Rachel was a bit of a spoiled pain in the arse himself. I mean he didn’t have to spend a fortune taking a taxi to Aïn Deb. They have got buses in Algeria and for a couple of dinar they’ll drive you, your family and all your belongings to the ends of the earth and back. Outside the bus station – a patch of waste ground with barbed wire fences where a hundred rusty ramshackle buses waged all-out war to get in, fight over passengers and get the fuck out – was a guy like a scarecrow whose job was to give directions. I told him my story. For fifty dinars he told me what I needed to do, all the while giving directions to a bunch of other lost souls. ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s right, take bus number 12 to Sétif . . . You, you need to take the number 8 to Oran . . . and you . . . uh . . . 36, that’ll take you to Sidi-Bel-Abbes . . . What? Oh yeah, so when you get to Sétif, take the bus for Bordj Kédir . . . and you . . . give me a minute . . . you can take the bus to Tiaret or the one to Mascara, doesn’t matter . . . You need to take the Ouargla bus and from there you take the caravan that goes to El Goléa . . . and you . . . you need to hitchhike the rest of the way to – where was it again?’ I repeated the name, pronouncing it carefully. ‘Aïn what . . . ?’ he said as he hurried over to pick a fight with another scarecrow who was cutting in on his turf. ‘Aïn Deb? Yeah, yeah . . . it’s like I said.’ And he left me standing there in the mud and the chaos.