The Indian peers again at the children through the window. Unexpectedly, a dimple opens up in his cheek. ‘Winfred,’ he says. ‘Winfred Tennyson. I’m with the Border Patrol.’ He touches his finger to the brim of his hat. ‘Glad to have been of service, ma’am.’

‘A delight all round,’ I mutter at his departing back-side. God knows, there used to be a time when you could charm your way out of a simple speeding fine. ‘Hey, wait!’

I stick my head out of the window. How on earth did he know we were heading to the Temerosa road? ‘Wait!’ I shout. But it’s too late. Winfred Tennyson adjusts his hat and under the darkening edge of afternoon eases his bulk behind the wheel of his patrol truck and pulls out quickly into the road.

4

‘Have you ever been to England, Benjamín?’ I ask casually.

‘Noh, Alice.’ He puts down the London Museum Guide and hastily straightens up.

‘I mean that’s not one of them, but there are some good books here.’ I wipe the spine of the Roget’s Thesaurus with a damp cloth, ‘Borrow anything you want, okay?’

Benjamín’s eyes flick towards me by way of polite acknowledgement. He takes the knife from his back pocket and slices through the masking tape on the next crate.

‘What about this, have you ever seen this?’ I hand him a Folger’s Guide to Mexico.

‘Noh, Alice, no.’ He scrunches up the used masking tape and yanks open the flaps.

I like the way Benjamín drops my name into every sentence as if it were a dot of punctuation. You’d feel compelled to shoot an American who did the same, but the cadence of Benjamín’s English is sing-song. When he says ‘no’, for instance, he lands on the ‘n’ as if falling from a great height, but as the ‘o’ is approached his voice swoops up again before coming to rest quaveringly on top, turning what would serve for anyone else as a curt negative into a multi-syllable word capable of expressing a whole range of other nuances – in this particular case, surprise.