If I’d obeyed my instincts, I’d have climbed up and at the very least given the brat a jolly good tongue-lashing. But one look at the Gypsy taught me that there were times to say nothing.

Rough brambles snatched at the caravan as it jolted and lurched from side to side in the lane, but the Gypsy seemed not to notice.

She was hunched over the reins, her watery eyes fixed firmly on some far-off horizon, as if only her shell were in this century, the rest of her escaped to a place far away in some dim and misty land.

The track broadened a little and a moment later we were moving slowly past a decrepit picket fence. Behind the fence were a tumbledown house that seemed to be hammered together from cast-off doors and battered shutters, and a sandy garden littered with trash which included a derelict cooker, a deep old-fashioned pram with two of its wheels missing, a number of fossilized motorcars, and, strewn everywhere, hordes of empty tins. Clustered here and there around the property stood sagging outbuildings—little more than makeshift lean-tos thrown together with rotten, mossy boards and a handful of nails.

Over it all, arising from a number of smoking rubbish heaps, hung a pall of gray acrid smoke which made the place seem like some hellish inferno from the plates of a Victorian illustrated Bible. Sitting in a washtub in the middle of the muddy yard was a small child, which jerked its thumb from its mouth the instant it saw us and broke into a loud and prolonged wailing.

Everything seemed to be coated with rust. Even the child’s red hair added to the impression that we had strayed into a strange, decaying land where oxidation was king.

Oxidation, I never tire of reminding myself, is what happens when oxygen attacks. It was nibbling away at my own skin at this very moment and at the skin of the Gypsy seated beside me, although it was easy to see that she was much further gone than I was.