‘What about him?’ I look back at the unconscious guard.

‘He’ll be waking up soon.’ He slips the gun into his pocket. Come on, I want you out of here.’

He grips my elbow and we hurry towards the border like Reuben’s disciples, hugging walls and looking over our shoulders until we merge with the hustle of the main strip and beyond that the reassuring exodus flowing unremittingly into the US.

The only sound in the truck is the death rattle of the aircon unit and the dry panting of Taco, who crouches precariously on the worn upholstery of the back seat like an only child starved too long of attention.

‘Alice,’ Duval says and I turn to him.

‘Don’t go home. Stay with me tonight.’ He touches his hand to my face and I feel hopelessly torn in two. I think of the children asleep in their beds and I think of Benjamín, loyal Benjamín, dozing upright in a chair outside their rooms, and part of me wants to go home, to crawl into Jack’s bed, to curl up beside the inert form of my son and hold him close for all life’s worth; but a bigger part of me wants to stay, and I know that it will be Benjamín who will take little M-E onto his lap when she stumbles from her room with a bad dream, Benjamín who will stroke away her fears, and Benjamín into whose neck she will whisper, ‘I love you, I love you with the guts of my heart,’ because I’m looking at Duval’s face in the blackness of the truck and I want to feel the heat of his skin against mine, I want to feel him inside me again before it’s too late, because tonight an invisible hand has flipped the hourglass on our time together and the sand is fast running through.

27

My heart feels enormous and swollen in my chest, like someone has put a bicycle pump to its main valves and blown it up out of all proportion with the rest of my body. I move torpidly through the cabin, a conscious sleepwalker, a dreamer, only partially following the progress of Emmy’s drawings and Jack’s cardboard box fossil dig, all the while thinking that if I pinch myself hard enough I might wake again to the sun rising and Duval kneeling on the hard ground by the fire, the smell of ashes and coffee pungent in the morning air. So when the telephone rings the noise barely penetrates my brain. Nevertheless I pick up on automatic pilot and it’s only when I hear my name for the third time that the real world comes sharply and sickeningly back into focus.

‘Alice! Alice, can you hear me?’

‘Yes . . . yes, I can hear you.’

‘Where have you been! I rang all last night, earlier this morning even!’