My father put me out on my eighteenth birthday after taking the $3,000 I had saved since I was fifteen. I still had three months of school left. Nine nights later my car gave out and I went behind a restaurant looking for food. A man in a suit said, “I’ve been looking for you.”

For the next nine days that sedan was my bedroom, my wardrobe, my dining room and the only private space I had on earth.

Four doors. One of which does not lock, which matters more than I can explain.

I kept going to school for all nine of them.

That sounds brave and it was not. It was simply considerably easier than explaining anything to anybody, including to four teachers who would have done something about it.

I showered in the school locker room before it got light, which you can do if you are through the side gate by about four minutes past six and out again before the first staff car.

Nine mornings. Nobody ever saw me. I wore the same jeans four days running and then four more.

And I joked with people in a corridor who had no idea at all where I had slept.

Four of them are good friends. One of them asked me, twice, in that fortnight, whether everything was all right at home.

And I said yes, both times, inside about two seconds, which I want in here because of what the whole of this turns out to be about.

Food stopped being food and became arithmetic inside about two days.

I ate about half my school lunch and kept the rest in a bag in the footwell for the evening.

After school I drove about and found quiet streets and the far end of car parks, where nobody looks twice at an old sedan with somebody asleep in the back of it.

Four different places over nine nights, because you learn inside about two days not to use the same one.

By the ninth day the tank was nearly gone and I had four dollars.

And then, on a hill, the car simply stopped.

I got it about four hundred yards, on the starter motor, to the back of a row of restaurants.

I left it between the bins and the delivery bays, in the space where nobody parks, and I sat behind that wheel for about an hour with the keys in my hand.

And then, at about ten o’clock, hunger finally got bigger than being ashamed.

That takes nine days. I would like somebody to know that it takes nine days, because I would have told you four weeks earlier that it would take about two.

PART 4