When Jonny went missing everything changed.

His mother's heart is full of terror and sadness instead of joy.

His father's study overflows with newspaper cuttings and profiles on missing people instead of the academic texts that were there before.

His sister, once carefree, now carries the weight of the world on her shoulders.

His bedroom at home remains untouched and ready for his return.

A place is set for him at the table on Christmas day each year.

His birthday is always celebrated; his unopened gifts gather dust.

The hands on the clock continue to turn and yet Jonny hasn't returned.

Where is he?

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Later, everyone who loved Johnny Hopkins had different ways to describe how what happened changed their world. Some of them experienced it like the silent collapse of a building – in one moment, when their backs were turned, something solid and familiar was gone, as if it had been a dream, and in its place was a terrifying nothing: a gaping absence, a blue blankness of uncaring sky. For some, it was slower, more dreary – not a violent break but a slow rust that gradually brittled the soul. Johnny’s mother, when talking of it, always pressed her hand to her chest, as if without protection her heart would splinter into a thousand pieces. She talked in concrete, physical terms: memory was a knife, loss was an axe, and hope punched her stomach so that she would let out her breath in a painful gasp. Her thoughts were razor blades. Time was a corridor stretching away from her, empty as a nightmare of closed doors, a windowless eternity of footsteps echoing. Sometimes, though, suddenly at a loss, she would simply say his name – ‘Johnny, my little boy Johnny’, although it was a long time since he had been little – and it was as if she was still hoping that her soft, clear voice would carry over the world and down into the earth and he would hear her at last, wherever he was.

Johnny’s father, long after, came across a photograph of a two-hundred-foot sink-hole that had suddenly appeared in Guatemala City. Houses and electricity poles and roads and human lives had been sucked down into its smooth-walled abyss and nobody could say quite why it had happened. He looked at it for several minutes, with his sore eyes. Then, putting on his reading glasses, he took the red-handled scissors that always lay on his desk, carefully cut it out of the newspaper and stuck it into the scrapbook, as he had done with every single story, interview, letter and printed-out email about his son. Nobody else would know why this photograph was there, but it spoke for Felix Hopkins, a man who didn’t always find it easy to put his feelings into words so some people didn’t understand how deep they went. After all the noise and action, all the attempted explanations, the endless scrabble for meaning, this was what they were left with: a crater that was so big, so perfectly round, so sheer, that it had swallowed everything in its circumference. The hole was at the centre of the family. The hole was inside him. It plunged without end, so that feeling was vertiginous; being alive made him dizzy. He laid the scissors back on the desk, beside the little bowl of linked paper clips and the cracked green mug holding his pencils and pens, and gently closed the scrapbook. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He took off his reading glasses and laid them on the desk. He pressed his slippered feet to the floor, gripped the sides of his chair, waited for this feeling to sink back down inside him.

Mia rarely talked about it. For a long time, she didn’t have the words, and she didn’t have the pictures – except for the particular one she carried in her head of Johnny that she had chosen from all the other images to remember him by: her brother Johnny, with his red-gold hair, the same colour as the fox that used to cross their garden at dusk, as silent as a shadow, and his freckles, which seemed to soak back into his skin during the winter but which in the summer were like muddy splashes on his face, giving it an asymmetry. Even when he was smartly dressed and his hair was brushed, he looked slightly slapdash and askew. Johnny, with his blue eyes and cleft chin. Strong shoulders, long fingers, muscled calves; at eighteen, half man and half boy, he had had a coltish grace. In this picture of him, he always wore a V-necked white T-shirt and an old pair of jeans, ripped in one knee, and was sitting on the small lawn with the sun slanting through the plum tree and falling on him, leaving one arm in shadow. His feet were bare, and his face was half turned towards her. He was smiling slightly. She didn’t think there had ever been a picture like this, although later she had hunted for it, turning out drawers and rifling through the shoeboxes where her mother kept family photos, but there must have been a moment that she’d filed in her memory, or a reason that she had invented it. The smile, which made him look as if he were thinking of something secret and glad, the autumn sunlight lying across the green grass and the shadow approaching him. For ever young and sweet and mysterious. And she had another picture as well, one that she tried not to remember and that she woke, night after night, remembering. The day he had left and she had stood on the pavement waving until he was out of sight. His face, distorted through the car window, turned towards her, his funny little grimace – the rueful expression of farewell.

Later, people said: He was so normal, or He was always such an easy boy. Who would have guessed? They said, Something must have happened. They said, It just goes to show. You can never tell. Out of a clear sky. The bolt from the blue and then the whole world changes. They said, How terrible, and their eyes glittered with fear and excitement. No one knows.