According to Sam, who collected the camping fees, the Miners Club was the place to drink, but it seemed easier just to walk up the road and try the bar of the Opal Inn Hotel/Motel. That was after we’d vainly attempted to clean ourselves up a bit. ‘Getting rid of the fucking dust,’ I heard somebody remark in the shower rooms, ‘that’s all I fucking care about.’ ‘The fucking trouble is,’ I heard his friend observe from the next cubicle, ‘you no sooner get it fucking off you than it’s fucking on you again.’

On the main street some of the underground opal caves and gift shops were still open. So was the underground Catholic church and the underground motel. There was even an underground bookshop, though in Coober Pedy that does not mean what it does elsewhere; I went in, but found no Henry Miller or de Sade. And no Orianna Ooi either. The bar at the Opal Inn was busy. I’d read that there were between forty-seven and fifty-one different nationalities in Coober Pedy and I estimated that between thirty-seven and forty-one of them were here tonight. The majority of the faces, though, were European – Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Croatian – the inured faces of last-ditch migration. Working men, gamblers, maybe even desperadoes. This, presumably, was what Darwin had been like before the social services moved in.

But it didn’t feel a dangerous bar. People smiled at us. A vivacious Aborigine with a look of Sammy Davis Jnr about him, and even an eye patch, gave us a friendly nod. Then someone fell into me and said, ‘Where you from?’ He was ill-favoured and mischievous – a self-conscious ratbag – and very drunk.

I told him, London. ‘Ah, London?’ He looked at Ros to see if I was telling the truth, then he fell into her. ‘London – he’s a good country.’

He was Hungarian, that much he was prepared to tell us; but when I asked him what he did in Coober Pedy he dropped his voice and let the alcohol liquefy his already runny vowels. I was able to make out just one sentence – ‘I’m a bludger’ – and to get the general idea that he was in the second-hand business.

‘Second-hand what?’ I asked him.

There was a sudden return of intelligibility. ‘What you want?’

I didn’t have to answer. Someone he knew walked by and asked him how he was. Nothing like as well as he would be, he said, if the person gave him money. A hundred dollar note was handed over without any ado. ‘See?’ he laughed. ‘I’m a bludger.’