I threw my nickel into the dirt the second I left the bus.

But it wasn’t a completely wasted afternoon. We had seen the country around Kalgoorlie and been surprised by it. Who would have thought that pink soil could be attractive? Or that there would be a luminescent quality about the bush, almost a glitter in the foliage? And I had found another tree to like – the gimlet tree, a twisting eucalypt with burnished leaves and a trunk which looked as though it had been dappled by the dust but was in fact its own colour, a sort of tarnished bronze, as if imbued in equal measure with the red and gilt of the Goldfields.

The following morning, while I did an interview for Stanley Brown’s book programme, Ros took her courage in both hands and climbed aboard another bus. This one was going to Coolgardie, whose desertion, unlike Kambalda’s, was the very reason you visited it. When I met her back at our hotel at lunchtime she wore a frazzled, slightly nauseous expression. I knew the look. It meant that she had seen a ghost. And I knew the ghost she had seen. Cornwall.

‘So how was Coolgardie?’ I asked her.

‘Pixilated.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said.

There was no chance she was going to let me off. Some ghosts we had to see together. ‘You will recall that stage of a town’s life where it is down on its luck,’ she said, ‘where all its real activity is in the past, but one or two locals keep plugging on, buying up properties cheap and not having the money to renovate them properly, so that when at last it becomes visitable as a relic, they are the town?’ (I kept my head lowered. I didn’t want to be reminded.) ‘Well, that’s what’s happened to Coolgardie. The most active local landlord seems to own about twenty houses. Which is very nearly all the houses in the town. He has painted these – and I don’t just mean the woodwork, I mean the stone itself – sea green. The roofs he has painted pillar-box red. He is currently searching for a mineral which will cure cancer. He is certain it is in Coolgardie somewhere. He reckons “the outlook here is bright”. There’s an open-air museum, next to the petrol-station-cum-junk-shop – all of which he owns – jammed with rusting objects, of no value in themselves and of no interest as exhibits. Next door to that there’s someone who collects limbs of trees which resemble human beings. He glues on gemstones where their eyes would be and sticks a school cap on their heads.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said.