The sun is warm. Facing south, on the north pavement of a wide suburban street, the light is blinding as it reflects from the just-unseen sea, probably less than a mile away. The street is quiet and empty, no people walking, no cars driving past. I’m not sure how I got here, wherever ‘here’ is. There is a bus stop where I stand, a precast concrete pole, hexagonal in section, bearing at its top a square enamelled metal flag that says ‘SOUTHDOWN REQUEST STOP’, set out in three lines of equal length. I seem to have been here a little while; the body is cooling now after the exertion of walking from wherever I came.

The sun is warm and I am sleepy. I turn slowly to clear my head, and to try and work out where I am, where this quiet street, stretching almost to either horizon, might be. Familiar, but still can’t place it exactly; most likely Sussex, could be Littlehampton or Worthing, Upper Portslade or Saltdean, maybe Seaford. The houses are semi-detached, built probably in the nineteen-thirties, some rendered and painted white, some in brick, most with curved bay windows, all with shallow-pitched hipped tile roofs. Their clean lines of their architecture and the endless street impart a sense of calmness and spaciousness to the mind, the repetition of roofline and window a mantra. Above and behind the roofs rise smooth green hills; they, like the street, appear empty of life, but a sense of ancient presence flows from them like a cool breeze.

The sun is warm and my mind is slowing. Waiting for a bus, I suppose, but the familiar apple-green-and-cream is nowhere to be seen, nor can the subdued clatter of a Leyland diesel engine be heard approaching. Must be a Sunday, so quiet; can’t remember the times of the Sunday buses. But it doesn’t matter; a blanket of calm is descending as I stand in the sun, baking in the light pouring from sky and sea and reflecting from the windows and white walls behind. The sweat is drying on my brow; I can feel the skin contracting and if I raise fingers to my forehead there is a thin crust of exuded salts. My body is giving off a hot, tight odour, not unpleasant, mummifying in the hot air, becoming dry and papery, concentrating the essence.

The sun is warm and I feel tired, as if I don’t want to go any further; but this quiet, empty place is fine to rest for the moment. It occurs to me that the last Southdown bus ran many years ago, when I was still young. How old am I, exactly; how long on this earth, in this place? I close my eyes and try to recall. The sunlight renders eyelids translucent and the hot orange-red light saturates sight, returning me to remembered days laying on warm grass. Memory slips backwards, further and further: staring into Sophie’s eyes, held oh-so-willing captive in her heartbreaking beauty; being hypnotised by the sway of Elizabeth’s hips as she walks in front of me; Yvonne smiling at me in the pub as I try to pluck up the courage to talk to her; picnics with Mum on Crowborough Common; Sara aged five running, crying, along the aisle of the church where Michael was married; and near the beginning, a grainy image (as if from a decomposing negative) of trees in the garden at Beauvaris waving in the wind as I gaze up from my pram.

The sun is warm, still, although the light is golden now as it slopes in from a shallow angle. Sleep must have stolen over me, in the train of reverie, as I stood here waiting for the bus that never appeared. Out of the corner of my eye I catch flashes of movement, so quick as to make me wonder whether imagination is creating them; subliminal blurs that might be figures or vehicles or passing lives. My own life appears no longer to be passing; it is hanging in stasis, like that weightless moment we all have as a child, as the swing reaches the furthest point of its trajectory and we hang, for a tiny eternity, before rushing back to the beginning of the arc.

The sun is red, up here at the apogee of this arc, and I don’t seem to be aware of temperature, looking down on the smooth chalk hills behind Brighton. The street I where I was standing is no longer there, no Upper Portslade or Hangleton or Mile Oak spreading over the slopes of the Downs, and the coastline is at least a mile further out than I remember. The town is just a village now, fishing boats dotted around a small circular bay. I seem to descend, slowly at first, and even that small habitation is replaced by the trees growing on the lower slopes of the Downs. On the ridge, burial mounds stand white and tall, free of the vegetation of three thousand years. Wood smoke drifts from settlements below the crest. I sink to the sweet turf; subsumed in this landscape where I was born. I am not I any more, just an atom, a part of the whole; no pain, no desire, just joy at being home.

In my place, at last.