It was still there, hidden under a tarpaulin behind the big shed in Nan’s sprawling backyard. I dragged off the tarp and pockets of it got caught on metal, tearing clean lines through the plastic weave. By the time I’d pulled it away, the tarp was in long blue strips on the ground – shed vestments.

The caravan seemed to loom and wobble before me, almost terrifying in its familiarity – the battered tin of its sides, the rusted tow hook, silver gaffer tape over the broken windows perished and crumbling into glitter on the kikuyu. The paintwork was still yellow but had faded in patches over the years.

The tyres were flat, snails with rubber heads and tails squeezing out on either side of the whorls of the rims. They’d have to be replaced if I were to have any chance of towing it up to Elsewhere—

Stop. Never going to happen.

I took a step closer and skipped a heartbeat when something scaly rustled in the grass at my feet. A blue tongue. You want the blue tongues, Nan used to say. If you’ve got them in your garden, it means you’ve got no snakes. I’d thought it was some kind of quantum fact: one cannot exist in the same dimension as the other. This was a male, big-headed and grumpy. He gave me a languorous hiss and waddled away.

Face up against the cracked, taped window, I peered in. The caravan was as yellow inside as out, now: cobwebbed and stained – the kind of filth that can only come from years of mouldering behind a shed, ignored and wilfully forgotten. I bundled up the tarp and tossed it into the shed, then headed back along the side driveway to the front of the house. I prised a key out of a split at the bottom of the timber window frame. Only us Buttons knew about that key…

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