Although we’d only been away for a few days we were nevertheless alarmed to discover that the Japanese motor cyclist, whose nerve I might have been responsible for shattering, was still in his old place at the caravan park. So on our last morning in Alice Springs, before I returned the van to Bill Richards’ agent, Ros insisted that I go over and see whether there was any assistance I could give.

‘Isn’t this more a job for you?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but you’re the one who knows how language works.’

Which was how I came to be sitting on the ground with him outside his tent, shouting, ‘Long time! You’ve been here long time! Is everything all right? OK? You not in trouble?’ I’d toyed with heap big trouble, but held off at the last minute.

He knew what I was saying. ‘Machine,’ he explained. ‘My machine. Parts. I’m waiting one week.’

Did that mean he had been waiting one week or would be waiting one week? I shuffled impossible conditional clauses made even more uncertain by the future-pluperfect tense. ‘Today,’ he said. ‘Parts coming today.’

So there was absolutely nothing to worry about. He was fine. He was better than I was. Just to keep talking I asked him about his friend. Where had he gone?

‘Friend?’

How do you mime friend? I pointed to where he’d camped when he’d been here.

‘Oh – he. He machine in trouble also. In Ayers Rock.’ He laughed, not at the misfortune of others but at this sudden picture of Japanese marooned beside their ailing bikes all over Australia. ‘He parts come from Japan.’

I asked him where he’d been before Alice Springs. He took a neatly folded map from his tent and pointed to Perth. ‘Fly in here. Buy bike. Go here.’ His finger traced a route that actually wasn’t there, along a road that had never been built. Perth to Alice via the desert.

‘A difficult journey.’ I said.

‘Oh – exciting. Big, big desert. Meet Aboriginaries. Good men. Good men. I take wrong way. They see me. They shout, “Go back – go left – go right!” They shout me whole way. Good men, black men. Good good men.’

I wished I’d been there, in the Gibson Desert, to behold it – this extraordinary confrontation of cultures. When Aborigines saw their first white man dismounting from a horse many of them fainted clean away, imagining that here was a beast that had the power to separate. So what about our friend, in his helmet and goggles, climbing off his Honda?