She shrugged. ‘The Camino will provide, they say, and I reckon it has. I wasn’t planning to walk, I just set off one day. Got talking to a man and his daughter in Pamplona who said they were walking to Santiago de Compostela. They said, “Come with us,” so I did.’

Michael considered this statement, the miraculous simplicity of it. He’d been planning this adventure for eighteen months from his home in Adelaide. He’d pored over guidebooks, compared the relative merits of the different routes – distance and terrain, variety and natural beauty, the prevalence of historic landmarks, the best trail for medieval authenticity. Before he left South Australia, he’d had rooms booked at hostels and refugios all the way from Le Puy to Santiago. He had a thick wad of traveller’s cheques in his money belt, and an emergency private telephone number for the Australian Embassy in Madrid, where an old friend of his father was chargé d’affaires. All these contingencies had seemed not only prudent but also necessary, and it was only now, sitting with this pared-down, beautiful, reckless creature, that he felt foolishly over-prepared.

‘Where are they now, your Pamplona buddies?’

Alison shrugged. ‘No idea. They stopped in Laredo for two nights, but I just carried on. Are you walking on your own?’

Michael didn’t want to talk about himself, or think about himself, or about the hundreds of kilometres he still had to walk before this long, lonely journey came to an end. It hadn’t been what he’d hoped or expected. He’d anticipated enlightenment, anticipated learning something about history, or life, or himself. This was what the guidebooks promised, but instead, he seemed to be pitted endlessly against whoever was on the road in front of him. It struck him, forcefully, that he’d been doing the Camino all wrong. So he ignored her question, and asked another of his own.

‘Do you even have a map?’

She shook her head and laughed. ‘It’d be hard to go wrong, but to be honest, I don’t really mind if I get there or not,’ she said. ‘I’m not after spiritual insight, I’m just enjoying the walk. And people are kind. Incredibly kind. When somebody says, ‘Hola, buen camino!’ I just feel, y’know, cheerful, and part of this crazy joint endeavour. Don’t you? I hope you do, after all the effort you’ve gone to, all the kit you packed.’

He stared at her.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Where’ve you been sleeping?’

‘Wherever I can.’

‘Outdoors?’

‘Once or twice, but it’s been warm, hasn’t it?’

‘And do you have money?’

‘Not right now, but I can always get work in a bar, or a café, if I need to. In Pamplona, I ran the ticket office in a little cinema for a few weeks.’

God, he thought, that was seriously cool. He felt such a fool. A pampered fool.