Sitting drying in the sun must have made him tired, because he curled up and fell asleep – the breeze from his overhead air-conditioner winnowing the hairs under his arms – the minute the bus started moving again. But fifteen minutes out of Katherine Wayne announced that he had a beaut new video to play us: The Electric Cowboy. I don’t know whether the movie was based on a paperback that the American had read, or whether he was simply susceptible to titles, but the words, The Electric Cowboy, seemed to reach deep into his slumbering pneuma. A solitary paroxysm racked his body and he was instantly bolt upright and wide awake. ‘Is it any good?’ he asked, without even bothering to rub his eyes.

‘Is it any good?’ Wayne’s confidence in his own critical judgement was unwavering. ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’

The look of uncertainty on the American’s face – how should he know what the Pope was? – made me wonder again if he might have been Jewish. Though later on, after we’d driven through a plague of locusts on the West Australian border – slaughtering them in their thousands against our windscreen – I peered across at him and found no recognition in his eyes. It was my belief that no two Jews who knew anything of the Old Testament could go through a plague of locusts together without exchanging smiles of quiet satisfaction. On the other hand it was always possible that he had not yet come across the Old Testament in paperback.