Why hadn’t he brought the stupid phone? Even if there’d been no reception, he could’ve used the light as a makeshift torch. It was too dark to read the map, too dark to see the road. There were no houses in the distance with warm, welcoming lights to guide him. There was no kindly old lady waiting for a young man lost on the moors to come in and sit by the fire, while she prepared a steaming bowl of chicken soup or porridge.
The bus dropped him off in Welmer in the late afternoon. It wasn’t a bad place – it had a high street with older-looking brick buildings and pubs with names like The Bait Shop and The Fish Bowl. The names of the beers were funny, too. Peter wished he’d brought his camera to take pictures of the signs – Hamms, Pabst, Schmidt. Leinenkugel, now that was a random name. But who would he have shown them to? Dad wouldn’t laugh. Even before, in the good old days, Dad wouldn’t have laughed – only Mum.
He went to the supermarket and asked for Duane, just like Ken had told him to.
‘What?’ The chubby girl at the check-out twitched her head slightly, as if he were speaking a foreign language.
‘Duane,’ Peter said, trying to add a bit of a twang.
‘Oh, Duane,’ the girl said. ‘He don’t own this place no more.’ She twiddled her varnished, inch-long nails on the black plastic conveyer belt. There was a customer behind him and a queue building up.
‘Is there a taxi rank in the village?’ It was worth a try.
‘A what?’
So, instead of getting a lift, he walked to County DD and stuck out his thumb. After all, the cabin was only a few miles from town, according to Ken. It would be no time at all before some kind, curious soul from Welmer offered him a lift, drove him along the darkening country roads, dropped him off at the top of the cabin’s driveway with a wave or a smile.
He hiked for a mile – no one. Another mile, and he got passed by a battered lorry full of kids, who only slowed down long enough to throw an empty lager can at him. By the third mile the sun had set.
With the darkness came exhaustion. It had been a long day. It’d been hours since he’d had anything proper to eat. Now, struggling along the side of the road, his bag of food and clothing getting heavier and heavier, having no idea how much further he had to walk, he wanted nothing more than to just lie down in the ditch and go to sleep.
He looked up at the starry sky.
‘Keep going.’ Mum’s voice in his head. Great, now she was talking to him. ‘You never know what’s around the next bend.’