Page 108 of Carry Me Home

She’s walked away from where the group was standing, out towards the harbour wall. Standing alone on the stone edge, looking out at the sea. Or maybe looking at the road. At the car. At me.

I can’t tell from here. I can only see her silhouette – small and solitary against the grey water, the mist curling around her like the village is trying to hold on to one more person who won’t stay.

I should stop. Turn around. Go back.

But what would I say that I haven’t already said? What would change?

Nothing. That’s the answer. Nothing would change. She’d stand there with her arms folded and her face closed off and she’d tell me to have a safe trip and I’d leave anyway, because there’s nothing left for me here except the outline of a life I wanted and couldn’t have.

The bend curves. The village disappears.

The last thing I see is Nina, alone on the harbour wall, growing smaller and smaller until the mist takes her completely.

I drive.

The A30 is quiet this early, the mist still thick enough that my headlights catch it in white sheets. I know every bend of this road – the dip past Treloars’ Farm, the long straight where the hedgerows open up and you can see the sea one last time before the road turns inland. I don’t look. I keep my eyes on the tarmac and my hands at ten and two and I drive like a man with somewhere to be.

The mist burns off around Bodmin. By Launceston the sun’s breaking through, pale and unconvincing, and I cross the border into Devon without ceremony. No sign. No fanfare. Just the road changing beneath the tyres – smoother, wider, the hedgerows giving way to open fields.

I stop for petrol outside Bristol. The station is fluorescent and depressing in the way all motorway services are depressing – too bright, too loud, the smell of reheated pasties and diesel – so I buy a coffee from a machine that dispenses it at a temperature capable of stripping enamel and with a flavour that suggests the beans died some time ago and haven’t been mourned. But I drink it anyway, standing in the car park with my back against the Land Rover, watching lorries pull in and pull out.

My phone buzzes. Cara: How’s the drive? Everything okay?

Fine. Long. See you tonight.

She sends a smiley face. A heart. A photo of the flat she’s found – small but bright, a view of green hills in the distance.

Your room’s on the left. I put fresh sheets on the bed.

Thanks.

Drive safe. I’m making dinner. Nothing fancy. Pasta probably.

Sounds good.

The conversation is easy. Uncomplicated. No subtext, no hidden meanings, no eleven years of baggage weighing down every word. I put the phone away and get back in the car and pull onto the M5 and the coffee sits in my stomach like acid and regret.

The Midlands pass in a grey blur of roadworks and average-speed cameras. I eat a sandwich from a garage near Birmingham that tastes of nothing and costs four pounds fifty, which feels like a personal insult. The radio’s on – Radio 4, a programme about soil erosion that I’ve been listening to for forty minutes without absorbing a single word. I turn it off. The silence is worse. I turn it back on. A woman is explaining the nitrogen cycle with the kind of quiet passion I recognise in people who’ve built their lives around one thing they love.

I change the station.

North of Manchester the landscape starts to shift. The hills steepen. The greens darken – not the bright, salt-washed green of Cornwall but something deeper, rougher, heather-bruised. The sky widens. I roll down the window somewhere in the Lakes and the air that comes in is cold and clean and smells of peat and rain and absolutely nothing like the sea.

My neck aches. My right hand has gone numb from gripping the wheel. I flex it, shake it out, grip again. The tiredness isn’t the kind that coffee can fix – it’s the bone-deep exhaustion of a man who only slept for four hours because he spent most of the night staring at the ceiling, listening to the harbour sounds he’s been falling asleep to for twenty-seven years and trying to memorise them.

The border comes and goes. Scotland announces itself in the quality of the light – sharper, thinner, the sun sitting lower even in summer. The road narrows. The hills become mountains. Everything feels further apart up here – the houses, the towns, the distance between one life and the next.

Six hours becomes five. Five becomes three. Three becomes the last stretch, the satnav counting down miles.

Cara texts again: Pasta’s on. Twenty minutes?

Twenty minutes.

I indicate. Turn off the main road. Follow a lane that leads to a village I don’t know, in a county I’ve never lived in, towards a flat with fresh sheets on a bed that isn’t mine.

The Land Rover smells of the coffee I spilled near Penrith. My shoulders are locked solid. I haven’t spoken a word out loud since I said goodbye to Nina eleven hours ago, and her name is still the last shape my mouth made, sitting there on my lips like a taste I can’t wash out.

I park. I sit in the car for a long time.