It was made of breeze blocks. They were waterlogged to grey. They faded evenly as my eyes moved up them. There were dents in the concrete, from gunshots, thrown rocks maybe.

High up on one side, it looked like a couple of blocks were missing. I tried to judge from the hole how thick the wall was. But nothing. It looked like it might be hollow. Something about the whole thing looked cheaply built, quickly built.

But here it was. The thing we’d made with our own hands. It was huge. It felt like it stretched on for ever, its edges tapering into the mist. Weren’t there meant to be roads? A bridge? A gate? Anything. I thought of the stories we’d heard – the tent villages, the soldiers who shot. But there were no signs of any of that.

I couldn’t understand. The gangs, at least – the smugglers had driven truckloads of people away. I’d seen that with my own eyes. I’d seen them drive off in old coaches. Coaches with cracked windows and luggage holds with missing doors. The coaches had come back time and time again. People had paid to go.

I walked slowly along the edge of the water. I nudged my foot at the silt as if I’d find something underneath. And then it came in drips. Drips of cold along the back of my neck.

The ditches a few miles back. The ditches with their mess and smell. The rags, the suitcase. The rags were clothes. They’d been bodies. The people who’d tried to leave, who’d tried to get across. The people who’d been told there’d be jobs where they were going. Were the ditches where they’d ended up?

My stomach, the muscles of it, folded in half. I started to retch, but there was nothing inside me that could possibly come out. I started to see their faces, faces that pressed against glass, mouths that made the shape of goodbye. It was all I could see.

My headache started to feel like someone unknotting my brain. On the high enough ground in front of the river I lay down in the half-shade of a huge, tangled digger tyre. The sun felt like a hand pressing down on me. My legs folded underneath me, the way an animal’s legs buckle to sit. I put down the tarp and spread my body flat to even out the weight. I was so thirsty it became a different feeling altogether. There was water everywhere, but it was thick with mud.

As I lay there, I held the pass that Kole had said had got him across, got him into London. The lamination caught the light and I saw parts of my face in the reflection, then behind it, sharing the space, the man from the photo. He must have been over fifty, he was black, he had a shaven head.

‘Do I look like you?’ I think I said, out loud again maybe, because I almost laughed.

And that was when I must have passed out. It happened gently. Because I remember thinking: it does feel like a pass, one hand passing me to another, passing me on, passing me back and forth, passing me out.

I looked at the sun just before that happened. Middle of the sky. Hotter than anything. It must have been just before midday when the world disappeared.