Oblivious to his sufferings by now, Cathy talked to me about Cardiff University; or rather I asked her questions relating to her course and her teachers, and she by and large failed to answer them. I knew, or thought I knew, several people who taught English at Cardiff and I was curious to learn how they were, but Cathy shook her head – no, no, she’d never heard of them. How very different, I thought, from me and my friends as students, who had been so obsessed by the people who taught us that we were familiar with every detail of their private lives right down to the birthdays of their children – Anna, and Birkin, and Dorothea. Cathy was not only light on the names of her lecturers, she didn’t know the names of any writers either. ‘Andrew’s the one to talk to about that,’ she said when I quizzed her on what novels she’d read. But had anyone tried to talk to Andrew he would have screamed.

‘So what do you do?’ Cathy asked me, after we had together exhausted every avenue of her ignorance.

The possibility that I could become the only writer she had ever heard of suddenly made me quite light-headed. I gave her my name, very slowly – I might even have spelled it for her – together with a list of my publications. She nodded thoughtfully after each one, in what looked to me like a serious effort to commit them to memory. But then I saw a fine film, like gauze, appear across her eyes; and I knew that she had forgotten me already. ‘Pity you’re not talking to Andrew,’ she said. ‘He’s the one.’

We stopped at Nanutarra, in the early hours of the morning, where there was a roadhouse willing to serve chicken and chips to anyone who was game. I settled for coffee myself, and a short walk in the dust. The sky had cleared now, though the moon was still inflamed, a bright watery orange. You could easily believe, standing stock still in the sultry night heat, that you could get a tan from such a moon.

Back on the bus I found Andrew collapsed in my seat. He cursed me under his breath when I woke him, pulled his sheet over his head, and out of some mad impulse to self-destruction made straight for the empty seat next to the driver, a place which, as we had been many times warned, was consecrated to the ideal of sociability.

‘You can’t sit here, mate,’ Dutchy told him, ‘unless you’re prepared to stay awake and talk to me for the next two hours, which I wouldn’t want anyway since you’re not a sheila.’

As Andrew raged back down the bus I noticed that the pupils had vanished entirely from his eyes and that he looked like Blind Pugh from Treasure Island.