Duval drives with his customary one hand on the wheel, elbow resting on the ledge of the open window. He’s been quiet for some time now, equally lost in thought. Every so often he glances at me and smiles and my heart twangs noisily like a guitar string that has been plucked and won’t stop reverberating. Under my clothes I feel the imprint of his hands like burn marks against my skin. I close my eyes and feel my cheek pressed against his back as he sleeps beside me. Through the windscreen, the sun rules a cloudless sky. There’s a succession of near-blinding flashes as it glints off the sides of hundreds of mobile homes, parked together in neat rows like a metal matchbox city. ‘Wow.’ I stare through the glass.

‘Desert rats,’ Duval says.

People are moving between the trailers, engaged in some activity or another. On the edge of the road, a man lies on the hot earth looking up the backside of his motorbike.

‘How do they lead their lives? What do they do all day?’ It’s surely awe-inspiringly optimistic that humans should congregate and settle in such an inhospitable place.

Duval shrugs. ‘They wake up every morning and go and see if they have any post or see if their disability cheque has come in, then they go back and have break-fast and a couple of cigarettes, maybe they fix something on the RV, a tube, a piece of exhaust, the feed for the propane.’ He winds up his window. ‘After that they doze in a nylon deck chair that they bought at a yard sale and soak up the reflected light from the sides of the RV, their feet up on all-weather green mats nailed down with spikes. They start drinking cheap beer at lunch. In the evening they do a little gambling, cards or bingo. Politics they talk about in terms of which ethnic minority they’d blow out of the universe if they had their finger on the button.’

‘Oh come on!’

He glances in the rear-view mirror. ‘Trust me. You wouldn’t want to be a black guy in one of those places. You see them west of here, whole communities of these guys over in the yellow sands of Yuma; they roll up and down the dunes all day in those buggies, flying their American flags and waiting for some poor bastard to stumble over the border from Mexico so they can chase him till he drops in the sand.’

‘Jesus, Duval!’

Neither of us speaks for a few miles. Then Duval reaches for his cigarettes off the dashboard.

‘I should never have let you come.’

‘I wanted to.’

‘What if I can’t keep you safe?’

‘If safety was what I was looking for, I wouldn’t be here.’

‘What are you looking for?’ Against the glare of the sun, his eyes look like black discs.