When the group finally split, Estella chose to stay close to her co-sardine from the truck. Though he now regretted telling her, he was heading for California and so was she, to Santa Monica. She had no idea where Santa Monica was but I imagine she liked the name. Two men, for reasons no one would ever be quite sure of, elected to go with them. The campesino watched them vigilantly for signs of bad behaviour but they were soon far too busy retching and gasping to think of behaving in an ungentlemanly fashion towards the woman and child who were now nominally in their charge.

Estella is weak and dizzy. She can feel her tongue, a great swollen thing all but blocking her throat. She hasn’t felt this sick since the first few months of her pregnancy when she’d become quite adept at chucking up in the flowerbeds of her neighbours’ gardens back in Chocan. She’d had bad luck in pregnancy too. The birth had been breech and she could remember the agony as the old witchdoctor turned the baby inside her with her bare hands. At the time she thought it worth the pain to bear a white child. Well white-ish, anyway. At least the lottery of skin colour had favoured her. Of her four sisters and two brothers she was by far the lightest. But when the baby had finally been hauled out, she’d still been shocked by how alien he’d looked. Even the campesino, once or twice looking into the baby’s blue eyes to make sure he was still alive, sussed something a little untoward with his parentage. Now he no longer wastes precious energy turning round to check the baby. For the last few hours he has felt his own life leaking out through the pores of his body and he has nothing left to sweat. When the two other men, the pair who had got drunk on King beer the night before, suddenly sit down within a hundred yards of each other and fail to get up again, the campesino knows he must find water or they will all die.

By the time the truck rumbles towards them along the dirt road, the campesino has given up on his crossing. He no longer cares whether the truck is full of swim-suited Miss Mexico contestants dispensing maps and free Fantas or fully armed agents of the USA Border Patrol. It was 1983 then and the divide between America and Mexico was not the great monstrous thing it is now. In 1983 the border was still an ideal, just a concept really, and it was supposed to be easy to cross. If you didn’t make it the first time, you cracked it the second or the third or the fourth. So when the dust from the approaching truck is almost upon him, he steps out from behind the scrub and waves the wave of a resigned man.