‘Okay, soon,’ Emmy agrees placidly. Emmy has a tenderer heart, it’s true, but before we get all judgemental here, one of her greatest joys in life is to beat her teddies to a pulp so that she can have the pleasure of comforting them afterwards. Jack grunts with disgust at the malleability of his sister and within seconds I hear the Klingon signature tune of his Game Boy pinging into life. I watch in the rear-view mirror as his fingers and thumbs fly across the key pad as if he were typing up a deposition for the impending trial of Jack Coleman versus his mother. Down goes his head and down it stays for the remainder of the journey, impervious to any and all feeble exhortations to admire the view.

After about five miles of sandy track, I steer the truck over cattle grids marked with orange and black diagonal tin strips, which, like the facade of the cabins, have been shot through with bullet holes. The track becomes rockier as it cuts through the mountain. The verge on the hill side is sculpted into long crumbly sand stalagmites and above these, dotted between bushes and scrubby trees, cacti of every kind are growing. I don’t yet know any of their names but some look like giant porcupines, others like green afros which would make ferocious gangland weapons if used for headbutting purposes. The south side of the slope is degraded and bare, blistered by sun. ‘Quick, look!’ I tell the children. A roadrunner, comically identical to the cartoon version of itself is running below us, parallel to the car. The truck veers around another corner and it disappears out of sight.

‘Did you see that, Emmy? Jack?’

‘See what?’ Jack says.

Our nearest town, Ague, turns out to be a pretty strange place. Population 1,000, it’s thankfully far too small to have had any of the McDonald’s, Wendy’s or Burger King franchises stuffed down the throat of its main drag, but the juxtaposition of old Victorian buildings – hotel, post office and saloon in its centre – and the more modern adobe slabs of a petrol station, Uzed car business and hardware store on its outskirts (Ague’s centre and outskirts, by the way, being no more than a couple of blocks from each other) leaves the town looking like a set for some post-modernist spaghetti western which ran out of money just before shooting started.

Even after we turn into the main road, there’s little traffic. Now and again we overtake a pickup with a spindly looking cowboy behind the wheel, flatbed weighed down with long planks of wood, and a beady cross-bred dog balancing precariously on top. Behind us, an ancient maroon Buick creaks to a stop at the lights, and drawing into the parking space in front of us is a Cadillac whose bodywork is so beat up that the butter-scotch truck looks right at home as I edge it in alongside.