‘I hate Douglas,’ he confides. ‘Oh it’s no worse than any other border town but I hate it all the same. It’s dirty and disorganized, the population is always in flux.’ He waves at a couple of tourists through the window. The woman’s dimpled legs merge under her beige shorts. She’s wearing a canary-yellow sweater tied round her shoulders and a white sun visor. Her husband is equally ubiquitous. Bald, bland, a hand held protectively to his money belt, a pair of taupe chinos belted loosely under an unmistakable all-American gut.

‘Mexico produces twice the national product it needs and yet our people are starving.’ Esteban regards the Americans sorrowfully. ‘Corruption in my country is so pervasive we now are forced to rely on tourists like these for our legal economy. If we want our children to attend the local school, Americans are the ones who pay for it. Look at them! Searching for cheap souvenirs to give their grandchildren. Maybe they don’t even know there is another Mexico to be seen. Maybe this dirty little ciudad is all Mexico will ever represent to them, a big plate of guacamole, a mediocre margarita, and the homeland of their hired help. “Hey, those Mexicanos,”’ he tries an American accent, ‘“they sure know how to sweep!”’ He moves his elbow as the waiter puts a plate of huevos rancheros in front of him. ‘But, hey, what do you expect? Mexicans are no good. Our police are corrupt. Our officials are on the take, border bandits rob and kill their own people. We are drug dealers, people smugglers and murderers. The rich live in splendour while the stomachs of the poor burn with hunger.’

‘Not your stomach, though,’ Duval remarks.

Esteban laughs throatily. ‘Food is my religion.’ He wipes egg from the corner of his mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Do you believe in God, my friend?’

‘No,’ Duval says flatly.

‘And you?’ Esteban addresses me directly for the first time.

Do I believe in God? The children are constantly asking me the same question. ‘I don’t know,’ I always tell them, and I don’t. I am religious up to a point. For instance, when I think of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I can picture God with his great flowing beard and long robes and I have no trouble picturing Jesus suffering on the cross, but when it comes to the Holy Ghost all I can think of is Casper, the friendly ghost, white, rotund, and happily whizzing round the room like a balloon from which someone has just released the air.

‘Who is more powerful,’ Emmy likes to ask, ‘God or the Queen?’

‘I don’t know, who?’

‘God,’ she squeals delightedly, ‘because God saved the Queen!’