He took us to a pub he knew in Katherine for lunch. Five minutes in the street were enough to tell me that I hadn’t made any serious mistake, at least as far as my comfort and safety went, giving Katherine a miss. I don’t know whether we passed any senior officers of SPONGE but we saw many whites who could have been active members. And the Aborigines, squatting on the nature strip which ran down the middle of the main road, looked angrier than in Darwin, less interested in street mischief, more confrontational. The pub that Fred recommended had an outdoor beer yard where you sat on upturned barrels and avoided eye contact. Next to me a skeletal Aborigine in a leather cowboy hat cleaned his finger nails with a knife, while the woman he was with berated him, with that characteristic rapid raucous click – a fusillade of shrill abuse, coming from high up in the throat – for some obviously minor marital misdemeanour. Through the window to the kitchen I could see the white woman who prepared the steaks standing over the ovens, breathing in the oil and removing wax from her ear. ‘Nice here, isn’t it?’ Fred said. He had his niece with him, a little girl of seven or eight. ‘Isn’t it?’ he repeated, tousling her hair.

We found some way of excusing ourselves, and retraced our steps, moving like a pair of Olympic walkers, in the direction of the service station and takeaway at which the bus had originally dropped us off. It was a murderously scorching day, but unless you are prepared to eat sliced beetroot and lettuce sandwiches you can only ever buy hot fried food in Australia; so we grabbed a half-chicken and some pineapple fritters and sat under the roof of the car wash for shade and with burning fingers ripped the chook apart.

I don’t think the hairy American with the Saul Bellow eyes and the Sal Mineo profile bothered about food. He looked upon meal stops as an opportunity to attend to his laundry and rearrange the thrillers in his rucksack. He was always the first off the bus, and before the rest of us were disembarked had his socks and sandshoes and singlet laid out to dry in the dust. At Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson Creek I had watched him throwing pebbles into his sandshoes from a distance of thirty yards. At Katherine he just sat in the dust himself and read the whole of Answer From a Deadman.