We flew to Chicago, took the train to Champaign and celebrated a very Midwest Christmas with Maddasyn's flatland speedway cornfield clan.

The word 'family' fails to summate the troubled bloodlines binding my Oxford chum to the community she claimed as kin. For nearly one year I lived among them and I can tell you those people were altogether another breed, tribal and guarded, yet magnificently hospitable.

Under and above it all they were outlaws. And I was a fool to ever let myself forget that.

Fuck it. I'm already telling stories on top of bloody stories here so let's have another shall we?

*

It snowed worse than any fatal winter in a Russian novel the night we stepped off the train in Maddasyn's hometown.

A towering cousin called Camille made a proper scene at the station. She roped us both in one circus-bear hug, pressing wet kisses against Maddasyn's temple and hauling the top of my head into her creamy cheek again and again.

Pilloried under the rough sleeve of Camille's Carhartt coat I could only grip my rollerbag and scramble to match her surefooted strides over the snowy car park toward a four-door Blitzkrieg Edition Ford pickup truck.

Mounting the back seat of that urban assault vehicle was like scaling a Mad Max climbing frame to find a pine-scented VIP booth at the top. I dragged my arse over the washboard ribs of a black leather bench scalloped in red flames, floating on a cool cloud of LED accent lighting.

Cousin Camille started the engine. Maddasyn turned up some White Zombie and put a lighted joint into rotation. Blasts of burning diesel drowned the music and the chassis shuddered, rocking and righting beneath me.

I puffed and passed and sank into the custom-stitched seams of the heated seat. The furrowed upholstery delivered blunt first-date vibrations, unleashing pleasant chemical aftershocks that squashed my exhaustion. I was sparkling, on full alert. Primed to participate in whatever might come next.

Peering between assault rifles racked in the rear window I saw Champaign's neat streets and festive lights shrink to a gumball bunch and vanish behind flaky drapes of snow. Then the farmland opened around us and we were riding in the belly of a crew-cab killer whale, chasing a school of blue light across the icy ocean floor.

Camille lowered the volume and turned down a rutted road flocked in fresh snow. Frozen hedges rose in crystal coils choking naked ranks of ash and oak, reaching higher than the top of the Ford.

The surrounding wood thinned. Derelict vehicles crowded the lane, snowed-over humps abandoned in rows like proofing loaves. We passed a wooden farmhouse, a couple of aluminium Jet Age caravans and an actual fucking log cabin. Each miserable domicile was guarded by chained dogs baying among ramparts of impossible clutter.

"Poor things," I said. "Are they your neighbours' dogs?"

"Everyone on this road is family," Camille said. "And those babies are spoilt rotten, don't worry 'bout them. They juss hate bein' put on watch when we congregate uppit the Big House."

A crop of strange shapes leaned left and right in the Ford's headlamps, casting a broken comb of shadows over the snow and into the wood.

"Is that a cemetery?" I asked.

Pride inclined Camille's jawline. Her smile filled the rearview mirror.

"We go back six generations," she said. "You're about to siddown with the latest three. Annif my youngest goes into premature labour wither first gremlin you're gonna meet the beginnin' of a whole new batch."

Maddasyn bounced in her seat.

"Boyergirl?"

Camille shook her head.

"Grammy Soo can't get a read. I never seener fail to call 'em c'rect, not my babies, notcher momma's. But on this one she just can't say."

Ahead on the edge of a frozen plateau stood the Big House.

Maddasyn's ancestral manor was a three-story shiplap farmhouse webbed in miles of Christmas lights, fronted by a chest-high porch swarming with more agitated dogs.

Like a female form afflicted by chronic motherhood, the farmhouse had expanded to accommodate a growing population. The trim lines of the original structure's lower floors were lost behind a ramble of sloppy extensions, mismatched windows and an unfinished addition sheathed in plastic.

Maddasyn reached into the back seat and seized my hand.

"M'so excited," she said. "Everbuddy's gonna love you."

Camille wrangled our bags, held them out like a milkmaid superhero hauling pails on a yoke and she charged up the salt-gritted porch steps in a blocking formation. We followed her through a bunting dervish of crotch-sniffing dogs and into a warm foyer that smelled of hot sugar and cinnamon, fresh bread and roast beef.

"Y'never guess who I found bummin' change at the train station," Camille shouted, shaking off her jacket and piling it upon others at the foot of a smothered hall tree.

She stomped the slush from her boots and took Maddasyn and me by the hand to meet the family.

On the flight over, Maddasyn latched onto my arm with trembling strength and confessed to feeling burdened by her family's expectations. High marks in school, first in a long line of farmers to graduate from university. She was uneasy about her status as something greater than a favourite.

"Might get kinda intense for you," she said. "Like, it's a lot, you know? Bein the one who done good."

She tightened her hold on my arm then and ordered another White Zinfandel from the touch-screen menu. It was the only time Maddasyn hinted that meeting her people could prove to be more than just a bit much.

And it was.

A loving scrum kitted out in holiday jumpers tackled Maddasyn. From that moment forward it was all revved-up and too fast to track, like being in a fucking Beatles movie.

It turned out Maddasyn kept her homecoming plans a secret from everyone except Camille, but there was no time to feel appropriately mortified once I understood I was crashing Christmas dinner as an unannounced plus-one in a house full of strangers.

I was mobbed, hugged and handled, assessed and discussed like a mute objet d'art by three generations of women with strong hands, long legs and great teeth.

If you come within one mile of a Midwestern home during America's retail high holidays, don't bother to decline any offers of food. Once your host declares the intention to "make you a plate", words of protest are oxygen wasted.

Seated against my will and forcibly fed, I was confronted by a number of things that normally make it impossible for me to dine and socialize with other people. I'm speaking of genuine dealbreakers, a short list writ large in bold type, underlined in scarlet:

Crying infants.

Country-western music.

Blobs of gelatine with fruit trapped inside, I can't stand gelatine with fruit inside.

Perhaps it was down to the weapons-grade cannabis triggering my unprecedented food intake. Most days I ran on half a KitKat and too much coffee.

It's possible I underwent a kind of spiritual transformation, something along the lines of The Grinch making room in his congenitally black heart to return stolen property and go wassailing with the Whos.

But I didn't mind. Never bothered to spoil the magic by wondering why.

How can I say it without sounding stupid? Those hillbilly people warmed me.

I devoured gelatine and fruit without gagging. Smiled at every teen mum juggling a wailing cub, and there were more than a few. By the time someone exchanged my empty dinner plate for one heaped with dessert I was singing along with Garth Brooks, leaning into his Oklahoma twang, hitting a stumpy joint wedged between the tines of a salad fork that had the unmistakable heft of department-store silverplate.

I lodged with Maddasyn in her childhood bedroom. She warmed two bricks on the woodstove, wrapped them in bath towels and tucked them under the covers at our feet. We snuggled up, shoved our toes against the glowing weight and whispered and giggled like a couple of March sisters until we fell asleep.

Maddasyn left before dawn to interview her bad man at Pontiac Correctional Centre. I spent Boxing Day with my hair tied up, embedded in the kitchen alongside a dozen aunts and cousins in a marathon baking session.

I cut the devil out of my thumb while peeling apples. Camille seized my hand and inspected the wound. Clucked her tongue and all but carried me bodily to the kitchen sink.

If this occurred in any other situation I'd find it problematic to be touched in such a way, good Samaritans and best intentions notwithstanding. But when Camille flushed the cut with stinging cold water and I flinched, she stiffened. Hissed as if she felt it. Her hands swallowed mine and she said:

"Baby girl I'm so so sorry."

My throat clogged. My eyes began to float. I managed a quick breath and a smile to halt the manufacture of tears.

A ten-year-old cousin named Austyn squeezed between my hip and Camille's caring bulk. The little girl gripped the edge of the sink, hung one hand from my back pocket and watched as Camille curled a cartoon plaster around my thumb.

"Whudappened?" she asked.

"Sissy cudderself," Camille said.

Sissy ...

My airway snapped shut. I turned my eyes to the ceiling and reached for the steel inside me, but it was flimsy now. Too small to hide behind, barely big enough to hold.

Austyn kissed her flour-dusted thumb. She pressed it against my Spongebob Squarepants plaster and looked up through a thatch of hazel ringlets.

"Thank you mouse," I said.

She flattened herself against me and I lost it.

Arms of all sizes circled my waist. Fell over my shoulders and when they stacked high enough to cover my face I collapsed against Camille's Looney Tunes Taz sweatshirt, exhaling hot snot, inhaling her signature scent of bourbon and Jean Nate. I couldn't remember the last time I'd cried but now I was here, forming the pathetic core of a nurturing huddle in a kitchen full of women greasing pans and rolling dough and dancing to Shania Twain.

Hours later I was basking in that caring-coven afterglow, smoking with the dogs on the porch when Camille came stomping out the front door dragging Austyn by one ear. The little girl's long hair was hacked off in an uneven sweep and she was crying so hard I thought she was walking on a broken bone.

Camille made a fist and said something in German that calmed the dogs and made them sit. She released Austyn and nudged her toward me. I held my cigarette to one side and exchanged confused glances with the closest dog.

"Teller," Camille said. "Teller whatchadid."

"I ... I ..."

Austyn's voice strangled, tapered to a squeak.

The dogs licked their lips.

Camille held up my phone. I patted my empty back pocket.

"Teller," Camille growled. "Right now or we go back inside an' shaveya bald-"

"I tookyer phoooone ..."

Austyn pushed through the canine assembly, ran to the far end of the porch. She bailed under the railing and disappeared around the corner of the house through crunching snow.

Camille put my phone in my hand and lighted a cigarette.

"Looks like she bought some Candy Crush upgrades and a couple-a palettes of Urban Decay eye shadow. You let me know what it cost and we'll make it right. Little bitch, can you believe that? Pickin' your pockit like that."

Maddasyn and I were asleep when Austyn came scratching at the bedroom door shivering, clutching a two-litre bottle of Mountain Dew and a sleeve of Saltines. She wouldn't look at us. Didn't say a word as Maddasyn bundled her in a T-shirt and pulled wool socks over her tiny knees. She crawled under the covers between us and I nodded off with my fingers buried in the chopped-rope punishment shag hanging over the nape of Austyn's neck.

The sleepy thief was gone when Maddasyn and I woke to the sound of roaring engines and gunfire outside.

Camille's cannonball steps boomed up the hallway. She threw open the bedroom door.

"Maddy," she said. "Your brother's come home."

I followed Maddasyn downstairs to meet Mayson, her fraternal twin.

Two days later I let my guard down and I married that stupid man in Las Vegas.

And that was essentially the start of everything else that happened.

When the next Christmas came Maddasyn was most likely dead. Mayson was back in prison for violating his parole and I was done running, strung out and stranded in a tiny town no bigger than a netball court at the bottom of Illinois.

The name on the map read Cairo but the motel clerk pronounced it care-ro, like pharaoh.

The air in my room was thick and humid, sour with spores. I slept horribly and woke with a sore throat. Showered to steam my ears open and walked south through town beyond the levees, into a grim sort of memorial park at the tip of the peninsula. It marked the site of a former Union Army fortress from the Civil War, an outpost at the absolute end of the state.

New snow growled underfoot. The sound of powder was identical to the muffled frogsong Mayson made grinding his teeth in his sleep after days of endless ops. I cringed at every raspy step along the water's edge.

There at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, I chose to ignore every circumstance I could not change and seized upon the narrow range of factors I was qualified to alter.

Maddasyn and I had been an effective team before she turned on me, but my metropolitan survival skills were unsuited to the vast open spaces of the States. Endless highway miles and wide horizons left me feeling exposed, a clouded leopard unable to hunt or hide on the strip-mall steppes of Middle America.

From Cairo I caught a ride to Carbondale. Boarded a northbound Greyhound and sat in the back with a map in my lap, one nibbled fingertip tracing an irregular mosaic of roads parcelling Illinois into squarish scales like a crocodile's hide.

The bus arrived in Chicago. I found a medieval dollar store, filled my upset stomach with Pringles and a warm can of Arizona Iced Tea. Bought a thirty-minute calling card and located a payphone. Rang Majid to make amends and arrange a room. Then I dug the last pills from my Troll doll keychain and flipped it into the Chicago River. Walked across the bridge and surrendered to U.S. Immigration as the narcotic filled my hollow chocolate-hare body with a warm molten core.

For days I sat with women from around the world, imprisoned in a series of rooms that smelled of wee. The lights never went off. I tried to measure time by the distribution of warm juice cartons and clingfilm sandwiches packed in brown paper bags.

My name was called. A British consul interviewed me by videolink. I told her I had suffered a psychotic break while visiting America on holiday and had no money, no family to rely on.

A doctor watching from a box in the corner of the screen asked me to name the current and former prime ministers. My answers made her smile as she wrote them down. She said:

"I want you to remember these words. Wolf, car and room. Can you repeat them to me?"

I said the words.

The consul asked:

"How have you been supporting yourself while living illegally in the United States?"

"Prostitution," I said, mumbling through bitten fingertips.

"Were you brought to the United States as a victim of sexual trafficking, or were you sexually trafficked while living illegally in the United States?" the consul asked.

I took my hand from my mouth and spoke up.

"No ma'am," I said. "I have never been a victim."

At the conclusion of the interview, the doctor in the corner box asked me to repeat the three words.

"Wolf, car and room," I said.

Seven bagged meals later I was on a plane headed home