They were utterly lost on the unmarked single-track roads. Green hedges whipped past. Trees with dense green canopies overhung the road at intervals, throwing shadows across our path. There were glimpses of familiarity: the way a passing point nibbled into a grass verge, or an aging wooden shed listed in a field. But they were fleeting things, as untrustworthy as childhood memories, and just as intangible for Michael to navigate by. Road signs were non-existent, transforming the countryside into a meandering labyrinth in which it felt they might be lost forever. They had passed into a strange world of half-forgotten things and the shifting dream-like recollections of the past.

  Michael slowed to a stop and disconnected the phone from the on-board computer. ‘Have you got a signal?’

  Sam answered with a shrug.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Another shrug. Sam’s eyes never left the window.

  Through gritted teeth, Michael took a slow breath. Don’t raise your voice. You’re stressed and lost, and the boy doesn’t know you.

  ‘Can I check your phone?’ Michael held out his hand, trying to keep his voice light.

  Sam opened his fingers but remained glued to the view of a rippling ocean of golden wheat.

  ‘You’ve no signal either.’ Michael handed back the little monolith of plastic and glass. Finally, Sam drew his gaze from the window only to retrieve his property. He pocketed it and turned back to the golden sea.

  The air-conditioning blew a chill breeze, and the car idled. Michael dredged memories he’d locked away for so long, groping for a sign, anything to let him know where the hell they were. Nothing arose from the jumble of still shots representing his childhood. He turned off the ignition. The cold air died, and the bright sun immediately reasserted its heat on the car’s interior, so he got out.

  ‘Great!’

  All evidence of the car’s recent valeting had vanished. The winding backroads had covered the Mercedes’ black paintwork in a grey-brown patina of dust, mixed with the splattered carcasses of bugs. With more pressing concerns, Michael held up his phone to the sky, moving it around with flicks of his wrist, while performing half and quarter pirouettes, like an idiot dancing secret incantations to the deity of network coverage. But that god, it seemed, was either dead, or a cruel bastard who enjoyed his suffering. Probably the latter.

  No GPS and no mobile phone signal meant he had to rely on his memory of how to find the beach house. Alas, those recollections were proving as reliable as technology in the back arse of nowhere.

  That wasn’t the only thing bugging him. It seemed that big life events were never content being alone. They insisted on being accompanied by another, equally destabilising event. It wasn’t enough to be selling his childhood home, the one that had been in the family for, well, literally since before people in England could read and write. No, no, Michael Lorimier, have another life-altering drama to keep it company. How about finding out you have a teenage son? Oh, and by the way, his mother recently died and you’re the only next of kin. Sure, that’ll be abso-fucking-lutely fine. He supposed Sam could help sell the house, if they could ever bloody find it.

  Michael checked his wristwatch, a twenty-first birthday gift from his mother many years ago. Actually, the watch was a family heirloom, being his father’s before him and his grandfather’s before that. It had a champagne face, bearing the marks of several lifetimes. Its black crocodile skin strap was fraying at the edges, showing through the rough brown of the raw leather beneath. It had the comfort of old things; the way they had been slowly worn into the groove of the world until they felt an inseparable and natural part of it. Only in this instance, it was part of Michael. He was anything but sentimental, especially when it came to

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Dad, but the watch, well, Mum gave it to him. It was her way of tethering him to something of his family apart from her, he guessed.

  It was approaching mid-day. They were late. Nush, the estate agent, would have been waiting for them for more than an hour. Michael definitely didn't have time for the small flutter in his stomach at the thought of seeing her again. Though, if it wasn’t for selling the house, she might not be pleased to see him.

  Covering his eyes, he squinted into the bright afternoon. The road displayed no signs, at least none that he could read, or rather remember. Had it been that long? All the fields looked the same as each other, edged with hawthorn hedges and peppered with large old trees heavy with the deep green foliage of late summer. They stood in the middle of guardians frozen under the midday sun, waiting for moonlight to free them from their slumber. His father would have been horrified at his ignorance as to their species.

  Seagulls bickering in the distance caught his attention. He followed the direction of their tuneless squeals and caught sight of three pairs of wings, floating ungainly on the ghost of a thermal updraft. With nothing else to go on, Michael took a leap of faith that the gulls were hovering over the coast. At least, the car was facing the right direction. The gulls were to their left. If that was the coast, it must be east, which meant they’d gotten turned around and were facing south, which was the direction they’d come from. That didn’t matter. If they could find the shore, he’d be able to find the beach house, or whatever was left of it.

  He got back in the car, and they drove saying nothing. The hedges grew more ragged, and their thin outgrowths whipped at the black paintwork of the Merc. Michael had used up all his small talk on the drive out of London, much of which was a rerun of the awkward day before when he’d officially become guardian to Sam, a son he’d been blissfully unaware off until two weeks ago. The intervening time had been filled with equal measures of shock and paperwork, calls to lawyers, a genetic test, and sleepless nights which scraped away the days until yesterday arrived and there Sam was, delivered to the door of his Nottinghill muse by a social worker.

  What do you say to a fifteen-year-old whose mother just died? Michael certainly didn’t have a bloody clue. Christ! He didn’t know what to say to a fifteen-year-old with a mother. Instead, he fiddled with the on-board computer’s dial, trying to find a radio station, a streaming service, a fucking signal from a passing alien spacecraft, anything to fill the silence. But that god of network coverage hadn’t finished messing with him and so the silence yawned on for fifteen endless minutes until finally a left turn appeared out of a hedgerow, and, miraculously, he knew where they were.

  Up on the hill to their right, the Tunstall farm sat back from the road, watching over the surrounding farmland. This road was even more of a bumpkin track than the others they’d endured. Riven with potholes, it was more dry, hard earth than asphalt. Then he saw the enormous conker tree, laden with spikey green fruit, and one low hanging bough parallel to the road. The memory came back, as if a box of childhood snapshots had been organised into a deck of cards, and the dealer had just produced one out of thin air.

  They used to throw sticks up into the tree come October half-term, knocking down conkers, and filling a plastic bag with their hoard. Back at the beach house, they’d thread the best of the conkers with string to carry off back to boarding school. The comfort of the memory made Michael shift uncomfortably in his seat.

  At last, up ahead, was the red telephone box, faded pink by sunshine and time, its glass fogged with grime and mould. Beyond that was the final reveal, but the car never made it.

  Michael was about to say, ‘We’re here,’ when a rumbling behemoth lurched through a gap in a hedge, eclipsing the entire narrow road. It towered over them, blocking out the world, long threshing teeth ready to gnash the car in half. Michael swore reflexively and swerved, but there was nowhere to go.