We found a cheap bus that was travelling through the night and climbed aboard. Both of us gazed around as we moved up the aisle, expecting someone to yell at us that we were refugees and that we had to get off.

But the bus was silent. Some people breathed deep as they prepared to sleep. Others were texting with a quick tap-tap on their screens.

We took our seats near the back of the bus and felt the driver crunch the bus into gear.

With a jerk and a slight rumble, we left Budapest behind. I watched the city lights twinkle until they disappeared behind a hill. Ayamin and I looked at each other, she smiled. It was a hopeful smile, but also a tired smile.

****

The doors to our bus opened in Vienna just as the morning sun began to show. Thirty of us stepped off and rubbed the sleep from our eyes. Ayamin and I hadn’t got much. We’d spent most of the trip talking about the next leg of our journey which would take us through Italy and then France. After that we talked about England and school and Syria and then she tried to convince me that Two Hearts in the French Night was the best book ever by reading sentences from it.

Samantha sat on the steps of the church waiting. The lights of Briancon were dark to save electricity – she had only the moon to find Rudy.

‘See?’ She’d said, ‘It’s like poetry – but without fancy words.’

As the bus drove off I hoisted the pack onto my shoulders, it seemed lighter than when I’d started carrying it, but maybe I’d got used to it. Ayamin did star jumps to get blood back into her arms and legs.

‘What do you want to do first?’ I asked.

‘I want to do breakfast,’ she said, ‘And a proper breakfast – not some half-eaten McDonalds.’

‘How about that?’ I asked, pointing in the direction of a shop that had a massive pancake sign sitting on top of it.

‘Oh yeah!’

****

After exploiting the pancake house’s ‘all you can eat’ policy we stumbled out of the shop clutching at our bellies.

I counted our money, we had about fifteen pounds left. Not quite enough for another bus ride.

We passed old castles, churches, and sleek modern mansions as we walked through Vienna. Stylish young people moved quickly through the city streets dressed in crisp yellows and blacks and whites and reds.

Ayamin sat on the bag while I held out my thumb at the edge of a busy south-bound motorway. We’d been waiting about half an hour when I spotted a sky-blue van with a field of flowers painted on it weaving through the traffic.

As the van got closer, I could hear hippy-music blasting from it, and then the scream of its engine.

The van pulled into the lane closest to us and skidded to a stop in front of me. The window opened. There was a young woman in the passenger’s seat with an easy smile, next to her a wild-haired, bare-chested guy in his twenties yelled at us in what was probably Austrian.

I shook my head, ‘English?’

His face brightened, ‘Ah… English, very good, where are you critters headed?’

‘England.’

‘Ahh of course. We’re going to Italy if you want a ride?’