I looked to Ayamin, she was loosening the straps on her backpack.

The side door of the van slid open, in the seat opposite us was a guy wearing a green shirt with a white clover on it. An unlit joint dangled in his mouth.

‘They’ve got the road dust on them,’ he said, then lit the joint.

I glanced at Ayamin and rolled my eyes slightly, Are we sure we want to get into this van?

She shrugged, it’s a ride I guess.

We climbed in and went for the back seat. While the outside had been a tapestry of colours the inside seemed stripped bare of everything – including the seat headrests.

‘If you’d caught me a week earlier,’ the guy driving yelled, ‘You’d have had the greatest seat in the history of seats, but we had to sell everything to pay for gas.’

We took off onto the road with a jerk. The driver picked up his phone and tapped at it. Music began pumping from a speaker at the front of the van.

‘Whose van?’ I yelled over the music.

The driver spun in his seat, clutching the wheel but not facing the road, ‘It’s mine. I’m Dean, from the Netherlands.’ He pointed to the woman that sat in the front seat, ‘That’s Mila – I picked her up at a nightclub in France, and in the back with you is Conor from Ireland. He doesn’t talk much. But when he does he says a lot.’

Conor nodded his head to the beat.

‘And how about you?’ Mila said, ‘Where have you come from?’

‘England,’ I yelled, ‘But we’ve just come from Hungary.’

‘Ahh, I dig that,’ Dean yelled, ‘I’m trying to see as much of the world as possible, as fast as possible,’ he turned his attention back to the road, narrowly avoiding a collision with a freight truck.

Dean drove like a madman for the next two hours, yelling his philosophies on life back to us as he went.

In the afternoon, when clouds started to appear on the horizon, he swerved into a gas station.

‘Caca!’ He yelled, ‘Caca!!’ Then wrenched on the handbrake and dived for the nearest petrol pump.

‘What’s Caca?’ Ayamin said.

Mila was halfway through the passenger’s door.

‘It’s French for poop, and I wish I never taught it to him,’ she gestured to the gas station, ‘Basically, we have until the car’s finished filling to go to the bathroom, stretch our legs, and buy something. If we’re not in the car by that point he swears he’ll drive off without us.’

My eyes met Ayamin’s, we both grinned and dove for the door.

Outside the van, I stretched my legs and walked into the petrol station. We couldn’t afford to buy anything. But I liked looking. I imagined what I’d be able to buy when we got to England.

I knew that chips would be near the top of the list – good old impractical, hardly filling, chips. I could just about taste the crunch as I wandered the two aisles of the petrol station.

A television screen in the corner of the station caught my eye. Like the store itself, it was small, rectangular and low quality. But sitting there on the screen with tears dripping down her face, was Donna, the Red Cross woman.

I felt like I’d been slapped, and it only got worse when the television show host appeared on screen again, accompanied by two photos of me. There was a big red WANTED written at the bottom of the screen. The host was interviewing a police officer.

Why do they care? I wondered as my mouth hung open, there are millions of people in Europe. Why do I make the news?

They switched back to Donna. She was crying. The title they’d given her was ‘Former Red Cross Team Leader.’

Former.

I glanced at the cashier, he was busy helping Dean, Mila was flicking through a magazine rack, Conor was outside smoking something illegal, and Ayamin: she was… in the toilet.

I breathed out. Glanced up at the T.V screen. They’d put up a security camera picture of me in the bank. I crossed my fingers. Mila had given up on the magazines… she was turning around. She saw the T.V, and let out a gasp.

‘Dean, look at that!’