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“But you’re in care,” Xavier said bluntly.

“It doesn’t mean I don’t have a mother,” I said. “Or a father. But the thing is that I know where my mum is, and so does Sophie, and if she’s not in Werton then that’s where she’d be. It’s the only place.”

“Where is she?” Olivia asked, far more encouraging than her brother.

“In Birmingham. I can be there in a few hours. Five tops. It’s a bus and a train and then a walk. Only…” Pretty much everywhere can be reached from everywhere else with a bus and a train and a walk. Maybe a boat too…But there aren’t many places where it costs as much as in the UK. “Only, I have a money problem.”

“The problem is he doesn’t have any,” Xavier said.

“I do so!” I fished in my pocket. “Five, six, seven, fifty—”

“Eight pounds isn’t going to get you there.” Xavier shook his head. “Eighty maybe.”

“He’s a kid, Xavier!”

“That doesn’t mean I should lie to him,” Xavier answered his sister.

“It does mean the fare will be cheaper though.” She pulled one of those faces that sisters pull at brothers and nobody else is meant to see.

“I’ll give you the money, Red.” Grandma Josephine opened her handbag.

“No!” I put my hand out.

“This is a serious business, yoot.” She turned her shoulder on me. “Old magics. Strong magics. Gotta see it through now.”

And so, with a pocketful of twenty-pound notes from a lady I’d only met the night before—undoubtedly the bulk of her latest pension payment—I set off in search of my sister in the last place we had anything important in common.

Xavier advised me not to do anything stupid and pressed a book on me “for the journey.” Olivia offered to come with me, but I could tell she had somewhere else to be, and this felt like a quest I had to do by myself. Literally that, a quest right out of Lord of the Rings, and not something I should have a babysitter accompany me on. Grandma Josephine told me to keep my eyes open, and not just for danger. Not even just for Sophie.

“The answer to most every question is out there staring us in the face. It’s seeing it that’s the hard part. And keeping your eyes open—and your mind—well, that’s the first step.”

I rattled around on a bus, stopping at every other corner and taking longer to get to Swindon than the train would take to cover the vastly greater distance to Birmingham. Emerging from the warren of New Street station, with its huge animatronic bull staring down arrivals, I consulted my phone for the next move. My mother used to tell me that when she was a kid hardly anyone had even heard of the internet. If you arrived in a strange city, you’d have to invest in a book called an “A to Z” with a high-resolution map of the place spread over its pages. Somehow, I think they were closer to the witch in her cottage with candles and handwoven clothes than they were to us. The internet feels like it’s a greater step change than flight or cars or even television…But maybe that’s just the failure of my imagination.

I’d been trying not to think about it on the train. I focused myself on the “why”—why I’d come, on Sophie, finding her, bringing her back, and if not that, if she said no, then at least bringing back an answer and some peace of mind. The image of Al Gar with Sophie’s head band around his neck kept returning to me, warring with the conviction that had brought me here, the idea that Sophie must have returned to this lodestone of our past. All of which had allowed me to push to the periphery the idea of seeing my mother again.

Out in the dying sunshine of early evening, with the roar of traffic and the stink of diesel, the truth of my destination hit hard and fast. It’d been two years since I had last seen my mum. I know, partly because I read, and partly because it just makes sense, that two years aren’t a big deal to someone in their thirties or forties. Not nothing, but the sort of time that can get behind you when you’re not paying attention and suddenly you’re sitting down with Jim saying, “Jesus, it can’t really have been two years, can it?” But to me those two years were like one of those voyages around the world in the days of sailing ships and scurvy and being lost at sea. I was coming back as changed as the bearded, sunburned captain who lost half his bodyweight and discovered potatoes or some shit. I had traveled, learned, grown, and one short train trip had brought me back to the start and woken that little boy, opened his wounds, hauled the monsters out from under the bed. All that and I hadn’t even met her yet.

I didn’t have the money for a taxi, and local buses can be a mystery even to locals, so I set off on foot. Saint Rose’s was one of six psychiatric hospitals in the Apriori Group, according to its website, and was “handy” for the rail connection to London. “Handy” meant “a little under two miles,” which I walked in half an hour, managing to take my eyes off my phone map often enough to avoid getting hit by a car for a second day in a row.

I actually walked right past the hospital, only realizing when another consult of my phone registered the fact. It looked more like a motel than the sort of hospital my limited experience had combined with what TV and film served up. But I suppose it wasn’t the kind of place that had to deal with cancer and broken bones and rare viral diseases—just the vastly more complex and less accessible contents of people’s minds.

The sign was discreet and made no mention of being a psychiatric institution. It was the type of sign designed to be overlooked, and it had worked on me.

My heart started to pound as I walked through the gates and across the car park to the foyer. Emotions surged through me, chasing each other’s tails, too many, too complex, too mixed and mired in memory to pick apart. I worried what she would see when she looked at me. What I would see looking back. All her different selves queued at my shoulders, following me toward the sliding doors. We’re all a multitude inside, but when we break, sometimes instead of the mix, the consensus of our many selves, we wear one self or the other, changing between them to suit our need or our pain or simply because the wind changed direction.

They talk about people becoming unstable, but it’s not until you see it the way it was in our mother that the word takes on proper meaning. She flickered between different Caroline Archers like a TV whose aerial could no longer stay with one channel but jumped from one to the next, sometimes sticking for a while, but always temporary, always burdened with uncertainty.

It’s a kind of torture. If she’d been the worst of them, all the time, it would have been easier than the switching, seeing our mum, the real one, the true one surface among the others like a drowning woman snatching a precious breath. She drew us in during those times, lowering our guard, offering the cruelty of hope.

“Can I help you?”

I realized that I’d come to a halt at the reception desk.

“I…uh…I need to see my mum. Caroline Archer.” I saw the woman’s frown deepen. “She’s one of the patients.”

“Ah.” A glance at the screen before her, hidden from me by the countertop. “Do you have a visit booked?”

“I don’t…but she’s my mum, and I really need to see her.”