd always known. For a moment my eyes let go. I was somewhere else. Everywhere else. Everywhere I'd ever been. A kind face asked if I wanted another one. 'Where you from?' I said I was looking for what home even was. 

The man sat down to join me and poured two sachets of sugar into his tea. He stirred, studying me, waiting for the boy to bring my second paper-cup coffee before responding. The sugar granules dissolved with the second city. 'Home!' He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. 'Home…' He stopped again, and asked if I spoke another of the western languages. By chance I did. He kept his voice low regardless. 'Officially I was born in this country, but not here, in the east… It's a different people, a different culture – a culture without a country, you know? Like I'm from somewhere that doesn't exist…' His face wore peaceful acceptance, but his eyes didn't leave mine for a second – the third time that morning – and I didn't need to nod or find words to prove I was listening. He explained how his parents had spoken a different language to the one he heard at school and on television, and that on television they'd always been spoken about as a problem. There was a strong military presence. There were checks. Sometimes there were attacks. He'd kept his head down and stayed out of trouble, but all the same he'd grown up being defined as not belonging to the country where he'd been born. 'They treat us like shit, like criminals – they terrorise us and call us terrorists. Eventually I left. What can you do? But imagine this: now I live in another country, and there they treat me like shit for belonging to this country!' He smiled ruefully at the irony. The way he was defined had been flipped inside out yet still remained the same. 'They call me one name here, they call me another name there, but in the end I'm always a foreigner – I don't belong anywhere.' He looked out of the window at the highway. 'That's probably why I drive trucks.' I asked him which name his mother had given him. He asked me where I was going.

I'd never been in a lorry before, and clambered up into the cab with the same grace I'd have shown mounting a horse for the first time. It was strange to be so high; I felt both tall and small at the same time. I clutched at my surroundings to orientate myself – the single bed wedged behind the two seats and the lanky gear stick between them – but like a child in a grandfather's garage I mostly saw personal details I could attach to the person beside me: the homemade rig holding two large canisters of tea; the multicolour elastic bands tidying various charge-cables together; the pattern of roses on the quilt. Dividing the wide windscreen was a tasselled piece of embroidered fabric, a crescent moon and star hanging above the long road ahead. The driver noticed me looking and conspiratorially revealed an LED crucifix he had hidden away as well: 'for the other side.' 

He told me that a few years ago he'd given a lot of rides, back when the first refugees had begun walking down the side of the highway, 'before it got crazy.' We pulled out into the traffic and the fully laden lorry started up a long straight incline – I could almost feel the weight behind us. 'Only as far as the border, of course, nothing more', he continued, 'but after a while there were so many of them… It just seemed impossible to help. There were families, children… Such desperation. It made your heart cry.' We pulled out to overtake a slower truck. 'Now you hardly ever see anyone walking. Now it's all closed off, hidden away. Now it's business. Now they let them drown.' I couldn't help thinking about the lorries in the news. As if reading my mind he quietly asked if I'd seen the television: dozens found suffocated inside the back of lorry refrigerators, desperately trying to get across to the other side. He mumbled a prayer. The sky heaved and hardened, high and heavy above us. 

We carried on up and over the barren hills in silence, images flooding the absence. Screened images. Images screened. My mind rolled with them: who did they belong to? Whose was the story?

A few seconds later was a few hours later, and the first snow flakes were already falling; I wasn't sure how long I'd been dozing. The traffic had slowed and the driver was concentrating hard, but when I asked about the rest of his journey he told me they normally managed to keep the important highways open with snow ploughs and however much grit and salt could be spread – everything possible was done to help keep the goods flowing across the borders – the important thing was not to leave the main road. We wished each other luck. He dropped me off on the edge of the last small city and went to join the queue. I went to find the railway station and my own ticket across.

By the time the train was due the snow was falling faster through the darkness, the flakes appearing out of the night as they fell into funnels of lamplight vision along the platform. At the far end I thought I saw someone appear and then disappear again – I'd seen sandals rather than a face – but when the train came nobody else got on with me. Eerily there didn't seem to be anyone else in my sleeper wagon at all in fact, and I switched off the cabin light to cancel my reflection as we pulled out towards the frontier. 

The train stopped again almost immediately at a station without a town, and those of us aboard were told to get off and show our documents while the police checked each carriage. There were only a few of us but it still took time: the darker our skin the longer our faces were studied before receiving the hard stamp of grudging approval, the date, location and manner of our crossing inked into the pages that identified us. I was last in the queue. The policeman asked where I was going. I gave the name of the next city. He asked where I'd come from. I gave the name of the last city. 'Tourist?' I nodded my head. 'Drugs?' I shook my head. He gave me a last sideways look for show and stamped and closed the passport: the ink smeared across the opposite page like a butterfly print, illegible.

We were allowed back on. The doors slammed shut. The rattling heaters were on full blast and scalded the seats, but there was no way to turn them down or let a little fresh air in: the windows were locked. A loud knock made me jump and the door slid open abruptly: a guard passed me a pack of white sheets, starched and folded, sealed clean in plastic. 

I pressed my nose to the cool glass. The snow continued to settle. Just a few hundred metres away the festive season would already be underway and those with roofs could enjoy a silent-night landscape like in the pretty pictures – simple, unified, hushed, unspoiled. The snow covered over and gave the hard, old landscape an impression of spotless, virginal renewal. The white lamb could play in the white snow, its red blood birth buried out of sight beneath. But to be here tonight was to picture three kings from the east and all the many others who had tried to pass through this way, camping out under the stars with their hopes and their battered suitcases: to be here tonight was to ask what else lay smothered under the blanket. 

While the snow hid the past, it also revealed the present. The footprints of those still out there would now be appearing, one after the other, the rough shape of broken shoes already come so far, and the crisp imprint of military boots on night patrol. Bright floodlights lit the border complex parallel to us where the highway waited under watchtowers, surveillance cameras and heat sensors, and as the snow billowed I caught sight of an empty stork's nest, built proud and precarious on top of one of the posts. Beneath glinted the razor wire and metal fencing – the only thing to hold no snow – and it rushed up the slope to meet us. This was EUROPA. No room at the inn. We pulled into the darkness again, accelerating.

The train would take me all the way to a city with a woman's name. It was printed on my ticket in simple whispered vowels. I wanted her familiar comfort but knew there could be no sleep, and I resolved instead to get off at the next chance and return to the border. Having caught a glimpse I felt compelled to see the barricades properly for myself, to stand in front of the wall: it had been built in my name after all.

I stepped out into my own first footprint. The snow rippled black and tungsten, thick along the platform. The fall had stalled, the wind was standing. The guard flagged back at me to get back on and whistled a few times, but I turned away and the train departed, leaving me alone with my decision and my senses. The snap of the cold woke me. My hot ears rang in the strange silence. I was back. Could it feel like coming home? I zipped my jacket up as high as it would go and left the white sheets on a bench, unwrapped. 

It was better to keep the muscles warm and I set off quickly down the middle of a deserted street, tracking the railway back in the direction I'd come from. Lining it were piles and piles of old sleepers, ripped up and stacked waiting in obsolescence. There was one last lamppost and then I faded into the gloom, the only sound the munching of my boots. From somewhere the snow found just enough light to reflect my way back at me.

There was no dawn, but gradually black gave way to white. Only the cold, damp tree trunks and the underside of their branches refused. The official border crossings had probably been a couple of hours walk at most, but I had peeled off to take a diagonal line north in search of somewhere more secluded. I'd been following the same lane across a roll of open land, and was yet to see anyone. 

The shapes of another small village drew closer. There were a few dozen buildings, predominantly red brick, but there was no smoke from the chimneys, no cock-a-doodle-do, no footprints. Half the houses were closed up completely. There was nothing but fields and trees between here and the border: it was the first village and the last, like so many others. As I walked past the buildings I realised to my surprise I had company. In looking for signs of life I'd been distracted by the houses, and hadn't noticed the donkey watching me, dark hide and pale underbelly. It was tied to a small pylon, and had already dragged a circle through the snow with the radius of its chain. I started forwards to say hello, but it twitched and stepped back anxiously; I raised my hands in apology, backing off to leave it in peace, hoping it wouldn't bray.

There the road had gone as far as it could, so I broke off to continue my own way along the edge of a stand of trees. As I did I felt something change. It was the same white compression underfoot, but the known road had offered security, and in leaving it behind I realised I had no real reason for being here if anyone were to ask. I followed the trees around to the left and out of sight from the village, wondering if anyone other than the donkey had been watching. To my right was a large expanse of open meadowland, and beyond I could just make out the start of the woods. Somewhere within a wide score of trees had been cleared in a long, arbitrary line for a long, adamant wall. The bald strip would have to be cut back each year – the trees would keep on coming. 

The meadow between us had a strange, inanimate quality. It seemed to be covered by a single species: strong woody stalks rising up tall from the snow with large, tawny tongues sticking out frozen on top. I crouched over to take a closer look. They were dry seed pods, cracked open to reveal the last plumes of silky hair that had carried their wind-borne seed elsewhere: common milkweed, migrating west to east. I took one into my pocket and ran my finger over its spine. The plant had died back to overwinter, its sap and sticky latex no longer needed, and as I brushed my way through them the stalks cracked, buckled and snapped. Here and there between the weeds I noticed a few sapling shoots had emerged as well: the meadow lay fallow, unused, abandoned. 

I stopped. Over on the far side was a watchtower. By now I was almost half way across and utterly exposed. Yet nothing had happened, the freeze frame continued, mute, and looking again I told myself that this one was different to those I'd seen crossing the border the night before. It was shorter, more like the ones built by hunters to shoot at deer. It was too far off to see if anyone was inside. I convinced myself there wasn't – there wasn't – and kept on without hurrying, trying to keep an even pace and my back straight, trying to look like I wasn't hiding, like I wasn't on the run. 

I willed the woods closer. Time slowed. I thought of the deer. I hadn't seen any footprints. Were they hiding in the forest? They couldn't eat milkweed either. In just a few years the meadow would be forest. They couldn't jump barbed metal fences. Hadn't we cut our clearings to move easier, to free the sky and let the light in, to cultivate and to survive? The ambivalence of the forest ran through me with all the childhood stories I'd grown from. For while hazardous, the wild woods had also protected self-willed survivors against the cold tyranny of centralised authority as well, and memory now urged me back into the dark arms of its tangled shelter – into the egalitarian danger of the unnamed places. I was the deer: I'd strayed into the open, hoping, and now retreated back into the dark to hide, anticipating the gunshot, running, sensing I'd left someone behind. I stood waiting, panting, alone in the woods.

It was a while before the continuing silence let me free, the damp sweat cool in the small of my back. I began to realise my surroundings, climbing out of my mind and into the thicket where I found myself. Thorny shrubs held a few inedible pink-red berries, the only colour beyond my eyes, and occasionally a little snow dust cascaded down from the motionless branches without warning, but otherwise the landscape was monochrome and static. As I moved through it, however, so did the trees, weaving in and out of each other as their positions changed relative to mine, their cold, unseeing bark-eyes winking through the interplay. Despite having felt so vulnerable in the open, the relief of this blind witnessing was also unnerving, and I knew that I'd be terrified to have to spend the night here. A shiver went through me as I thought of all the children that had.

I came upon two smudged tyre tracks that led down a white alley and back out towards the abandoned meadow. At least one vehicle had passed since the snowfall – presumably heading for the border on patrol. I realised how slow my arboreal progress had been, and told myself the human way would be quicker and easier, stepping into one of the dirty grooves to follow without leaving my own tracks. The alley curved, and I was left once again with the confined view of snow-laden branches and the dark trunks behind them.

I heard a car; I heard a heart. It was difficult to discern whether from in front or behind. I didn't move, listening furiously while my head wondered if I should hide or what I should say. I didn't want to be a surprise. Which direction was it coming from? I still couldn't tell – the snow must have been muffling the sound. I looked again into the trees, rooted to the spot. The sound of the engine didn't seem to be getting any louder, however. Perhaps it was even getting quieter; perhaps it was going another way? I convinced myself it was – it was – and gingerly I trod onwards, one step at a time, trying not to make a sound as my ears continued to scream their concentration. It was no good. Although it couldn't have been much further, the instinct to hide had now overcome me, and I took myself back into the shade of the woods to carry on there at a concealed parallel, pleased to be dressed inconspicuously in black.

Up ahead there was more light. I must have arrived. Sure enough I heard voices in the distance: male, relaxed, armed – nothing happening. The voices were crisp in the silence, compressed, strangely loud despite the distance, and I realised they were somewhere else: I was hearing the conversation relayed through a walkie-talkie. Whoever was carrying the signal didn't speak. I waited. The cold worked up my legs. I wanted to back away but felt sure I'd snap a twig. The radio cut off. A car door slammed. The engine started up and I let my breath out as it pulled away. It sounded like the same vehicle as before. 

Now I could approach, and from the safety of the last trees I finally saw the new fortress wall: heavy metal panel fencing stood tall in the snow, entwined with reams of razor wire that curled tight along its crest. Its meaning was clear. It spoke of fear, of having something to lose – the haves living in fear of the have-nots. But standing there in front of it I saw the wall didn't just embody that feeling, it constructed and reinforced it. In and out. Us and them. The response became an inescapable reality, self-fulfilling, for now there could be no meeting, no chance to quell those anxieties. It was the division above all that made them them. I stood inside, looking out, and thought of all the snow being shovelled and scraped into orderly piles behind me. It was impossible not to think of the photographs in the recycled school textbooks, of the walls we thought we'd taken down – the walls that had held captive, the walls that had locked people in.

I began to see faces staring through the metal at me, the faces of the locked out, the unwanted, the feared. The wall was working. I only saw their number – what they represented as a group. I was staring at vague non-faces. I tried to fight it: what about their fear? Were they brave or scared? Hopeful or desperate? But even my questions now separated them from me. I didn't know anything about the people in my head, I finally admitted, because in reality I couldn't see them. There was nobody there. We'd built the wall; this was happening elsewhere.

I fled.

The first landscapes of the west gave the impression of being the last, not so much a future opening but a past closing. The west had slipped further into itself in the long night; the horizon was no closer than yesterday. 

The only sound was the snow melt as it dripped onto the tiles that had already slipped off their sagging roofs. The plaster cracked to expose the bricks underneath, and the rain licked the mortar out from between them. A few dark interiors were already lit up by the first hole. The houses were homeless. 

Up in the hills, other scattered buildings had temporarily reappeared now the leaves were banked up against their porches, but in spring they'd disappear once more behind the fresh green foliage as they crumbled under the rising forest. Today the low sun shone brightly, caught in the downy fluff of the old-man's-beard clematis as it climbed through young saplings – ash, willow, hazel and hornbeam – and along dangling telephone wires, connecting tree to house: one unified landscape of ochre and copper, tan and toast.

What remained of the moon passed through the blue. Down in the shadows a duck flapped its way through the wispy mist that hovered over the icy river. The water ran clean: the mine was empty; the factory had closed. Easier quarries had been found.

The village began to concentrate, its buildings huddling closer as a few lanes radiated outward. From somewhere I thought I heard a hammer – or perhaps a woodpecker – but all was quiet again. The designated centre was marked by a corrugated bus stop and a threadbare flag, under which a monument cannon stood pointing at the forest. The shop was shuttered up and the school's windows were glassless like the wind-eyes of old; whatever ideas the wind held whistled in and straight back out again. On the village noticeboard last year's election posters had blued, their names blurred, but fresh prints announced the deceased, laminated photos of the dead and their dates – a record of how long they'd been here. I stopped and sat on a wall to eat something and two cats revealed themselves to whine and brush their tails past my ankles. They were carbohydrate tubby; someone was feeding them. I wondered how many were still living here among the ruins, and whether they'd voted for the fading faces on the election posters that promised  no immigrants would be allowed to come and join them in the landslide.

As the road wound up and over the next hill I came upon the cemetery. The gate creaked as I let myself in. Smart, city-money gravestones were adorned with the plastic flowers of those living far away. I looked back down the hill at the arrangement of brick and stone, at the square, squat buildings that remembered a life closer to the ground. How many generations would return to pay their respects? The village was a gravestone.

I followed the river down until the rocky land flattened off into thick alluvial mud. The road curled out onto a busier, straighter one, and at the junction a rusting tractor was so ensnared by creepers it looked like the sinking loam was pulling the old horse under. From there things looked very different however: the land spread out far and wide with barely bush or tree. A series of high-voltage, vertical pylons provided the only perspective to this vast horizontal of depthless field. The earth was red-brown, and had been rutted and churned into thick clods by something much bigger than the disintegrating tractor behind me. What did the field produce? The industrial scale suggested either foodstuff syrups for us in the city or cheap fodder for the ever-growing population of caged 'livestock' that had also disappeared from these landscapes. When spring came here there would be no insect buzz and no birdsong; in their sacks the seeds were already coated with their poison. The last streaks of snow lay frozen in the trenches. 

Such a void, lifeless terrain was all the more salient after the dense layering of vegetation and meaning in the valleys, and I walked faster to get somewhere. My breath substantiated the humidity, puffs of warm air condensing on the little hairs above my lip as I pressed on across floodplains of chemical fertiliser. With oil there was no need for the river, and its waters had been dammed and diverted to generate the electricity flowing overhead instead. Resources. Yield. Capital. Onwards towards the action. As I went I tried to imagine all the birds and animals that had lost their habitat here – the bats and songbirds, squirrels and mice, rabbits and hedgehogs – and together we marched and flew in a great swarm towards the city to take our place at the feast.

I couldn't hold the picture – they were animals I hadn't grown up with after all – and by the time I arrived in the next village I was alone once more. Despite the heavy land use it was almost as quiet here as it had been in the abandoned lands. It would only take one to drive up and down those agglomerate fields; the smaller, bought-out family farms had been inefficient for feeding distant mouths. Many gardens were overrun and the curtains were drawn and dusty, but linen pegged along the odd washing line attested to a few inhabitants. Eventually I found three men sitting outside a bar that wouldn't open. They had long ears and soft hair on their cheeks. They studied me intently as I approached, but my greeting fell flat, bouncing tamely off a door too long shut. Perhaps they'd pass comment afterwards, I thought, once the apparition was safely out of sight.

Something about the last garden caught my attention. Bush and bramble were climbing up the overgrown fruit trees like elsewhere, their boughs weighty like the village roof beams, yet a ladder rested against a plum tree that had just been pruned, and out of a single strip of dug earth a few woody stalks protruded where a half-dozen cabbages had been grown. Keen eyes appeared at the doorway, and explaining my interest I pointed at the vegetable patch and gestured globes. The old man confirmed and came over to share the few words we could manage. Deciding my curiosity was innocent he invited me in to show me the rest of the garden, prodding at various interventions with his stick before finishing the tour with the antique pot-still he had protected in a shack around the back. Its greening drums and tubes hadn't prepared brandy for a long time, but retained their pride of place regardless. He motioned drinking and we both nodded and smiled before his expression turned serious and he pointed at my chest to invite me for one. He arranged two seats carefully under the plum, and beckoned me to sit down while he went to get the drinks. I waited some time. Perhaps somebody else in the village had kept on distilling? He eventually came back with two plastic cups and a bottle of cola, and together we sat there in the sunshine amongst the weeds for a while.

There was no shop and nowhere to stay; I needed to get to the next city. This wasn't the countryside but some sort of betweenland, and whether abandoned to the wild or denuded in servitude, these lands had no real use for people. Even that which was produced here could only be processed and consumed in the city. I had left but you couldn't leave; these landscapes belonged to the city's pervasive logic just as I did.

I set off once more through the vacuum, and stuck out an arm hopefully at each car passing in my direction. It was the oldest, poorest one that stopped, just as the sun was setting. The car was warm. The driver was elderly and shy, squinting at the road beyond his worn knuckles in concentration. I didn't force a conversation. Last rays of sunlight shone through the car and caught each village we drove past, their bricks glowing amber then cooling mauve as twilight descended. The day drained, and the silhouettes of tall, smokeless chimneys advanced our arrival into a dark city. Immediately a hotel sign called out. Like fingers counting down, only three of its five letters were still illuminated, but illuminated they were, and I thanked the kind driver profusely, repeating myself even after he'd pulled away to find his own shelter in the cold night.

The boy at reception jumped in surprise and hid his sketchpad under his paperwork as he checked the lists nervously: 'Reservation?' I said no, and asked if I might see what he'd been drawing. He relaxed, and now it was my turn to be surprised: there in graphite grey was a beautiful hare. Its wild muzzle and long, anxious ears expressed something I'd sensed throughout the day, but wouldn't have expected to find in the city – a feeling. I thought again of the whiskered men and the ubiquitous old-man's-beard. 'But this one's just a quick sketch – twenty minutes,' he said, beaming as I continued to stare, 'you should see the rest – if you'd like – from the beginning, the real drawings…' I took my bag off and respectfully leafed my way through elaborate illustrations of hard, armoured robots and fleshy, outline women until finally I got back to today's hare. I closed the sketchpad – where were all the women?

The next day was bright, and I pulled my hat down lower to protect my eyes. I was on the periphery of a small city on a big river, and was impatient to see the waters I'd be pursuing all the way west, like everyone else, into the lands of plenty. I cut through the housing estates to find its banks, which in turn would take me into the city centre, but tacking from one street to the next I quickly noticed something very strange had happened. Where were the people? I stopped. I tried moving again. It was as if I were still in yesterday's villages, still enveloped in absence, still listening for something beyond the still. Desiccated seed pods rattled around the city, the faintest breeze accentuating the quiet, tickling the mousy leaves that trembled on poplars and rustling the dangling ash keys. Below, thick piles of crunchy plane leaves let the odd one loose to bounce its way down the middle of the street – tick-tick-tick. These were mature, city trees, planted in neat lines to green the grey blocks, but their whispers were no different to the spontaneous forests smothering the villages. 

The eerie peace worked its way into me. I slowed. The world aged. I came across yet another play park in the shadow of its high rises. The metal swings, seesaw, slide and roundabout stood static against the subtle movements of the trees around them, their primary colours temporary and unconvincing, as if they were already being mixed in a great paint pot to form a more natural brown.

By the time I happened upon the river promenade I'd almost forgotten I was trying to, and I took a seat at one of the many vacant benches to gaze dumbly into the inherent movement of the water. The river ran and rippled as it always had, eddies rolling. On the opposite bank determined cottonwoods grew stubbornly out of the sand and water, just a little too far for me to see the reflected light marbling across their undulating trunks. The silty flow told no stories. The turbid water revealed no details for me to grab at and grow from. No past. No future. I felt my paper map journey disintegrating in the wet, a flash of fear and a wave of relief – danger and peace. But I sucked in air on reflex, and like a hungry fish I turned to face upstream, waiting for a boat to come into view and reanimate this present continuous. 

It was a driftwood willow that came first, floating towards me down the faster outside channel, water bottles and other colourful flotsam caught in its half-submerged branches. I wondered how far it had come – from where it had been ripped when the land had slipped – and ran my eyes along its fissured bark. Seeds fall where they fall; nobody chooses where they're born. 

I sensed the wind, and let it briefly kiss both eyelids. Birthmark landscapes flowed through me, unnavigable contour maps at my fingertips. The willow's journey continued, its young, scarlet stems effulgent.

From the same direction appeared a distant figure, the first I'd seen along the promenade. Thinking they might disappear again I got up quickly and made my way to intercept. Getting closer I realised they were two, a mother and her little boy, their scarves wrapped tight against the cold, the sun in their faces. I could already see the woman was talking, but the breeze was blowing the other way and it was as if her S's couldn't break into the monopoly the dry leaves held over those sound frequencies: ssshhh. She was trying to encourage her child to play in their piles, but he refused to go near, perhaps nervous and respectful of the only things in this outside world that made a sound. For the leaves revealed the breeze, and the breeze revealed the time: the time passed; the woman was young. She made one last attempt by kicking a few into the air to demonstrate, but it was as if time itself exhaled, and they simply fell to the ground once more. The child took his mother's hand and squeezed. 

I'd almost reached them, but realised I was going too fast. Too late. Too soon. I tried to say good morning, but in my rush and hesitation the words came out too quiet, barely audible. They both squinted at me for a moment, just as we passed, their faces over-exposed in an old, sepia photograph, and then they were gone. It only occurred to me afterwards that with the sun so low and bright in their faces mine in turn must have been silhouetted. 

The breeze picked up and the leaves swirled around me. I passed broken windows and a large, ruined synagogue. What had happened here? I veered away from the river and stole through the city at random. It was most peculiar: some neighbourhoods were almost entirely abandoned, while others ticked over more recognisably, like tired engines turning at a red light, the first leaves collecting on their windscreens. What would happen here? 

The city had lost almost half its population in the space of a generation.

In the housing estates many of the businesses had already closed down, unneeded, the unemployment manifest in their empty window displays, bouquets of plastic flowers left in the middle of bare shelves against the dusty dark. Still life. Product placement. The only places where people gathered seemed to be the supermarkets – the waiting needing feeding. 

The poverty was apparent. The tower blocks were peeling, the lampposts rusting. It was striking to see a place built so recently falling into such abrupt decay; many of those living here would have seen these buildings going up. This wasn't the slow weathering of stone-ruin, this was collapse.

The less people there were, the more the economy slowed; the less work there was, the more people left. There had been some kind of investment sent back – many of those play parks were brand new – but play parks alone couldn't conjure children if those young enough to have them had already left to find work elsewhere. This was a city but it wasn't the city. It was too far. It was too small. It couldn't fulfil the promise.

Many of the businesses that were still open promised a way out. There were language schools for those who had time to invest, loan shops for those who didn't, and slot casinos for those whose future seemed beyond investment. All offered discretion, their windows covered over so you couldn't see inside. The gambling dens were particularly concealed, their blacked-out windows decorated with life-size photographs of the young, smiling women who must have been hiding within. I went in to meet them, but found only slot machines flashing and gurgling in the dark. For a coin I could slip into an illuminated world of gold, cowboy hats and cartoon, pinched-waist women with enormous, pointy breasts – the far west – but it was too late now: those young, smiling women must have cleaned the place out and run away to the capital to drink cocktails. 

I tried a bar. The elderly were drinking milky coffee. The radio was on loud, dance tracks and advertisements blaring alternately. A television streamed unrelated music videos on mute. I took a seat and a coffee and gazed dumbly into the asynchronous, splashing water of the sky-blue swimming pools, at the sex and excess of the party that was allegedly going on elsewhere. Outside the chipped horses of a carousel waited to spin under a decorated spruce. A political symbol of violence had been spray-painted onto the bottomless waste-bin beside it.

I tried the station. It stood proud in the winter sun, hazel-catkin yellow, its waiting room panelled in dark wood. The heavy door squealed through the silence as I closed the quiet city behind me, but it wasn't enough to wake up the man inside: he slept on under his newspaper, flat on his back, without snoring. I tip-toed over to the departure board and saw why nobody was around. The door squealed again. Behind the station was the bus garage, and from its flat roof grew a little tree. It was a ghetto-palm, a suckering species that could grow a couple of metres a year. It would be cut back – for a few more years at least.

The bus stopped at the capital's terminal near the banks of the same river. I was back. Back in the crowd, back in the action, back where I'd been. I went to the railway station to buy a ticket for tomorrow. I knew the way.

But I stopped dead as I entered the station. There was nobody inside. My skin prickled. Through the next doors I could see there was nobody along the platforms either. Self-doubt flushed through me, the days blurring – a double-take. Outside the stark reality filtered through. It was simple: there was nobody here because there were no trains. The rails themselves had been ripped out. The soon to be demolished platforms were left like piers reaching into a sea of rubble where a huge section of the city had been flattened. Through sleety snowflakes I could see distant cranes swinging below the first towers of a gigantic riverside development. A single tree had been left standing by the bulldozers, a single island of meaning between my platform and the construction, between past and future, a spruce.

On the wall there was an information notice and a map of diversions. The old station was to become a museum piece, a trinket under the skyscrapers that were going up. An underground replacement station was being built further out of town near a highway interchange. It would be called 'Center'. I went to see what was being built here instead.

The promontory platforms had actually offered the best view into the construction site, however, for the rest of the perimeter was bubble wrapped with miles of opaque hoardings. Each piece of the fence had its own plastic print pulled tight across it, advertising the future being created within. Whereas the slot casinos had been covered with photographs of women, each of these advertisements had been entirely computer-generated: pixels that had only ever been pixels. Now the images were careful never to reveal the faces, so you could imagine your own face over theirs. Each simple image was accompanied by a few simple words. I read them in turn as I walked past: 'My Kind of Town; Stardust; For Sentimental Reasons; Autumn Leaves; The Magic Window; When I Fall in Love; Fly Me to the Moon.' They were printed on soft, pastel colours and combined with water, stars, petals, balloons and white puffy clouds. In the last of the series a little girl played in a meadow and I had to stop, for this was exactly what we'd left behind to come here. There were hardly any meadows left. The cows were in their concrete stalls eating cereals, and we were in our concrete cities eating cows. Herbicides had guaranteed this pact; the grasses and flowers had become weeds. 

I kept looking at the blue-sky composite, but the grasses had dissolved once more into pixels, the impressionist flowers too vague to be distinguishable as individual species. The image only worked at a glance. All that was left was a pretty-pattern wash of CMYK green. I stepped back to see the breeze blow through the grass once more. Would we really want our children to play in the real thing? Hidden in the plants would be insects and arachnids – ants, spiders, ticks and bees – bites and stings, nettles and thorns: hay fever. The wind and sleet bounced off the sunny image. The little girl smiled up at her parents as they paid the down-payment for our sheltered future.

Sure enough the next series of hoardings were all pixel-panoramas describing it. These focused on the steel and glass towers themselves – 'Parkview, Aurora, Magnolia, Arcadia' – on their smooth, wipe-down surfaces and their incredible, don't-look-down height. It occurred to me that the dream wasn't merely an escape from dirty mud to clean city, but indeed an escape up and away from the ground itself – from the earth that called for us. Great heights offered abstraction. Only up there in the eternal sky could nature be rendered a safe place. The skyscraper was flight – an attempt at refuge from the ultimate fear. Escape and escapism: were we all on the run?

Inevitably the noise of the construction site down below spoke of dust and ash however. One of the hoardings had come loose and the future city rippled in the wind. I gazed through the hole of the fabrication. Mud and debris. Piles and puddles. A dog limped through the rubble, hind leg hanging. I followed its path until it disappeared in the sands. The feral dog had become a street dog; the street dog had become a stray dog. As always the dog simply did as it pleased, wild and free, but in the orderly, unsoiled city it had become a pest, a problem – a reminder.

I made like the dog, and slipped between two fence posts to get down to the riverside. I quickly saw why they would want to keep the area sealed off: industrial pipes were pumping filthy waste from the 'waterfront' construction directly into the river.

That night I fell into a mercifully deep sleep. 

A dream grew slowly from two beautifully shaped eyes, seeds in the night, which seemed to look straight at me, into me even, as if my body didn't end with my skin, as if I were without edges, without borders. The eyes smiled and something swelled up inside as I let myself feel chosen for a moment, that childhood promise fulfilled, lost and found. Where might I belong? Suddenly a different question offered an escape from this endless journey: with whom might I belong? The wide river mouth embraced me, kissing and teasing my seriousness, and the woman took me by the hand and brought me to a small village at the end of the road, a nest up high in the mountains. 

The village was perched precariously on a lip of rock. Steep scintillating waves of green crashed all about it – a young, vigorous forest rapturous in the absence of all those who'd been washed down to the sea – everywhere the sound of the clear waters that slowly carried the mountain down after them. I'd come a long way since the sanctuary at the beginning, but here, finally, under the living arcades of the forest, the other mammals returned once more: I felt the tail of the fox, the snout of the boar, the paw of the jackal, the neck of the deer, the ear of the bear. We crossed paths blindly, footfall soft in the mulch and decay. 

The shimmer of the forest canopy gave the impression of being underwater, and on that rocky seabed were many shipwrecks, houses and stables run aground in the storms of time, trees growing through fallen roofs like masts for a new wind. Everywhere evidence lingered, but already the patterns of stones once arranged by human hand were loosening. The woman pointed at black butterflies that lifted out of our way as we went, their soft, twitching wings absorbing rather than reflecting.

Everything moved except for the village in the middle, a tight clutter of cobbled lanes and simple houses, and despite the bliss of our wooded wanderings we naturally gravitated back to this promise of refuge, to birdsong and the tinkle of a water fountain. A cool damp emanated from the big, old-fashioned keyholes of abandon, and wild flowers grew from the cracks in the doorsteps, but unexpectedly we also saw colourful ribbon bunting hung between the buildings, flickering in the stasis – not everyone had left.

Sure enough we found them one by one and introduced ourselves. They felt their village didn't belong to the relentless world beyond the valley walls and were surprised to meet outsiders, but they took us in with warm curiosity, glad to be able to share their small world with someone, their own sense of belonging all the more conscious for being expressed. 

All the places had names and stories: a pear tree recalled the great uncle who had grafted it, a bend in the river a hot childhood summer, a landslip the big storm. The people told stories rather than history, and looked up at the cloud formations to see the future. They watched the sun and the moon orbit them, happy in light of being at the centre of it all. I noticed the shape of their calves and forearms with anticipation, hoping that mine would soon be lean and strong too.

We met in the village bar, somehow still open, and made plans for our days: to cut the bushes back, to dig a new vegetable garden, to mend a dry stone wall, to reopen an old pathway, to save the last meadow. Perhaps one day we would even organise ourselves to put on a little summer concert. Perhaps others would come. After working we would cut open a watermelon to share – red flesh in the green grass – even if we were too few to finish it. Two large dogs lay around hopefully in the sun and then the shade and then the sun again, humping each other occasionally when the feeling arose.

Meanwhile the two of us began fixing up a simple place of our own to stay. The structure had once been a stable – space for two cows and their hay – and that was exactly what we wanted, something stable: to feel like things would go on and on, like the water that ran and ran from the fountain. So I learnt how to mix cement and I willed it to set. 

I watched hands I didn't recognise at work, happy and proud of their new movements as they turned around tools, plugging leaks and nailing down wood determinedly. I watched the woman in the garden, her long fingers in the dark soil she was improving, the earth pulling on her body and my desire.

The village absorbed us. Just like those black butterflies, it didn't reflect: there were no glass walls or shop windows, no screens and no mirrors. In the dream I never saw my own face. The dream had many days and many nights, but I myself never slept. To do so would have revealed the dream for what it was; to fall asleep would have meant waking up.

But I started to tire. A pressure was building, pushing down on me from above, as if the daylight itself were getting brighter and brighter. My eyes grew heavy, squinting to see what had seemed clear just a moment before. I peered up into the blue blue sky, confused. A tiny aeroplane passed overhead. Within it were more people than in the whole valley beneath them. The engine roar lasted long after the aeroplane had disappeared over the crest of the mountain, and the dream trembled: the violence out there hadn't ceased simply because I couldn't see it. 

I refused to give up, hiding instead as best I could in what shade I could find. But things were falling apart, and though I did my best to keep repairing, the mimicry became obvious: I didn't know how to build or to grow. My skin itched and maddened, an edge once more, a bloody border of conflict. The woman bandaged me up as best she could, and despite everything she kept smiling into my swollen eyes, even as her own betrayed increasing concern. I tried to smile back. But I could feel myself waking, the dream wavering, and the knowledge crushed me. I found one more breath and then another. I clung on and on. I drank one more coffee in the village bar. I pulled one more weed from the vegetable garden. I went to bed one more time and watched that beautiful woman sleeping in the bed we'd built together – but where I wasn't sleeping. My eyelashes were wet. My cheeks were tight. My clothes clung to my sweaty body in some distant, dirty city where nobody knew me. 

Waking up was a death. 

I laid there for a long time.

When I finally rose I ran. It no longer mattered where I was – I didn't belong and I couldn't long – so I stopped looking. I'd already gone. Life flashed by and I let it. I let go. I let myself be carried along with the flow. I teleported, over and over, overlaying one city with another until they began to liquidise into a kind of amniotic fluid. Caffeine, sugar, alcohol. If I couldn't keep up with the ever changing world around me, their consumption might at least help me 'take back control' of myself, tweaking the chemical reactions in my mind to navigate and numb the day. Stimulate and tranquillise. Suck and swallow. There was comfort in returning life to the mouth where it had begun. I put on sunglasses. I plugged in headphones. I paid 'contactless.' 

Routine soon came as easily as it must have in the small places. Despite being in a different city each day I could more or less live the same day anywhere. Travelling itself prescribed this in fact; the transport hubs were the most reliable places of all. You could take an aeroplane or a high speed train and get off exactly where you'd been before, like a rollercoaster at a theme park. The open halls of daylight had been rebuilt as warm, glassy intestines. Shopping malls. Time to kill. 'Keep your bags with you at all times.' There was no waiting – there were no benches – travel was no longer a journey; a journey was no longer an event. I learnt to look the other way as the armed soldiers checked.

I got up early to squeeze a single carton of milk from a single silky udder. I fed the chickens their cornflakes, and turned on the television to hear the dawn chorus. I ordered the same coffee-pot on the stove, and a girl I didn't recognise asked if I wanted chocolate on top with the same smile. Transfers and transactions. The escape of indifference. Safe and sound in the same lives. 

I found myself disappeared in a crowded elevator mirror; none of my neighbours were looking back. I checked my appearance. A boy I didn't recognise avoided eye contact. My clothes were fraying, my face was grey. But well-signed solutions showed me the way: under the same roof I could repair my shirt in the blink of a needle – 'let your light shine' – and consult the herbalist shelves about tubes of lube for my disappearing complexion – 'nature's way'. I just needed to pick which colour. Satisfied but still hungry I plunged once more into the cool larder where hundreds of neat-triangle sandwiches had been prepared just for me, the wide selection convincing and empowering, offering me the chance to claim my crust of identity. But there was so much choice spread across the same bread I hesitated all of a sudden, a little hot, and then a little dizzy, trying to remember what I'd had yesterday: millennia of safeguarding against surprise an anchor without a port.

I'd gone too far, and went back in search of the 'old town' to try to reorientate myself a little. There was to be no past, but perhaps the historic shapes of a few iconic buildings might offer just enough singularity to stabilise this blur of familiarity. Perhaps that's why we photographed them so eagerly and so repeatedly – tags to organise such similar experiences into separable city memories? I was here. I was here. I was here. Was it enough? Three clocks told the same time in three different cities. 

The war was never as distant as we liked to pretend, and in looking I risked seeing. The truth was most of these buildings weren't old. No matter how timeless these cities prided themselves on being, often even their oldest domes and spires had needed rebuilding – representations even before they became images – whilst most homes hadn't been deemed worth salvaging at all. Not everything could be rebuilt. There was to be no past because the past had been shelled, gutted, firebombed: the black and white photographs taken in the aftermath had all described the same ruined city. 

Perhaps the devastation had been too much to contemplate – easier instead to compensate. Those without roofs had little time to pause and ponder after all. I walked from block to block through reset cities thrown up at breakneck speed, built to pattern by the next fleeting utopia in the void left by the fall of the previous one. The greater the destruction the faster the construction; the more extensive the project the less distinct each street.

I realised I was travelling through a vacuum colonised by a single idea, like the simple scrub that follows a great forest fire, like a meadow of milkweed – monotonous landscapes of unexpressed loss.

How to navigate? How to read the map or tell the story? I felt myself quiver between parched sands and open sea like an alternating current.

How would we meet if we didn't know where we were? 

Again I looked at the many people around me in their own worlds, each of us as if we were somewhere else. Every body was busy with their own chosen activity; every body slid the same finger the same way. It was all happening so quickly. We were trying to adapt. But in seeking the comfort of familiarity everywhere what if we'd never find anywhere special – perhaps we'd never make our way home? 

I could feel the anxiety welling up inside, the pit of my stomach bitter in my mouth, but all I could do was swallow it down again and carry on, fearing outright panic if I stopped. When lost sometimes the only solace is in settling on a direction and going. So on it went and on I went, ever west. My blood went round. The planet span. An astronaut rocketed into space.

The cities continued to get richer, centripetal concentrates of ever more capital, but there were less and less holes to be filled and more and more people sleeping rough on the street. To build something increasingly meant to demolish something; to generate more affluence seemed only to generate more poverty. Rising rents pushed the city's inhabitants around the peripheries, while the centres were reserved for those just passing through to photograph the palaces. Not everyone could keep up, not everyone could prove their worth: festive illuminations shaped like snowflakes lit up the bodies in the doorways of the freezing boulevards. 

It was getting more and more difficult to look the other way, the act of ignorance almost as exhausting as facing the truth. My redundant jaw ached from biting down, hard against itself. I wanted to cry out, but to who? I was back in the mall-station, my train almost due, and in non-places nobody can hear you scream. 

The names of possible cities twitched their way up the departure boards. They were flanked by flashing information screens with last-minute, under-the-tree gift offers alloyed to scores and headlines. Two-for-one. Three-nil. The war ground on to the east. There was another angry march to the west. 'We come first! Our home for us!' The rubble of one city lay on the mind of the other. But desperation rang through the claim that only a wall could protect the last tree standing for our traditions and values where once there'd been a forest. 

That tree twinkled, lit up like the city. I stood close enough to smell its dark needles. The scent seemed to hold a little of my own desperation, yet to breathe it in was strangely calming, and for a moment I felt my lungs and not my stomach. Breathing deeper I noticed another incongruous smell in the disinfected hum: straw and sawdust. Behind the tree were the same old figurines in their stable old nativity scene, so familiar I could barely see them: shepherds watching, little donkey, virgin mother, newborn baby. The everlasting. The evergreen. A story from the east to define the west. Buried under all the chocolate and gift-wrap it was still a story of hope, but it was also a story of a family on the move. A family forced from their hometown by a data-collecting empire. A family soon to be on the run from the persecution of a violent dictator. Away in a manger. It was late and nobody was looking so I stepped onto the straw to see the peaceful face of the newborn. But the child wasn't sleeping like in the song, his eyes were wide open and he was looking straight through me. Who was supposed to be saving who?

Outside sheets of cardboard lay vacant and soggy, clothes strewn across them. An overhanging roof provided shelter, and so the whole area had been doused with water to deter the homeless from gathering somewhere so visible. On the steps down to the metro a grubby shoe was stepped over again and again. I looked up for a star. We'd been telling the same story for two thousand years. The stars were the same, and so were the rags.

It was dawn. I'd slept. The sun came up behind me and lit up the undersides of the tall, purple clouds ahead. From my window things slid by into the past. The intercity train was still going fast. I rubbed my eyes and stretched my spine and knew that something had to change.

Down the carriage I could hear the sound of other bodies waking and uncurling, the inside of the warm train well insulated from its own hurtling motion through the world outside. Flight seemed the only way to be still in these restless landscapes – you could almost convince yourself you were going home – but no voyage lasted forever, and sooner or later I was going to have to make peace with the impact of arrival. 

I checked the time. The anthropogenic streamed past in a sprawl. Somewhere out there the river still ran parallel, canalised ever more stringently into straight channels with concrete embankments, while ever more lines recorded the latest height of the damage up building walls. It seemed that rushing the sewage out of one city only brought it quicker to the next, and that without the freedom of broad floodplains and looping meanders the river simply raced faster and faster towards us. 

The water was my watch. Loose fists from slender wrists lay idle in my lap.

There was a pop as we entered into a tunnel and my eardrums pushed outwards, the glass darkness replicating our bodies and our bags in transit – waiting, at speed, on hold. Holding. I sat up with a start and took my notebook out, flicking backwards through the blank pages of the past few days. I finally saw the inertia of my motion. I was travelling without going anywhere: there was no arrival. I closed my eyes and then opened them again, and scribbled there's no escape in escapism. We emerged from the tunnel into a much wider valley. I squeezed my pen tight.

Outside my thoughts the colours had been changing, and now I saw the subtle greening of the landscape, the gaining proximity of the ocean. Pale lichen had spread over walls and bare branches like peeling paint, and clumps of moss were creeping inland over damp concrete as they once had over lifeless continents. We were going too fast for me to see anything other than their colour, but from some dark bog I filled in the blanks and gave them texture: somewhere a city boy's hands were still gripping hold of a tree trunk. I let my eyes run along the soft edge of the distant hilltops, their shady conifer green, and once more felt an urge to climb up there into the wild, where nothing was decided.

Between us was asphalt and warehouses, hard and flat, the largest of which a distribution depot for one of the world's largest corporations named after one of the world's wildest places, far away on the other side of the planet. We flew over a highway, cars on commute, and I remembered this was where the lorry driver had been heading. I recalled what he'd told me, why he'd moved here of all places: 'safety, security – work.' I was deep into the midwest, the new promised lands of the east. These were lands that could now afford forest. Ahead of me were the old ports, the river mouths where the world's wealth had been unloaded for centuries, and where millions of the poor and hungry had once boarded ships to colonise their own distant promises. The grasslands and potato fields were now covered in solar panels, tilted heavily to the south.

The train was slowing, and eventually came to a halt at a station deemed worthy. It was a small city, much smaller than those I'd been bouncing between, but its name was famous, and called to mind poetry and the arts, end times and death: I got off. 

The change in the air was immediately apparent, the movement another. The passengers spread out from one another. The cars paused at the pedestrian crossing. The clipped trees stood still and clenched in their paving stones, evenly spaced and straight as lampposts, their heart-shaped leaves long since fallen and swept away with the litter. There was nothing to reveal the wind other than the cloud drift overhead. The dogs were on leads, out for a walk rather than going anywhere or searching anything, their bellies full, their legs a little shorter, and one of them looked me in the eye while his owner scooped his shit into a little plastic bag. There was a pharmacy, a shop selling life insurance, and a bakery. I joined the queue. We stood in line, and contemplated creamy glazed pastries.

I'd intended to walk straight through and up into the hills, but there was no rush really, and I found myself dawdling and eavesdropping amongst the pensioners, looping the lanes, caught by the way the city presented itself as of another time. Even the horse had now been welcomed back, cart and all, trotting tourists up and down past plaques and memorials. I noticed I was ageing myself, and wondered if I was far enough west that my own sense of future was becoming vaguer: which way was west in the west? The sun set; the days were short. 

As the light petered out people gathered in front of the theatre around temporary wooden chalets serving fatty treats and warm wine. The river didn't freeze like in the old days, but a small ice rink had been installed for the children to skate around under the bronze gaze of two writers who'd lived here back when everything had had its place. I stood watching the rosy cheeks circle, and for a moment the world curled up into a smaller, warmer story of woolly hats and mittens. 

Looking round the rink I caught sight of the one person who wasn't animated by the scene, a woman by herself with a faraway expression, staring down into the ice. I couldn't tell if she was avoiding everyone or if she was being avoided. Still she didn't move. I decided to risk being friendly, and went over to try. 'Everything ok?' I asked, awkwardly. She turned, surprised, and scanned my eyes urgently. I apologised, and tried again in my own language, adding that I wasn't from the city either. Now she smiled back, and we introduced ourselves. 'Sorry,' she said, 'I was dreaming, I'm not used to this darkness so early.' We exchanged pleasantries, but she didn't ask where I was from and so neither did I. She'd been in the city almost a year and I almost a day, but neither of us knew how long we'd be staying. I asked if she'd like a drink. 'I can't,' she said, pointing out two of the teenagers skating, 'my daughters. I have to get back and cook.' Again she scanned my eyes, flicking rapidly from one to the other. 'But maybe later, after dinner, if you have time before you leave?' I agreed, and she suggested a place at the shopping mall that did freshly squeezed juices, explaining it was one of the few places open late that wasn't alcoholic.

I dropped my bag at a dormitory where boys from all over the world were stretched out watching videos on phones, and set out again down quiet streets of tidy gardens and widescreen living rooms. Cars were speeding fast in a crime drama, gazelles even faster in a nature show; criminals and lions prowled the neighbourhood. Nobody was venturing out. The evening stalled. My stomach folded. Back on the main road I found a place to eat and ordered some falafel. The microwave span. The news was on. A well-known clothes factory had collapsed in a city I'd never heard of. A mysterious virus was spreading quickly in another. Both stories seemed as far away as the rainforest. 'With everything? Hot sauce? … Where you from?'

I'd arrived at the shopping mall early, and went up and down the escalators to take a look around. As well as the usual shops there was a gym, a cinema, and a 'wellness' centre. There were no windows or sky vents to reveal the dark winter outdoors, and the low ceilings had been painted sky blue with puffy clouds, punctured only by the bright spot-lighting and emergency sprinklers. The walls in turn were decorated with trees, a rolled-on wallpaper of sunlit leaves on loop. I thought again of the wooded hilltops beyond the city, and once more let the idea fill my tomorrow. Occasionally a door would open out into the cold, multi-story car park – half the mall's floors were actually underground – but the top floor was protected from these intrusions, and that was where we were meeting. 

Here the decorations were more extravagant, with murals of cobbled, car-free lanes and assorted suggestions of antiquity. The whole floor had been painted as a kind of homage to that sinking lagoon-city you have to see before you die – it was, as perhaps all malls, a kind of cruise ship. Only one table was free on deck so I sat down to take it. A winged lion smiled down benevolently. Fast-food noodles fried brown incrementally. I realised looking twice that the small olive trees in the plant pots were real. Most people had already eaten, trays and crumpled packaging pushed away to one side, but there was that same feeling I'd sensed on the train: a kind of waiting, a kind of holding. Those of us aboard had very different stories, but as the mall cruised the rough seas of the world it could easily have been in any of the many countries we'd been born in. Perhaps these would be the meeting places after all?

She appeared on the escalator, and for a second seemed surprised to see me, but I sensed right away that she had something to say. We ordered our juice – fruit that had travelled further than us – and took the chance to change table to be closer to the olives. 'My daughters wanted to go out as well' she said, 'they have some friends now. We don't even know for sure if we can stay, but already they're learning the language and changing. So fast! Not like me…' I told her how well she spoke my language. 'I studied literature. Lots of books.' She'd worked in humanitarian aid, back when the war had been in the next country and refugees had been arriving in her city, and then later as a displaced person herself. She'd helped coordinate international projects, with money sent from the same countries that sent the weapons: 'the last big one I worked on was a project called Resilience, one million dollars. I should ask you: what's this word meaning? When bombs are dropping on your houses and you've nothing, when the airstrikes just keep coming – what's this resilience?' In my silence she concluded herself: 'It's a stupid word.'

We spoke about language and the experience of arriving in new places, and eventually arrived between the rivers where I'd begun my journey. She told me how green it was down along the riverbanks: 'it's not sand like everybody thinks!' She stopped abruptly, and again I saw the same expression she'd had at the ice rink – a pinching of time and space. She came back and turned to me: 'What are you doing here?' I took a breath, and almost as much to myself replied that I was writing a book. Her face lit up, and immediately I felt embarrassed. 'So you're a writer?' I thought a little longer before speaking. 'Well…' I stammered, 'I write… Perhaps it's easier with verbs.' She looked at me very seriously and sat back in her chair without breaking eye contact. 'I'm not a refugee,' she announced, 'I fled.' 

She asked what I was writing about and I thought again. 'I thought I was trying to find what home meant' I remembered, rubble and ruin out of the corner of my eyes, the flickering haze of the horizon, 'but I'm beginning to think it's homelessness I'm trying to understand.' It was a question, an invitation. She answered. 

'To go away from home generates new feelings, and so you try to test it, what’s this feeling? What’s home meaning? Home is land? A feeling? An environment, an atmosphere? Home is safety? People? Now, home for me is tenderness. When I become so tired and want to sleep I need this tenderness. I need to feel that I’m in my house. But I’m not in my house. This is not my house. This is not my land, at the end.' 

'Because I’m in a changeable situation. Every day I face many changing situations. I don’t know for what time I will stay here… It’s a hard situation. I resist all those feelings and keep calm and tell myself: come on, you are very strong! I try to go forward and not think emotionally. Try to see the reality, see the things for what they are, here, and try to adapt yourself – adapt yourself. I try to live positively, flexible, to be more strong, but… sometimes I just want to find a little corner where I can be weak. To rest. To have rest. This would be home. This tenderness. I try to be positive, but there are backgrounds in my mind: I’m lonely. Completely. But can I search for this little corner, this tenderness, with someone? Or only alone? Maybe I'm also afraid of this someone.' 

'Maybe I will close my eyes. Maybe I try to run to the sea – the sea means a lot of things – maybe I want to go to keep alone. And when I decide to walk the streets, see people, I decide to be sociable, and when I decide to be alone I decide to be unsociable. I try to escape to nature because we are from nature in the end. I try to see green lands – with people for sure, but when I decide to see those people, and when I decide to not see I will sit in front of the sea, just thinking: why we aren’t in peace? Why we don’t live in peace?'

'A lot of people think like me.' 

I let her words land. Everyone else had gone. A cleaner was mopping the floor. Even the mall shut at some point, and it was almost midnight. I could only reply how courageous it seemed to acknowledge this vulnerability, to give space to all those feelings of homelessness and live them too. I looked into her eyes. She'd seen hell. She'd lived my nightmares. Her name was Ula. We went down the escalators and said goodbye. 

I flowed back down roads I didn't know, eyes moist under a waxing moon. Perhaps homelessness wasn't necessarily a void to be filled.

When I woke a door was still ajar to all the other days I'd woken into, ever so fleetingly, and I grabbed out in vain, realising and materialising exactly where I was – a radiator still rattling away behind me as it had done all night. I left the boys to their snoring and their turning, and slipped out with a single click to zip and brush up in peace, then set off uphill into a grey morning swirling, hoping I might find a tender little corner of my own.

The last housing blocks were met by the first unruly trees, a clattering of skinny birch wavering about the holly and the dog rose. A brief hail shower marked the threshold, small beads of ice bouncing lightly off my back as the pavement gave way to squishy roadside verge. Nobody was expected to pass this unspoken boundary on foot, and for a while I was caught between the oncoming headlights and a tumbledown fence. No-entry signs warned of a former military training zone, and renounced all liability to those who entered, but the wire was red with rust, and trees had begun growing into it, enclosing the barbs with their soft tissue. The fence eventually collapsed altogether into spontaneous hedge, and I squeezed through into the rough scrub to continue under creaking saplings. They were too young to have formed a full canopy, and clumps of dry grass persisted with the leaf litter. I missed a step; a blue tit lay frozen in the paper.

It wasn't long before I hit another road, and my shadow skipped across as a single ray of sun screamed off the metal and the wet asphalt – wing mirror figment – back into the wood. I wondered if the roots and fungal filaments on either side would one day grow long enough to find each other down beneath the traffic. How deep was a road? The wind whipped through my hair and buffeted me about. The limber trees let themselves sway, experts in standing still. I was struggling to tell them apart without their leaves, and their distinctive barks would only come later with age. The tight stands of spindly trunks didn't much resemble the mature woods in the pictures, and I realised I was going to have to get much further up into the hills to find the forest I was looking for.

I reached the first crest. From there the hill fell away again into shadow before rising up into a higher ridge. That was the green I'd seen from the train, that bit further than it appeared. I followed the hilltop, trying to get a better view, and noticed a raised bed running parallel. Along its gradual curve into the trees were evenly-spaced headstones. They were inscribed with numbers – milestones measuring the distance from the city – all that was left of another railway. Down the slope in front of me I finally saw the beeches the woods were named after, none of them quite old enough to have seen what had happened here back when the trains had come without windows. For a while the prisoners had been forced to make bricks from the local clay deposits – but to dig the earth they'd first had to clear the trees. Those standing here now had grown from their graves. 

If I'd have followed the line of stones a little further I'd have arrived at the memorial and the museum centre, the electrified fences and the watchtowers, the coaches and the cameras, while all the time down in the valley you could still see the city – you could still make out the steeples. A stone's throw. Today's camps were much further away of course, out of sight beyond a continent of monuments, but we all still knew they were there. It wasn't a question of visibility. From here I could see it never had been. 

The young beeches let go of another few leaves that blew up into a flurry before touching down with the others on a hill that needed its forest. Perhaps one day, if the climate allowed, some of these trees would still be standing here, rising up from a thick forest floor immemorial. 

It was hours before I finally smelt the bark and the resin I'd imagined. The sky raced. My feet ached. The beech hanger had been smaller than I thought, and I'd had to cross fields, roads and commuter villages before finding the path that had led me up into the damp shade of the evergreen. Now the brisk wind sounded all the more urgent in the needles, an ocean roar, and I had to fight off the alarming feeling that there was no other sound at all in this tumultuous silence. Something about the trees kept me moving, as if not one of them called me, and I marched on uphill at a pace, convinced I just needed to get deeper in. Something didn't feel right. 

It was a muddy forest road with grooved, tank-like tracks that cut through to me, and unsure which way to go I stopped to look properly at the trees. They were all spruce. They were all the same size. They were all spaced uniformly apart from one another, equidistant. It was a plantation, and they'd been planted to be cut down. It was pulp. Toilet roll. If I were lucky, the pages of a book. 

This wasn't the forest I was looking for. I was looking for something that wasn't human. Something older – other. Something that had survived. I carried on and knew what I'd see: swathes of stumps where the machines had already cleaned through. I took my smartphone out my pocket to navigate, sliding my thumb and finger together to zoom out, swiping around the map desperately for another shade of green. It couldn't all be like this – I may as well have stopped at the first birch I'd seen at the edge of the city! 

I sat on a stump, and let my air out. The spruce offered their oxygen regardless. I tapped the screen and searched for ancient forest. The usual images of gnarly old trunks and sunbeams streaming through dark greens of lush underbrush flashed up. But where were they? I tried again, searching more specifically for ancient forest here in the 'old world'. Surprisingly a series of international news items appeared. It seemed I wasn't the only one searching. Thousands of protesters had travelled from the cities to try and protect one of the last remaining fragments before it was cleared for an open-pit coal mine expansion. Some had been there for a few years: they'd built treehouses up high in the branches. I clicked to watch the videos. Trees in the rain. Ropes and chains. Young faces bright in the police lights under circling helicopters. And 13,000 tonne excavators the size of high-rises working their way across the landscape. Most of the forest was already gone, cleared over the course of my lifetime, and I was already on my way, hoping to catch a glimpse of the last trees before it was too late. What was left lay due west, between me and the sea. Somewhere in the plantation a rifle shot echoed up into the air. 

The land flattened off and the wind fell through the night. By the morning a mist was hanging low along the skyline. Out of the oozing murk a single hill rose up imposingly, solid, and I headed that way on instinct, guessing its steep slopes were what had saved the trees until now. There was no sign of the mine, but pylons approached the area from all directions like six-armed giants. The high-voltage cables crackled overhead, bullets zapping through the air towards fridges and hairdryers. The power station furnaces must have been out there in the mist as well: smoke in the clouds. Everything was slowly disappearing. The mist was thickening into a dense fog.

By the time I reached the hill I could barely see more than a few steps, but from an empty car park I found a wide footpath that led off into the trees at a measured ascent. The fog was condensing; the trees dripped. I snatched sight of a jay and heard the heavy flap of a crow. From what I could see the trees didn't seem very old at all, but there was incredible variety: beech and birch, hickory and hawthorn, maple, walnut, cherry and alder, as well as several other trees I wouldn't have been able to identify without the knee-height information boards in front of them. Again this wasn't the forest I was expecting, and the trees seemed so neatly curated in their groups that it was hard to believe they hadn't all been planted as well. The hill levelled off and more paths criss-crossed off into the grey opaque. I tried one after another, each a kind of strange promenade of labelled nature, until after a while I must have reached the highest point because a sign announced a panoramic viewpoint. There was a turret tower to climb up onto, built and named after antiquity, and I took its steep, brick stairs into the clouds. I was looking out over the biggest open-pit mine on the continent – but I couldn't see anything. What I didn't realise was that I was also on top of the biggest artificial hill in the world.

I began the descent down the other side and again took out my phone to navigate. I decided that if I found the edge of the mine and simply followed its circumference I'd eventually find the old part of the wood. The satellite images revealed the scale of the mine however: the pit was as big as a city. Most of the green pixels were where I'd been exploring all morning, but there were a few small fragments at the other end as well, and I lengthened my stride to try and reach them, the distant buzz of a helicopter adding urgency to my direction: the fog must have been lifting. 

Sure enough the suspended droplets began to drip and drizzle as I worked my way down the strange terrain, until eventually I ducked out of the cloud and into the rain and into another visitor's car park. I began my umbrella march down the side of the road, feeling small against the stream of trucks that splashed past. A steep bank of bramble was topped by a high wall confirming what I knew lay on the other side, while industrial pipes ran away into the fields, most likely pumping groundwater to allow the dig to go deeper. The rain eased. The rain picked up. The helicopter circled overhead. The longer it went on the more I found myself hoping for a glimpse of the mine instead, the idea of an ancient forest ever more remote and abstract. And then, all of a sudden, there it was – there it wasn't – a gap, a missing landscape, a hole in the world. 

It was a public viewing platform, complete with metal parasols and deck chairs, but until I approached the fence to look down all I could see were the clouds. The far side remained obscured, too far to see where the pit might have finished. I stepped forwards. I gaped in. Way down below, a dark seam of coal stretched off into the distance, soon to be burnt into the sky – millions of years of compressed life to go up in smoke. The excavators were working into it along giant tiers of earth and rock, but there was nothing familiar to grasp hold of to get an idea of the scale, no way of gauging the depth. Then the obvious truth hit me: the hole would be as deep as the hill was high! The hill was the hole, inverted. I suddenly understood what was happening. The entire pit was moving forwards as the machines dug further, while the excavated material formed the hill growing behind it. The hill could only have been a few decades old, and all those trees I'd seen on its slopes must have been planted to 'offset' the ancient forest lost through the process. It felt obvious, I felt naïve, but despite the clues I simply hadn't had the imagination to perceive the magnitude of such an operation. 

Feeling dizzy, I hurried on even faster to find the trees I'd come looking for. Now I knew for sure where they'd be: if the forged hill was behind the mine, then the forest had to be in front. But the whole world seemed to be shifting around me as everything fell into doubt. The rain was sheeting, the ocean rising. Wildfire ripped through forests around the planet as ecosystems collapsed and habitats vanished, while in front of me another empty village lay half-demolished as the coal mine advanced towards it, its rubble joining all the rubble behind me on this long journey west. My feet pounded, my carbon footprint heavy in the mud, while I tried to picture the natural forest I sought after, some pristine place still standing.

I stopped. There at the end of the road was a grove of tall, angular silhouettes: a small, unassuming woodland, nothing more, nothing less. 

I drew closer. These were the trees. I stepped in onto their leaves. Ovals of hornbeam, lobes of oak. Nothing moved. Balanced up in the branches were the remains of several dismantled treehouses. Every now and then a plank would squeak and a tarpaulin tickled, but there was no other sign of police or protesters. There was nobody here. 

I drifted through the wood, stepping over fallen branches and stormy detritus. Each trunk had been spray-painted with a number and an X, luminescent yellow dribbling a little down the rough bark. Counted. Crossed. Condemned. The rain had stopped. 

What was I looking for? I thought again about the green valley I'd dreamt of. I thought again about the city I kept running from and finding myself in. I thought again about the way Ula had described home as a place where she could be vulnerable – homeless – and accept how she felt. And I knelt down in the wet leaves of the clean forest floor.

Deep down I knew what these landscapes of guilt meant to me. The city was my home and my homelessness, my place of birth and my berth song. It was a galleon ship clearing of the forest: a smokey duvet of protection from a world of life and death.

And the forest was my grief. My mother was gone. 

I was almost back. Back where we used to play in the ocean's waves. Back where I used to find her when I could still go back.

I just wanted to hold her, to be held. I just wanted to tell her, to be told. I wanted and I held. I held as tight as I could, gripping a hold of the hole in me, and I wailed into the wood. 

There was no way back, I knew, and I felt a sudden conviction that the meeting places of the future would be there where we could face that – places of sincerity where we'd find the courage to stop, a little naked, and see all the other lost boys and girls around us. I stood up, and ripped a strip from my clothes to tie to the tree.

The air was thick with salt as I followed boat symbols on road signs around the periphery of the city. Night had lingered into dawn like crusts of sleep in the corners of our eyes, the sky's tears and mucus collecting in impromptu pockets of discrete survival: blankets on a gravel pile; cardboard sheets under a bridge; a tent behind the ivy. That tent would be slashed and confiscated if found by the police, but most officers would now be in bed after a long night's duty. It was a new day and a new year, the distant explosions of fireworks recalled by damp city streets, used rocket sockets and colourful plastic debris strewn amongst the smashed glass, glitter-bombs and streamers. The seagulls had already picked out the fallen fries and other edible waste, but half-finished bottles of beer and bubbly stood waiting by bus stops and doorways, the last of their bubbles dissipating into the morning. 

Out in the industrial wastelands the litter was different. Here the discarded ditched empty milk-cartons and fish-tins with their on-file fingerprints, one more meal taken care of. Here the new year brought only a new day: another new day trying to squeeze onto a passing lorry; another new day waiting for the message that another old dinghy was ready. Years were for those of us with somewhere to be.

I arrived where the camp had been, but found only dry weeds in the sandy earth. Nothing remained of the tents or the shelters, the kitchens or the shops, the water points or the information centres, the church or the mosque: nothing on the map; nothing marked the spot. A more careful process of elimination must have followed that of the bulldozers, and all that was left were two red signs forbidding entry into an empty expanse, waves of dunes blocking the view out to sea. 

Somewhere out here hundreds of people were still living rough along the coastline, but they were no longer allowed to gather together. Meeting places enabled groups to form and people to organise themselves – even a tatty tarpaulin in the mud might offer a small sense of home if shared with a few others – and under no circumstances was anybody to feel like they belonged here. This was our 'hostile environment', a popular policy of encouraging people to stay in their own hostile environments. Charity work was stigmatised and food distribution criminalised, while human rights went increasingly unrecognised. People were hounded, demeaned, and pepper-sprayed, their papers and phones confiscated – all so they wouldn't come. Yet most had seen much worse, and in any case, they were here now.

When all was said and done people continued to gravitate towards the places where wealth continued to concentrate, however grim the conditions. The hope remained that things could only be better on the other side: one last city; one last push west; one last chance before the ocean. 

The island across the water had sent more and more money to militarise its off-shore defences accordingly, attempting in various ways to unmoor itself from the rest of the continent. The future was growing away from us, yes, but the manufactured now outweighed all the living biomass put together, and the idea there'd be more and more of everything was mirrored by the twin doubt there'd be less and less of everything, and the drawbridges were going up. The approach to the port had been sealed off from the rest of the city with concrete, metal and razor wire, and here it passed by the invisible camp on steep embankments. My throat lumped as I spotted the ripped clothing caught in the barbs. 

A little further on I passed a disused petrol station where a boy was standing alone eating breakfast. Breakfast was a piece of bread, resting on the pump. He was difficult to age – he had no years – but he looked like he should have been at school, and certainly not by himself. How far had he come? Much further than me, I was sure. I waved and called out, but he looked straight through me, chewing on slowly through the same stale bite. His eyes were wide, peeled ready, but it was as if he couldn't see me, as if we inhabited parallel worlds which, although overlaid, couldn't interact with one another. What else could experience have taught him? One of us had a passport and the other didn't. I stepped forwards to try again, but he turned and span away, slipping through a fence and off into the warehouses. I grimaced, unsure if I'd proven our mutual existence or merely interrupted his breakfast. 

Later, when they scanned my face at the security controls I realised his face had been burnt into mine: his eyes wouldn't shut.

The ferry was hot and smelt of toast, perfume and diesel, and I pushed open the heavy door to get out onto the wet deck for some air. A couple of men were already out with their backs to the wall and their hoods up tall, pensively cupping hands to mouths to relight cigarettes in silence. What was left to say? The sea slopped about the wharf. The engine vibrations intensified. We cast off. 

Beyond the breakwaters the wind swelled and the boat began its slow lean in and out of the spray. I watched the city recede, but nobody was watching us depart: the tired and windswept ports of the west had long given up looking outwards. The world was no longer something to profit from but to protect yourself from. The horizon promised nothing. The boat wasn't going to AMERICA.

We slunk into a sea fret and the shrinking lights blurred, the thickening mist connecting sea to cloud: water, water, water. The giant propellers left a white trail through the deep greys and greens, our wake like a dissolving road to the east, slowly fizzling out. Piratical gulls took advantage, swooping down into the churned water over and over, preying on the silver fish caught up in the turbulence. The fret thickened and we hit a bigger wave, setting off a series of car alarms on the deck below, flashing and squealing into the gloom. I prayed nobody was trying an independent crossing in this filthy weather, but perhaps I was just scared to witness a dinghy, kayak or inflatable for myself. I held my gaze, keeping watch, a wave of vertigo coming over me, the porous surface of the water shimmering dimly above the seabed, the car alarms still blaring.

And then from nowhere the ferry emerged from its sheet as the land emerged from its water. The crossing was complete. There it all was, déjà vu, there it all was in a sweep. There was the chalk. There was the calcium. There was the castle. There was the first tooth, the terraced housing and the telephone off the hook. There was the roundabout and the exit, the slip-lane and the slipway, the special offer and the shuttered up shop. There was the pothole and the rabbit burrow, the stubble grass and the prickly gorse, the coconut scent wafting through the dry thistle and the wavy, spiky hawthorn swept back from the clifftop, the soil erosion and the drop. There was the silent surf rolling down below the roar of the trucks on their way to the city. There was the crumbling concrete of the acoustic mirror 'listening ears' cupped to sea, and the millennia-old burial mound that became an 'irregular hexagonal type 24 pillbox' bunker for the firefight that never came. There was the graffiti. There was the security camera. There was the 'no entry', the 'no camping' and the 'no unauthorised persons' sign, the 'private property' and the 'prohibited area'. There was the warning not to stand under the infected ash trees. There was the smell of a bonfire from a garden corner. There was the fox behind the wheelie bins and the new year's pub lunch seen through steamy windows, frail hands chopping large battered fish into ever smaller bites. There was the man with the metal detector out in the bay. There was the marsh, the mudflats and the shingle. There was the razor shell and the sandcastle swept away. There was the nuclear power station. There was the cottage escape. There was the military patrol boat coming around the headland and the memory of grandad's little sailboat rocking in my sway. There was the lighthouse against the goose grey sky, its bright lamp flashing, turning, beckoning, warning. There was the driftwood and the shredded plastic, the seaweed and the missing shoe. There was the dog's footprint in the coiled castings of the lugworms, that same paw a few steps ahead, all the way to the pebbled cape. And there was the boy with the small, round stone in his pocket, crossing the low tide beach barefoot: the beach he'd known his whole life; the beach where brothers and sisters washed up in search of a new one. There was the ness. There was the final view out west. But all I could see with my own eyes was the grey haze of distance.

I relented, and let myself collapse down onto the cool pebble shelf. I looked out beyond the waves of the choppy foreground into the bleary horizon where the future used to be, and allowed myself my death. 

There was no way back; there was no way ahead. The linear direction of the west had dried out the past and submerged the future, dividing the living and disappearing the dead. 

So I took off the ticking compass from around my wrists and around my neck, and placed my small, round stone with all the others. Here it would lie, exposed to all the elements, where the sea and sky came aground combined. 

I pictured the sticky buds of the uprooted willow on its new sandbank island, somewhere a little further along the river. And I rose once more and put my boots back on. Every living moment was a birth; every living moment was a death. Time to share what I could. 

Before I sat down to write I went to visit my grandparents, where I sensed one last landscape belonged to this journey. I asked shyly if I could see my grandmother's warm belly, and if I could perhaps even rest my hands upon it. She consented without question, and raised her jumper for me. My grandfather stood with us: 'that's where his mam was.' And I knew she still was.

I knew that, if I let her, she'd be in so many other places as well – in wild little moments of timeless wonder.

This work was composed in many places. It was composed on the move. But it was also composed in the homes of many friends who took me in when I most needed it, sometimes for long periods and with exceptional generosity of spirit. Other friends have meanwhile found all manner of ways to accompany me on this journey with their thoughts, ideas and questions, gifting their own experience through our time shared – this work has many authors. These acts of friendship have been immensely grounding, and have allowed me to explore these things with greater focus and at greater depth, without getting lost. To all of you, my sincerest thanks.

In particular I thank Lisa for her belief and the serenity she instils. I thank Ottavia for offering to read this as it grew, for helping me to understand where I was trying to go. I thank Alessandra for her encouragement and her curiosity. I thank Jason and Ruth who, when suddenly we were told 'you must stay at home', immediately offered their apartment. Likewise I thank Michael and Judith who welcomed me in when I was further away from home than I'd ever been, and Krystian who came out looking for me. Michael also supported this project with a spontaneous contribution at the very start, back when not even I knew what it was about. All of you trusted; all of you opened a door in the storm. I also thank those of you who called out into the waves when I didn’t respond, and I apologise. In particular here I thank Sarah, who taught me so much what home can mean.

I thank all the people I met along my way who recounted their intimate stories of home and homelessness to a complete stranger, exploring the mystery with me for a moment. From these a very special thanks to Ula Sulaiman, whose words appear as part of the dialogue in chapter 8. The original conversation was held in a different shopping centre in a different country, but her thoughts came to be a guiding star when trying to find my bearing. Thanks then to Abed Qabbani who originally put us in contact, and indeed to everyone who helped at Jouri in Antep. Thanks also to Massimo Mucchiut with whom I discussed many of the themes before the journey began.

Finally a thank you to my family who've always supported without ever questioning my path – a wonderful gift.