We weren’t so spontaneous ourselves, naturally, as to stop in order to get a better look; but the road was straight and otherwise deserted, and for some while I could see the car in my rear view mirror, still where it had been left; and I was able to imagine the expression on the face of the gooseberry boy in the back seat, full of disdain and impatience, but troubled also by a dim sense of missing out. That could have been the last day of his childhood we’d driven through. Unless this happened whenever he got taken for a ride.

We were no sooner back in Alice Springs than we found ourselves listening to a group of evangelists wired up for a large audience but having to make do with a small one on the grass lawn outside the council buildings, where the town Aborigines like to congregate. In the main they had the usual story to tell of not finding Jesus until they were forty-five and now look at them; but their act livened up when a middle-aged Liverpudlian swinger in a blue country and western waistcoat worn over camel-coloured flared trousers stepped forward and took the mike. He looked so experienced that for a moment I thought he was going to toss it from hand to hand and swing it through his legs. And he was experienced – that was precisely the confession he had to make. ‘I used to go around with the Beatles when I was younger,’ he admitted. ‘I used to spend all my time – every hour that the Devil sent me – with John and Paul and Ringo and George.’ (I don’t know why one suddenly chooses to believe a person who says this sort of thing, but I believed him utterly. He had the authentic nasal drawl. And the same sense of humour.) ‘And I thought that was the whole meaning of life. John and Paul and Ringo and George – and me. If you’d asked me then what else there was to life I’d have answered, nothing. But I was wrong. Jesus is the only friend worth having.’

I thought this was a bit rough on the memory of the Fab Four. Not only did he still talk like George and look like Ringo, I believed I could detect the lingering influence of John’s theologizing. And when he began singing –

Jesus is the answer, for the world today,

Above him there’s no other; Jesus is the way

– I thought I was listening to McCartney.

Funny, the way things had turned out. They’d stayed with showbiz and he’d gone to God, and yet he was the only one of them now on the road. He might have shifted his allegiances from pop to pietism but here he was, twenty-five years on, in his old flared gear, in the middle of Alice Springs, still doing a gig.