Then one day he returned home and it was all over. Maria Elena waited for him no longer. She had taken the children, moved to another village, gone with another man. Cuckolded, his jaw beating with rage and humiliation, Benjamín sought her out. He stood on the cobblestone street in front of her new house and screamed bitter abuse. Now she would never have a refrigerator or shop for groceries in an American supermarket or own a car. Now their children would be as poor and ignorant as their forefathers and all because she couldn’t wait, all because she was a puta to end all putas. So he left the dustbowl of Nopalillo, walked away from the only things worth staying alive for. He left his children and climbed back on the rattling bus to el Norte, vowing never to return.

That time, appropriately, he crossed the border curled up by the engine in the front of a Ford whose battery had been removed and jacked up underneath the car to make room for him. The heat and the dirt and the burns served to stoke the furnace of his anger, but he was nearly asphyxiated by pollution travelling through south LA. Still, he held it together long enough to find a job on a rose farm. For a month he put on a leather apron and picked flowers till his hands bled, but on his first payday he went on a wild drinking binge and was eventually picked up by the police.

It was 1996 then and the border was no longer just an ideal. It was a hard tangible thing, forged out of steel, barbed wire and intolerance. It had become a politicians’ tool, a $235 million sop to real Americans, the ones with a vote. Following the devaluation of the peso, 1995 was a year of economic crisis in Mexico and the floodgates opened. In came Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Safeguard, Operation Hold the Line. Under the new crackdown everyone got scrutinized, employers and illegals alike – and what, the police asked Benjamín, was a campesino doing with a letter from the University of California if not being offered work of some kind? Benjamín couldn’t remember what he answered, but maybe in his drunkenness, in his numbness, he boasted of friends in high places – thinking anything was better than having his ass dumped ninety miles south of the border again. So the police contacted the INS who contacted the head of staff at the University of California – and finally, finally, this particular deus ex machina, thirteen years in the making, came full circle.

‘Mummy. For God’s sake!’ Jack’s voice finally breaks through. He wipes charcoaled hands on his jeans. ‘You’re so unfair.’

‘Yes, you’re so unfair,’ Emmy echoes. ‘You always tell us we don’t listen to you, but you never listen to us. Never.’

‘I’m sorry. What were you saying?’