He pushed his head out again, looking all around as the sinkhole tried to trick him with its echo, its walls ringing too. He remembered now. He’d been holding his phone, his elbow resting on the open window, the trees blipping by as he shouted at his father.
He worried it would stop ringing, that he would never find it, and then he saw the phone some way below him among the dark stones, daylight catching on its screen.
Clicking open the door, he heard the car’s suspension bushes twang and the tyres straining, wanting to move, and he whispered over and over that he was lighter than air. But the scree swallowed his foot like murky water, and then sections below him sheared off, sending the phone clattering deeper into the hole, the ringtone mewling as it fell.
When the Land Rover suddenly lurched and started to slide, he yanked the door shut and turned quickly, clasping his right arm round the back of the driver’s seat, and his left one across his father’s chest, to try and keep him safe.