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Rocking from side to side in their battered vehicle, the old couple barely clear the crest of the Jemez Mountains. But once over the rise, a wide rocky bowl opens up below them, its surface pocked and fissured with steaming vents. Lagered on the rusty brown earth stands a circle of battered old motor homes and converted school buses. Here, desert yields here to alpine, the giant red ponderosa pines reaching up to meet the walls of the canyon. Scents of sage, pine and desert sand filter through their nostrils, inspiring them with a hale, fresh vigour. From below they hear drums beating and the blaring of ancient rock songs.

Mock bows and all-hails greet them – ‘Hey, it’s Princess Leah and the Boss!’ – and, as they weave their way through the encampment, many old faces, wrinkled and familiar, grin in welcome: Marta and Cassie, Manfred and Tamar and others they know only by their ‘handles’: Sam the Man, Groover, Witch Woman, Moon Dog, Munchy, Buffalo Boy and Big Banana. 

Multi-coloured eyes, mandalas and peace signs swirl over the sides of the vehicles, mixed with sprawling slogans: ‘On the Road Again’, ‘Further’, ‘Nearly There’, ‘To Boldly Go’, ‘Dreamchaser’, and ‘Keep on Trucking’. Between the vehicles stalls have been set up selling candles, ornaments, wind charms, tattered old paperbacks and organic foods. Elsewhere, knots of people squat on blankets busying themselves with tarot card readings, yoga and tai chi and whole body massage. Talks are under way on aromatherapy, crystal healing meditation, tantric sex and recollections of previous lives. In the distance, others ease their old aching limbs in the hot sulphurous springs that bubble up from the desert floor. Later, Pat decides, she might organise a dance class. 

The old men and women gathered here call themselves the Family – but they are a family that will never go home again. They have packed up, sold up and severed all ties with their old lives. Like Indian tribes, they criss-cross the West, staying at most only a few weeks in one place before moving on. They live as best they can off pensions and dwindling savings, doing odd jobs if necessary, scrounging food from dumpsters and checking into free clinics when sick. Moved on from time to time by local townships or police, mostly they are ignored: an elderly tribe left unto themselves, too old or infirm to make trouble. They are the ‘Snowbirds’: ageing Boomers who have left the fogs and frosts of the North and East to warm their bodies in the heat of the southern sun, only heading back when the desert heat flares into a furnace. Their restless new lives they call ‘R-V-ing’ after the RVs, the recreational vehicles in which they travel. The better-off gather in large established sites, with laid-on services and hook-ups to utilities. Others like the Family shack up wherever they can in ramshackle, make-shift camps.

Exchanging greetings Pat walks over to one of the many waist-deep, copper-coloured springs, strips off and climbs in. Its waters, though cloudy with mud and algae, are gloriously warm. Already, lolling in its heat, are other members of the Family, are idly rapping:

‘Sweats out the poisons.’

‘Really wakes you up.’

‘Yep, when the wind blows, this place really rears up and roars.’

‘I can take it.’

The voices fade. Pat dozes. She is a little girl again at home, playing with her dolls and her Bayco building set, planting the tiny lead rods in a bright green plastic lawn, before slotting in the square Bakelite bricks to create a miniature suburban villa topped off with a shiny red roof. Her father is telling her: ‘If you don’t stick your neck out, your head won’t get cut off.’ Then he is shouting. Her neck has suddenly sprouted a purple hickies. ‘I didn’t bring you up to be a sex kitten!’ he bellows. Pat and boyfriend rush out, racing over the hills on his motorbike, she behind him clutching onto his leather jacket. They stop to sip beer at a little country pub.

Then another home: a messy shared flat. London swing like a pendulum do. Smoking pot, temping for money, slipping out to discos during the lunch break, rushing out after work to the Marquee or the Roundhouse. Parading up the King’s Road, loitering outside Biba in her boots and mini-skirt, with her centre-parted long blonde hair hanging down flat, her face thick with mascara and matt white make-up. A boy shouts after her, ‘Hey, you, you Whiter Shade of Pale!’ Then, she forgets to take the Pill, misses her period, has an abortion and slinks back to Mum and Dad. 

The dream fades, then re-focuses. She is sat behind a typewriter in a firm of accountants. She looks up, sees Alan and marries him. They live in a spotless, tightly comfortable house. No children, but they are happy enough, slotting together as neatly as her old Bayco bricks. Time runs on. Alan and Pat are retired, their savings have swelled into a huge golden egg. As usual on Friday she is going out to do the weekend shopping. Alan shouts not to forget his prescription. When she gets back, he is on his side on the kitchen floor, as shrunken and dried-up as a dead canary at the bottom of its cage. Afterwards there is a lot of coming and going with police and emergency crews trying every way they can to resuscitate him, before they tell her he’s gone – something she’d known all along. She shuts the door on them, goes into the kitchen, makes herself a pot of tea, sits down and writes out a long list of all the things to do.

*

Something is blocking the light. She is on a beach, South Beach in Miami on holiday by herself.Screwing up her eyes against the sunlight, she sees a bulky shape looming over her.

‘Well, look at you!’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Look like you’re having a good time out in the sun.’

‘Yes, it’s nice, very nice.’

‘English?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Thought so. On holiday?’

‘Mmm, mmm.’

 ‘Quite a few of you over here now. I only wish more of ‘em would come into my bar.’

 ‘You look pretty trim. You work out?’

‘Actually I go dancing.’

‘Dancing, eh?’

‘Yes, line dancing.’ 

‘What that cowboy thing? I thought only we did that.’

‘Actually, it’s quite popular too now in England.’

‘You don’t say. Maybe I should try it myself. Work off some of this fat. It’s the beers that do it and being behind my bar all day.’

‘Well, shouldn’t you be there now?’

‘Thought I’d take the afternoon off. Kind of a slow day. Most of ‘em are now.’

‘But you make a living out of it?’

‘Just. It’s no gold mine but I get by. And you?’

‘Well, I suppose you could say I’m a lady of leisure.’

‘An English lady of leisure! Wish I was an American gentleman of leisure.’

‘You seem to be a man of leisure already.’

He shrugs.

‘Hey, Pat, tell you what. Why don’t you drop by my bar and have a couple of drinks on the house?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, I have plans ….’

Oh come on, Pat. You’ll enjoy it. You can sink a few drinks, meet the some of the natives, maybe catch a bite to eat.’

 ‘Well, maybe. But no promises …’

Pat is back in the hot spring. So that was how she met Herb. Afterwards Pat had returned to England at the end of her trip, but she and Herb spoke by phone almost every day, and a few weeks later she flew out again and moved in with him. Their idea was to sell her house and his bar and open ‘The Beefeater’ a British-themed restaurant that would supply traditional English fare to the British tourists flocking to Florida. In time, they hoped, it might even spawn a whole franchise. 

It was a crazily bad idea. The very last thing British tourists wanted was heavy stodge from back home. They wanted tacos and enchiladas, washed down with margaritas. They stayed away in droves. As had the local Cubans, who found the food too bland, and the retired Jewish couples, who declared it too rich for their pinched old stomachs. 

The restaurant went bust. Pat and Herb lost everything but for some reason Pat didn’t mind. It felt she was at last ridding herself of Alan’s money and all it stood for in the hissing flames of some imaginary crematorium. With what cash they had left, they had bought an old RV and hit the road and never once looked back, wrinkled easy riders who had left behind all their comforts and regrets. How many years ago, was it? She forgets. Anyway what does it matter?

*

Overhead, a silver sliver of moon is slowly climbing the desert sky. Spirals of steam, coiling up from the springs, reach up to greet it. It is time to go. Pat eases herself out of the pool. There is no pleasure, she decides, quite like stretching out on the rocks and drying off there, still dazed with heat, watching the water steam off your skin into the cool mountain air. 

Soon it will be time for the Family’s ‘cocktail hour’. Then as every night there will be grill-outs with wine and beer and joints and dancing – boogying along to ancient favourites: the Stones, the Byrds and the Grateful Dead. And of course, sex, even at this late stage of the game: ancient bodies and sagging bellies heaving and humping away in the backs of vehicles or behind boulders and sour wine breath wheezing from old exhausted lungs. But Pat, clinging to the shreds of her English prudery, will still stick only to Herb. 

She spends a few moments looking up at the stars in the desert sky, pondering and remembering, then slowly makes her way back to their vehicle, clambers into their sleeping bag, closes her eyes and before long begins to drop off. Soon, she knows, Herb too will stagger back, wriggle into the sleeping bag and snuggle up close to her. 

Before she falls asleep, she remembers another dream she often has. She is staying with some people – friends or family it seems, although they don’t seem particularly warm or friendly. One morning they all pack up and go, leaving her behind. She is left waiting in the empty room, sitting alone on a hard, unfamiliar chairs. Then a stranger comes in and smilingly opens a door.

Yes, she went through that door. She is finally home, at the end of life in this strange old-young world of aged children, boogying and driving, as long as their hearts and livers and brains hold out, into the setting sun.