I Was Given ONE RULE at Camping Rozafa. I Think Something Is Rearranging the Campsite.

The first thing I did at Camping Rozafa was chalk a tyre. Not with real chalk, I'd left that at home on purpose. A white Fiat sat half on the verge by the gate with its nose over the line, and my hand actually twitched toward my back pocket. Eighteen years of the same six streets does that. I noted the plate, noted the time on my watch, five forty, and then made myself stop. Nobody was going to fine anybody here.

I hadn't taken a real holiday in years. Elira's family goes away together every September, forty cousins and me, and I love them, I do, but by the third day I've usually counted every plate on the table and every chair in the courtyard, and my head is tired. This year I said I wanted the lake. Quiet, water, nothing to organise. I thought someone would argue, her brother Genti at least. Nobody did. Elira just squeezed my arm and said the cousins would survive without my opinions on parking. She's with them now, up the coast, and I'd promised to ring her tomorrow.

The camp sat between the road and Lake Skadar, and you could smell it before you saw it. Diesel from a generator somewhere behind the office, woodsmoke, and under that the sweet rot of mulberries dropped on the ground. The trees were big and old and the fruit was staining the gravel purple. Past them the lake was flat and brown, with mist lying on it in a thin layer that didn't move. The frogs in the reeds were loud. Really loud. I stood at the gate with my rucksack and my folded tent and listened to them argue.

The office was a hut with a tin roof and a hand-painted sign. The woman inside was writing in a ledger and didn't look up until she'd finished the line. Short grey-streaked hair, apron, rubber boots, forearms like a man who unloads lorries. She looked about fifty-eight.

"Hoxha?" she said. "I'm Vjollca. I own the place. Passport."

I gave it to her. She copied my name into the ledger, slowly, then a second book, a guestbook, with a biro on a string. I signed where she pointed.

"How many nights?"

"A week. Maybe more."

"Maybe more is fine. We're empty." She said it cheerfully. She took my cash, counted it twice, and put it in a biscuit tin. "Fourteen. Down by the water, near the fence. Quiet side. You wanted quiet."

"I did."

"Good." She came out from behind the desk and walked me to the door, and pointed with the pen. "One rule. Only one. Bathhouse is the block by the far corner, you can see it from here. You walk to it along the fence. Always along the fence. And after dark you never cut across the pitches. Not for a shortcut, not if you're desperate."

"Why?"

She laughed, short. "Tree roots. Guy ropes. Somebody breaks an ankle, I have to drive him to Shkodër. Fence, please."

"Along the fence," I said.

"Good man."

I liked that, honestly. A rule, stated once, no exceptions. Most people want to explain themselves for ten minutes and end up contradicting it.

The pitches ran down toward the water in loose rows under the plane trees. Each one had a wooden stake at the front, knee high, with a number painted in white. The paint was old and flaking. I walked down the row slowly. Ten. Eleven. Somebody's camper van at nine, shutters closed, no sign of anyone. Then twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, which was mine. Grass, a bit uneven, a mulberry stump at the back. I stood at the stake for a moment. Then I did what I always do. I lined the tent up with it.

I know how that sounds. But a numbered space is a numbered space, and the tent belonged inside the edges of it, so I squared the groundsheet to the stake and put the door toward the water, and I kept the pegs inside what I judged the pitch's boundary. Nobody was going to check. It still had to be right. The tent was green nylon, old, and it went up in ten minutes. I threw the sleeping bag in, set my torch by the pillow end, put the paperback next to it face down, folded my fleece. Everything where I could reach it in the dark.

Then I wanted a wash. Vjollca had pointed the bathhouse out, and I could see it from the tent, a breezeblock box painted cream a long time ago, with one strip light over the door. It was coming on early in the dusk and it flickered, a stutter and a buzz, on and off, on and off. I set off along the fence with my hand out, trailing my fingers on the wire because it was there. The wire was cold and slightly wet. Mist had crept in off the lake and taken the far end of the campsite, so the mulberries were just dark shapes, and somewhere behind me the generator changed pitch and dropped away.

The bathhouse smelled of bleach and damp concrete. Two showers, one working. A mirror so scratched I could only see half of my face, and half was enough, grey in the hair, the same tired eyes. I washed my face and my neck. The light over the sink went out for a second and came back. I dried my hands on my trousers because there was no towel.

I came out and stood under the strip light in the cooling air. Then, because I'm me, I turned to the fence and paced it back. Not fast. Heel to toe, normal steps, one hand on the wire. I wasn't testing anything. I just wanted to know, the way you want to know how long a street is.

The frogs got louder as I walked. The mist moved around my ankles. I passed nine, the camper van still shuttered, then twelve, thirteen.

Forty-one steps, and I was standing at fourteen.

I told myself I'd remember it. Forty-one. It seemed like a good number to know.

The second day was easy. I slept until seven, which I hadn't done in years, and spent the morning in a folding chair by the water with the paperback open on my knee. I rang Elira from the gate, where the signal was best. She was on a beach with a cousin's toddler and had to shout. Everybody said hello, and Genti had already had an argument about the barbecue. I told her it was quiet. She said good. I didn't tell her I'd counted my steps to the bathhouse.

That night I went again, a bit after nine, with the torch in my anorak pocket. The strip light was stuttering over the door. From the tent I could see it plain, and a straight line across the pitches would've saved me half the walk. I've never in my life parked across a bay line, though, and Vjollca had said it once, clearly. I kept to the fence, hand on the wire.

The bathhouse was the same. Bleach, one shower working, half a face in the mirror. I brushed my teeth and went out.

Back along the fence, heel to toe. The frogs were even louder than the night before. I passed the camper van at nine, still shuttered, no light in it. Twelve. Thirteen. I looked for fourteen and there was only grass and then the next stake, a little further on, with my tent behind it.

Forty-four.

I stood there a bit. Then I walked back to the bathhouse, put my hand flat on the cold door frame, and did it again. Same pace, same hand on the wire. Forty-four. I did it a third time, only I stopped and turned back at the van, because I didn't want to know a third answer.

The stake said fifteen. The white paint was flaking the way it had on the one I'd squared my groundsheet to, and I crouched and picked at it with my thumbnail. It didn't come away from anything. It had been there a long time.

I hadn't moved the tent. I'd have known. I'd lined it up to the edges of that pitch with pegs inside the boundary, and it sat there now with the door toward the water, groundsheet square to the stake it was sitting behind. Same green nylon, same slack in the left guy line. It hadn't moved. The numbers around it had.

I unzipped the door and put the torch in. Sleeping bag. Torch spot at the pillow end, which was empty because I was holding the torch. The paperback face down. The fleece folded in thirds. All of it exactly as I'd left it.

That bothered me more than if it had been thrown about. If somebody had been in there I could have been angry at somebody. I knelt with my head in the door for a while, smelling nylon and my own socks, and the tent gave me nothing back.

I switched the torch off and zipped the door and went round the back, to the water side, where the ground slopes down to the reeds. The mist was lower there. Past the fence, along the shore, were the villas somebody had started and never finished, three of them, concrete frames with no glass. Rebar stuck up from the roofs, grey and rusted, bent in different directions. Beyond them the lake was flat and brown-black and I could just see the pale line where the reeds began.

Something was in the shallows out there.

I heard it before I saw it. A slow splash, then a gap, then another one. Whatever it was lifted each foot clear of the water and set it down again. It was tall, or the mist made it tall. It went along the edge of the reeds, past the second villa, and every time it stopped the frogs got louder.

I kept the torch off. My thumb was on the switch and I left it there. It stood, and I stood, and neither of us did anything. Then it moved again, wading, going away from me along the shore, and I let my breath out.

Here is what I decided, standing there in wet grass with my socks getting cold. The reeds were pulling the layout round me. It's an old lake, the ground shifts, stakes get pushed about, maybe somebody renumbered them in the season. And whatever was out in the shallows was doing it, stirring things up, dragging the whole camp a few yards each night. It didn't explain the forty-four. It didn't explain why my tent was where I'd left it and everything around it had slid. But I'd got it into a shape I could hold, and that was enough to walk back round to the door.

I took my boots off and lay down in the sleeping bag with my anorak still on. The frogs went on and on. Every so often the splashing would start again out past the villas and I'd stop breathing to hear it better, and then it would stop and I'd lie there counting nothing. Forty-one, forty-four. Around three I thought I heard someone walking the fence, unhurried, a hand running along the wire, and I didn't look.

I slept in bits. When it got light I was still in my anorak, and my hands were cold.

Fifty-three steps.

I said the number out loud at the stake, which I don't normally do. That morning I'd told myself I wouldn't count, and I'd counted anyway, all the way from the bathhouse door with my right hand on the wire.

The wire was the first thing. It sagged. Two nights running it had been tight enough to hum if I flicked it, and now it drooped between the posts so my fingers dropped through air and had to hunt for it again. The posts leaned. The gaps between them were wider than they should have been. I hadn't seen that in daylight. In daylight I'd walked up to the gate to ring Elira, got her voicemail, and left a message saying it was quiet. I'd come back down through the plane trees, and the ground between them had been leaf litter and one rusted bin.

There were pitches there now.

My torch found the first tent when I was still a good way off. Green nylon, the door facing the lake, pegged out square, with the flap tied back. It sat six feet from the fence. Behind it was another one, and another behind that, going back into the trees in rows I couldn't see the end of. Dozens. Every door was open and every one faced the water. Not one had a light on.

Nobody had said I couldn't look. I stayed on the path and crouched at the edge of the gravel, and the nearest door was close enough that I didn't need to step off.

Inside was a sleeping bag, unzipped halfway. A fleece folded in thirds. A paperback face down with its spine cracked open at page one hundred and twelve. A torch laid at an angle toward the pillow, switched off.

I looked at the torch in my own hand. Then I moved along the fence to the next tent and shone the light in. The same. The next one, the same. The fleece was folded in thirds, the fold on the left. The book was face down. I reached in and touched the fleece on the third one. It was cold and a little damp along the hem, where mine had dragged on the grass that morning. I took my hand back and wiped it on my trousers.

I'm not going to pretend I didn't know what I was looking at. Somebody had laid out my things, and they'd done it dozens of times, and they'd done it right. Nothing was out of place. If one of them had been a mess I think I could have worked with that.

I should have run. The gate was behind me, about two hundred yards of gravel, and the road past it. I know that now and I knew it then, crouched there with my knees cracking and the frogs going flat out in the reeds. My legs did nothing. Cutting across the pitches to the office was out anyway. She'd said it once and she'd said it clearly. And I've never in my life parked across a bay line.

So I got up. I put my hand back on the wire and walked the fence the way I'd been told to, past tent after tent with its mouth open toward the lake. I didn't count those steps. The stakes had numbers, and they went up as I went along. Fifteen was behind me by then, somewhere. Sixteen. The paint on every one was flaking in the same places.

Seventeen was mine. I knew it before the torch reached it. There was the slack in the left guy line, and the groundsheet square to the stake, and the pegs inside the boundary. The door was open. I hadn't left it open.

I took my boots off at the flap and set them together, toes out, and crawled in. My sleeping bag was where I'd left it. The book was face down with its spine cracked. I laid the torch by the pillow, angled the way I always do, and zipped the bag up to my chest.

It was only when I was lying there, with the nylon close over me and my breathing slowing, that I noticed how easy it had been. I hadn't argued with it. The stake said seventeen, the tent was pitched right, and so I lay down. The whole thing had felt like the most ordinary decision I'd made all week.

That frightened me more than the tents did. I lay there and let it.

The nylon over my face was bright green and warm, which meant the sun had been on it a while. Somewhere outside, a broom was scraping gravel. Long strokes, a pause, long strokes.

I lay there and worked out that I didn't remember getting up. I didn't remember the night either, not after the torch and the zip. My boots were by the flap, toes out, set together. I unzipped the door and looked at the stake.

Twenty-one.

The paint was flaking in the same places as the others. I sat in the doorway with my socks on the grass and didn't touch it. Then I went to find the broom.

Vjollca was down by the mulberries in her apron and rubber boots, pushing purple mush into a pile. She glanced up when my boots crunched and went back to it. She didn't say good morning, so I didn't either.

"The stakes," I said. "The numbers on them. Are they ever changed?"

"Changed how?"

"Renumbered. Moved. I was fourteen when I arrived. This morning I'm twenty-one."

She leaned on the broom and looked at me the way she'd looked at my passport. "You want a different pitch? I said you could have any of them. It's empty."

"I don't want a different pitch. I want to know why the numbers keep going up."

"Ah." She waved a hand, and a few mulberries rolled off the pile. "Guests get confused. Everybody does. It's the trees, they all look the same in the evening. Somebody walks off to the bathhouse, comes back, thinks they've come back to the wrong place. It's why I say the fence. Keep to the fence and you can't get lost in there." She nodded at the plane trees. "People do get lost in there."

It was a reasonable answer. It was exactly the kind I'd have given at a window, to a man holding a ticket. I heard myself say, "It isn't the trees. I didn't leave the fence."

"Then you're fine," she said, and started sweeping again.

I nearly let it go. But she stopped mid-stroke with her head tilted, and then she snapped her fingers.

"The Dutchman. Pieter. Two Septembers ago, no, wait, it was the one before the big rain, so yes, two." She was already walking toward the office, broom under her arm. "Tall, cycling shorts. He did nothing but complain about the walk to the bathhouse. Come, I'll show you. He wrote it down."

I followed her. I noticed I was keeping to the edge of the gravel, though there was nobody to see.

The office smelled of stale coffee and the diesel from the generator behind the wall. The ledger was on the desk where it had been the first day. The guestbook was beside it, with the biro hanging from its string. She pulled it toward her and leafed back through the pages with a wet thumb, past a lot of names I didn't know. Italian, German, one long line in what looked like Cyrillic. She stopped and turned it around for me.

The blue biro had gone the color of weak tea. The handwriting was upright and quick, with a hard stroke on the crossed t's.

Path to bathhouse too long. Will complain. Not leaving until tomorrow.

"That's him," Vjollca said. "Every evening he'd come in here and tell me it was too far. I said it's the same as it always was. He said it wasn't."

Under it, on the same page, there was another line in the same hand. It was smaller, though, pressed in tight against the ruled line above, as if the writer had been saving space.

nearly home

There was no date on it. I read it twice. The first line was annoyed, and the second one wasn't anything I could name.

"What's this mean?" I said. "Nearly home."

"He was Dutch, who knows." She shrugged. "Maybe he was talking about the Netherlands. I never asked."

"When did he leave?"

"One morning. I got up, and he was gone." She laughed, one short bark, the same one she'd used over the tree roots. "Four nights he hadn't paid. That's what I remember, honestly. Not even a goodbye."

"He left without his things?"

"He took what he took." She closed the guestbook and squared it against the edge of the desk. "His bicycle's still in the shed. Come."

She went out the back door and I went after her, past the generator, which was shuddering on its concrete pad, and along the side of the office. The shed was a lean-to of corrugated tin with a padlock hanging open on the hasp. She hauled the door and it screamed on its runner.

Inside were a rolled-up tarp, a stack of white plastic chairs, and two gas bottles. The bicycle was propped against the back wall. It was a touring bike, dark blue, with panniers still clipped to the rack. Both tyres were flat, right down to the rims. Moss had grown in the spokes of the front wheel, thick and green and fuzzy, and in the gap where the chain met the frame.

"Two years," Vjollca said. "I keep meaning to sell it."

I looked at the moss. It hadn't grown up from the floor. It was in the spokes, all the way round.

"Don't touch the brakes," she said cheerfully. "They'll come off in your hand."

I didn't say anything to Vjollca about leaving. She was still talking about the brakes when I walked off, and I let her.

It took me twenty minutes to strike the tent. I pulled the pegs one at a time and put them in their bag, rolled the groundsheet with the wet side in, and stuffed the sleeping bag on top of everything else. The paperback went in the side pocket, still open at page one hundred and twelve. I hadn't read past it since the first night. Then I stood by the stake with the rucksack on and looked at the bare rectangle of flattened grass where I'd been sleeping. It was a very neat rectangle.

The dirt track started behind the last row of pitches and ran along the back of the half-built villas toward the Shkodër road. It was mid-afternoon and warm, and the ruts were dry. I walked it at an ordinary pace with my thumbs under the shoulder straps. The rebar stuck up from the villa roofs, and someone had left a cement mixer in the first one with a bird's nest in the drum. I said out loud that it was two miles to the road, maybe less. Nobody was there to hear it.

The track bent left round the third villa. I'd expected that, since there was a low wall of breeze blocks there. It bent left again, and I kept walking, and the sun moved round to my other shoulder. Then I smelled rotten mulberries.

I was standing on gravel. The big trees were over me, the fruit squashed purple under my boots, and beside my left foot was a wooden stake with the paint still tacky. Twenty-six. The nearest stake to it had been flaking for years, but this one was new. I didn't touch it. I turned round and the track was behind me, dry and empty, and I walked it again, faster this time, and I'll skip what happened.

The reeds were the other way out. I'd never gone near them. The shore path ran below the villas where the ground dropped, and I went down it with the rucksack knocking against my spine. It was evening by then. The mist was coming up off the water and the frogs had started, all of them at once.

The first step into the reeds was fine. The second went in to my ankle. By the third I was in to the shin, and the mud was black and cold and had a smell like an opened drain. I pulled my foot out and it wouldn't come. I leaned on the other leg to get my weight over and that leg went down to the knee. The mud closed round it and held on with a steady pressure, tighter each time I moved.

I made a noise. I'm not proud of it.

I stopped moving, which took some doing. I got my hands behind me on the rucksack and let my weight go back and worked the left leg out a bit at a time. The boot came free with a long sucking sound and I nearly lost it. Then the other one. I crawled backward on my elbows up the bank until there was grass under my hands, and I lay there with my legs shaking so hard I couldn't stand.

When I could, I listened. Out past the reeds the water was flat and brown-black. The villas stood against the last of the light. I waited for the slow splashes with the gaps between them, the foot lifted clear and set down.

Nothing. The frogs, and the water lapping once against something, and that was all.

There had never been anything wading. I'd stood at the back of my tent that second night and watched it walk along the shore, and I had made a whole theory out of it, the thing that dragged the camp about. But the mud had just been mud. It had gripped me because I'd walked into it. It didn't want me. It wanted nothing. The lake was only a lake, and it was the thing behind me that was hungry.

I sat up. The mulberries were behind me and the office light was on. I could see the fence from where I sat, running down the slope in its long line, and I thought about what Vjollca had told me on the first day, stated once, with no exceptions. Always along the fence. I'd liked that about it. I'd taken it for a rule that kept me from harm.

But the fence went where it went. It took me from the bathhouse to the pitch, and every night the pitch had a different number. It hadn't kept me out of anything. It was the way they walked me, and I'd walked it three times a day with my hand on the wire, grateful for the instruction.

So the layout hadn't been moving around me. I'd had that backward too. A pitch had been cleared, and a stake put in, and a tent laid out with everything folded in thirds, and none of that was for the ground's benefit. It was room, made for one more. And a walk that had been stretched long enough for me to settle would be pulled in a bit at a time, toward whatever the place had picked. Pieter would have felt it. He'd have written it down.

I got up on my second try. My trousers were black to the thigh and already stiffening. I put the rucksack on again and went back up the bank to the fence, and I put my hand on the wire before I'd thought about it. It was cold and slightly wet, and it sagged under my fingers.

Stake twenty-six was where I'd left it, and it had its own patch of bare gravel. It looked like a good pitch. It was level and square to the trees, with the door side facing the water. I dropped the rucksack and stood over it.

Then I got the groundsheet out and unrolled it. I lined the edge up with the stake, pushed each peg in just inside the boundary, and tied off the left guy line with a little slack in it, the way I always did. The tent went up in ten minutes. It's an old tent and I know it well.

I put my boots outside the flap, toes out, together, and crawled in.

Fifty steps the next night. I counted them twice, and it was fifty both times.

The night after, forty-one, which was where I'd started. The stakes went the other way. Twenty-six was mine, and then the number on the end of my path was twenty-eight, and then twenty-nine. Bigger numbers, fewer steps. I'd like to say I saw it right away, but the first night I noticed the shorter walk, I was pleased. My feet hurt less. I thought, good, that's better. Then I heard myself thinking it and stopped on the gravel with the torch in my hand.

After that I quit telling myself it was the ground settling or the reeds. Nobody had been shortening that walk by accident.

Vjollca swept the mulberries every morning and nodded at me as I went by to wash. I nodded back. I didn't ask her anything. She had told me what she was going to tell me, and I'd already seen the bicycle.

On the seventh day I went up to the gate and rang Elira. I stood on the exact spot where the signal held, one foot on the cattle grid. She picked up on the fourth ring, and the noise came down the line before her voice did. Plates, a radio, a child crying about something, and Genti somewhere behind her saying the coals were fine, they were fine, nobody touch the coals. Elira laughed at him with her mouth away from the phone and then said, "Daniel? Can you hear that? They're impossible."

"I can hear it," I said.

"Is it still quiet?"

"Yes."

"Good. You sound tired. Are you sleeping?"

"I'm sleeping fine."

Somebody shouted her name and she said she had to go, and asked when I'd be back, and I said soon. She said the cousins kept asking where the parking expert was. I told her to tell them to leave the car by the wall. She was already gone, and the line was just the gate and the road and a lorry going past toward Shkodër. I stood there and wanted to be in that noise so badly my hands shook. Forty cousins and a fight about charcoal. I'd have put up with anything. I'd have let Genti park wherever he wanted.

The gate was open. It was always open, and I looked through it at the road. I didn't go. I had already walked that track twice, and I knew how it ended. I went back down along the fence with my hand on the wire.

Thirty-four steps on the eighth night. The tent stood where it stood, with the door open. I hadn't left it open. The bathhouse light was noticeably closer behind me, and I could hear it buzzing from my pitch without trying. I sat inside with my boots outside the flap and didn't read. Every so often I looked at the stakes on either side of mine and did the sums. Not many left.

On the ninth night the strip light died.

I was at the bathhouse door, hand on the frame, and it went from stuttering to nothing with a small tick. The dark that came down was total. No moon, mist on the lake, and even the generator seemed far off. The frogs were the only thing left. I stood there a while and then I put my right hand on the wire, because that was the rule, and I started to walk.

One. Two. I had the torch in my anorak and didn't get it out. I don't know why. It seemed like a waste to see anything.

Six. Seven. The wire was slack and wet under my fingers, and somewhere on my left I could feel the open pitches, the air different there, wider. Nine. Ten.

Eleven.

I stopped, because my hands were full.

I had the guestbook. Both hands held it flat against my stomach, and the cover was damp and soft at the corners. The biro on its string trailed down over my wrist, snapped off short at the office end. I had not gone to the office. The office was at the other side of the camp, behind the mulberries, and I could not remember one step of it. Just the wire, and counting, and then the book.

I got the torch out with my elbow and thumbed it on, and held it under my chin to read.

Pieter's pages were where Vjollca had shown me, the blue biro faded, his hard crossbars. Path to bathhouse too long. Will complain. Below that, small and squeezed against the line: nearly home. Below that, on the same page, there was another one.

nearly home.

Same words. Not Pieter's hand. The letters were round and looped where his were upright, with a long tail on the y that I put on every y, on every form I ever signed, on the back of Elira's birthday cards. I knew it before I let myself know it. I have looked at that hand for fifty-one years.

I hadn't written it. I would have remembered writing it.

The torch was steady in my fingers. That surprised me. I turned it off, and the dark came back in one piece, and I pressed the book against my chest with both arms. The wire was cold along my hip. On my left, the pitches waited. I couldn't see them and I didn't need to. I knew there were tents out there with the doors open, facing the water, and one of them was not empty and one of them was mine.

Eleven steps. I'd counted eleven from the door. Whatever came next was under ten.

I thought about Elira at the gate, saying impossible and meaning it kindly. I thought about the coals and the plates and forty people who all thought they knew better than me where to put a car. That was all I wanted. I wanted to go home and be told I was wrong.

Vjollca had said it once, and she'd said it clearly. Never cut across the pitches. Eighteen years of not parking over a line, nine days of walking where I was told, and here was where the walking ended. The fence would bring me to the light, or what was left of the light, and the light was a door.

I took my hand off the wire.

The gravel edge was under my boot, and then the grass.

I ran.

The grass was wet and uneven, and the first guy rope got me across the shin before I'd taken five strides. I went down on one hand, got up, and kept going. Vjollca had said tree roots and ropes, and she'd been right about that part. The only sound was my boots and my breath.

The tents came up out of the dark on both sides. I could tell they were there by the pale nylon and by the smell of it, damp and a bit sour, the same smell I'd been sleeping in for nine days. I put my thumb on the torch and the beam jumped around ahead of me. A door flap, open. Inside, a fleece folded in thirds. Another door, another fleece. They were closer together than pitches should be, so close I had to turn my shoulders to get between them.

I looked for stakes because I always look for stakes. Thirty-one, I thought. Then one with a three and something soft after it. The next had paint on it but no shape I could read. Then the numbers were only white smears at knee height, and I stopped trying.

My heel caught a peg and my ankle went sideways. I didn't stop for it.

Somewhere past the sixth or seventh tent I heard the breathing. It came from inside them, one after another as I passed, low and even. I told myself it was the frogs and it wasn't. I breathed in and the tent on my right breathed in. I breathed out and it did too. When I ran faster it kept up.

I held my breath to test it. All along the row, they held theirs.

Then I let mine go, and so did they.

I nearly dropped the guestbook there. I don't know why I was still carrying it. I had it clamped under my arm with the biro string flapping, and I kept running.

The tents ran out. Ahead of me the ground sloped, and I could hear the reeds and smell the water. One tent was left at the bottom of the row, square to the lake with its door wide open, and my torch found it before I wanted it to. Green nylon, the left guy line slack. The pegs were inside the boundary. Somebody had done it properly.

Someone was lying on the sleeping bag.

He was on his back with the bag unzipped halfway under him, one arm across his chest. My anorak, faded green, done up to the neck. The hair was mine, thinner. The jaw was mine. The rest was what happens when a man keeps going with nothing to keep him going: cheeks gone in, skin grey as the concrete at the bathhouse, the collar of my anorak standing away from his neck. The paperback was face down by his hip, open at page 112.

His eyes were wet. They were on me, and they weren't hurried. He looked like a man who had been waiting for a bus and knew the timetable.

I said, "No." I think I said it. I heard something.

He smiled. He did it with my mouth, the way I smile at people who've come to argue about a ticket, tight and polite, and then he drew his knees up slowly, one and then the other. He was making room.

That was when I understood about Pieter. He hadn't gone anywhere. He hadn't left one morning without paying. He'd gone into a tent, and he'd said so in the book, nearly home, small and squeezed against the line, because that's all the room he had left. The bicycle in the shed had never been his. It was only what he'd been carrying when he arrived. And all those tents, every one with the door open and my fleece folded on the left, weren't waiting for me. They were waiting for whoever came next, and I had been the practice.

I took my boots off at the flap. I set them together with the toes pointing out, and I saw myself do it and couldn't stop. The guestbook slipped out from under my arm onto the grass. The torch was still on. I looked at it, and then I turned it off and put it by the pillow end, angled toward where my head would go.

Then I crawled in.

The nylon closed over my back. The groundsheet was cold through my socks. He was very close, and he smelled like me, and he didn't move except to keep his knees drawn up so I could get past. There was a place on the sleeping bag where a man my size would go. I put my hip in it and turned, and my shoulders found the shoulders, and my head found the dip in the pillow end. Everything fit. My feet came to rest at the end of the bag where his had been.

It was like pulling into a bay that had been marked for me. Nose to the water. Square to the stake. Inside the paint on every side. Nobody would have needed to correct me, and there was nothing left to correct.

That was the worst of it, that it was easy. I'd been afraid for nine days, and the fear went out of me in that one motion, the way it does when you've finally done what you were told. Nothing hurt. My legs stopped shaking. Somewhere behind the reeds, the frogs went on, and I could hear the breath beside me evening out, and mine going with it.

I wanted to scream. I opened my mouth and pulled in air to do it.

There was nothing there to scream with.

The stake at the end of the path had no number on it. The white paint was there, flaking in the usual places, but the square where the number belonged was bare grey wood.

I saw that first, before the light was properly up. I was sitting in the door of the tent with my knees drawn up and my boots outside the flap, toes out, together. I don't remember sitting down. Behind me the sleeping bag had a dip in it the size of one man, and the fleece was folded in thirds on the left. I didn't turn around to check on anything else.

I tried my voice once, the way you test a pen. It clicked, dry, and that was all I got. I left it alone.

The frogs had stopped. Daylight is theirs to be quiet in, and the mist was going off the lake in thin pieces. Somewhere behind the mulberries a broom started, long strokes with a pause between each, and I knew whose it was without looking. Vjollca came around the plane trees a while later with the pile of purple mush ahead of her. She glanced at my tent. She nodded, the same short nod she gave me every morning on my way to wash, and went on sweeping. That was all. I've thought about it since, and I don't think she was hiding anything by it. It was just her morning.

A car came up the track around eight. I heard the gravel take it, then a door, then a voice saying something in what I think was Czech, and then in English, "No, no, it's fine, I'll walk from here." Vjollca leaned the broom on a tree and went to the gate. I couldn't hear the paperwork. I could hear her laugh, the short bark, and after that the crunch of two people coming down toward the water.

He was young. Twenty, twenty-one. Hoodie, shorts, messy light brown hair, a rucksack with a foam mat strapped on the bottom that was too big for him and knocked against his legs. He looked at everything as he came, the trees, the lake, the villas past the reeds. Vjollca said the thing she says. Along the fence, always, never across the pitches after dark. He said, "Sure, sure, no problem," and I watched his shoulders and knew he'd have agreed to anything. It's a good rule. It's stated once, with no exceptions and no explaining, and people like being told where to walk.

She left him at the end of the row and went back to her sweeping. He dropped the rucksack on the grass. Then he went off to the bathhouse for a wash, and I sat and watched the gap in the wire where he'd gone.

He was gone maybe twenty minutes. When he came back along the fence his hair was wet and he had a towel over one shoulder. He wasn't in a hurry, but he kept looking behind him. He got as far as the stake next to mine, the one with the bare square on it, and stopped. Then he turned and called up the row.

"Excuse me? Madam? Sorry." Vjollca looked up from the gravel. "Why is the bathhouse so far? It looked close from the office. I mean really close. It took me ages to walk back."

"Guests get confused," she said. "The trees look alike in the evening."

"It's morning."

"Then you're fine," she said, and went back to the mulberries.

He laughed. He wasn't bothered, he was interested. I could see him deciding to find out, and I knew what he'd do before he did it, because it's what I did. He put his towel over the rucksack, went back up to the corner where the bathhouse door showed pale under its dead strip light, and put his right hand on the wire.

"Okay," he said, to nobody, or to me. "Let's see."

He walked it heel to toe, exaggerating, making it into a game. I counted with him. I couldn't help it and I didn't try. Ten, and the camper van at nine still shuttered. Twenty. His hand slid along the wire and it sagged under his fingers, and he looked down at it, puzzled and grinning. Thirty. The sun was on the water by then and the plane trees threw the tents into stripes. Thirty-five. Thirty-six. He passed the first open door with the fleece in it and didn't look in. Thirty-nine, forty.

He stopped at the stake with no number on it. "Forty-one," he said out loud, and looked back at the bathhouse, and shook his head. "That's not forty-one. That was more than forty-one." He said it to me, more or less. He'd noticed me by then, sitting there with my knees up. "Morning! Is it always this long?"

I looked at him. I had nothing to answer with. He waited a second, friendly, and then he shrugged and went back to his rucksack and pulled the foam mat off the bottom.

He'd come in at forty-one. I remembered that number very well, the one I'd been so careful to hold on to at the start. Tomorrow it would be more, and then it would be fewer. He'd count it himself. He'd count it twice and not tell anybody, and he'd be sure his tent hadn't moved.

The grass beside my pitch shifted. Not the ground, exactly. There was a place a tent's width from mine that had been ordinary a moment before, and now it wasn't. It had a square to it. The blades lay flat in the right directions, and the edge of it was clean, and the place where a peg would go inside the boundary was already the right distance from the stake. It had loosened, that's the best way I can say it. It was ready. Tomáš was looking at it too, and he didn't know what he was looking at. He said, "Oh, this one's nice, it's on the water," and unrolled his groundsheet.

He squared it to the stake. I watched him do that, and I was proud of him, and I couldn't have told you why.

Vjollca went on sweeping. The frogs were quiet for the day. I sat with my boots set together outside the flap and my hands on my knees, and I kept the count going for him, forty-one, forty-two, in case he lost it, and I did what I'd always done. I watched him find his place, and I knew exactly where he was allowed to stand.