But the cop who walked up beside them fined them a hundred and five euro anyway. He said they had been spotted further back on the highway, driving with their high beams on. This was apparently an infraction. He casually rested his hand on the holster of his gun.

It was an unpleasant transaction. They didn’t argue. It was hard to be sure the lights didn’t malfunction, and it didn’t seem the time to get into a dispute. Damien was the one who had the cash to hand, but afterwards Max was the most put out. He thought he deserved better as a visitor to the country – it had been Spain’s sovereign credit rating he’d helped to review in his summer job.

‘Okay, so we didn’t raise the rating, but we didn’t drop it either, which was frankly a good outcome in the circumstances.’

But to the Spanish, they were just two guys with surfboards in a car with foreign plates. At least the rain held off, and the education argument was forgotten, or put to one side for the time being.

At their lodgings for the night, they wrestled their boards inside. The middle-aged owner of the guesthouse watched them with sharp eyes, making sure they didn’t mark her walls as they climbed the stairs. The rooms were thirty-five euro, and they each had an attic room with goat-hide rugs and heavy linens. Their hostess sent them to a restaurant where an old woman cooked their dinner and Damien paid in an attempt to cheer his cousin up.

Damien slept fitfully that night, waking from a strangely vivid dream. He was walking uphill on a stony road. Walking up and around, and hearing a bell tolling, he passed some kind of building made of the same stone as the road. He woke from the dream unsettled. It had felt so real, so vivid, and yet he was sure he’d never seen the place in the dream. In the morning he was unnerved to hear that Max had a dream like it. He felt as if they’d dreamt someone else’s dreams – as if, in those heavy old bedlinens, they dreamt the dreams of pilgrims. Which was not what he signed up for, he thought, feeling out of sorts.

It was Monday, but the days of the week had lost their meaning. This is how you know you are on holiday, said Max. As they set out, they found that another cassette tape had gone missing.

‘Seriously, this is fucked up.’

‘They’re probably under something.’

Max rummaged, frustrated. ‘I can’t believe we got that ticket. The guy was targeting us as tourists.’

‘So? That’s cops the world over.’

‘It’s the principle,’ he said.

‘You and your principles.’ Damien had to laugh. ‘How do your principles sit with your plans of working for a big international corporation?’