One morning in the 1970s Jeff Young slips out of his parents home with the intention of hitch-hiking to Paris in search of a version of himself he calls the wild twin, a shadow boy, a feral drifter. There he falls headlong into a fever dream of dive hotels, rough sleeping, getting lost, squats, violence, poverty, thieving, illness and madness. Journeying across Europe, from cathedrals to doss houses, from Red Light district to deportation and breakdown, finally Young returns to present-day Liverpool, caring for his dying father in the house he ran away from 50 years earlier, remembering the past with a man who can no longer remember.