Making some real progress with this, I feel. I now have one photo of my missing town…

…one segment of an emerging map based on the photo, one sound file…

 … and this new piece of text:

Oldton is a town that doesn’t exist. If you try a google search or look it up on multimap, you will not find it.

Olton, yes. Oulton, yes. Old Town, yes. But not Oldton. Oldton has disappeared.

The only evidence that Oldton ever did exist is my ever growing collection of texts, pictures, videos and oral testimonies from a host of people who all lived in Oldton, but then left.

Left. One by one.

My Oldton archive shows them doing it.

I have photos of them standing on their favourite spot, waving, as if saying goodbye. I have fragments of text, diary entries and letters written on the day of departure. I have tapes of people making their farewells. Some of them I vaguely recognise from my childhood. And in each and every case, the same phrase crops up again and again. Without fail, in every piece of Oldton evidence I dig up, it recurs.

An obvious statement. An innocuous statement. But a chilling statement for me who has no record of saying or doing anything on that day when I left Oldton forever. And no record either of my father saying it when he walked out of our lives the evening before.

Tomorrow, I won’t be here, they all say. Tomorrow, I won’t be here.

My dad said nothing