‘You speak the lingo, I suppose?’

She nodded. ‘French, yep, and I didn’t speak Spanish, but I do now, sort of.’

He stared at her for a while, watching her drink, watching her throat as she swallowed, and then his gaze slid lower. ‘Who’s Wild Willy Barrett?’ he said, reading the words on her T-shirt. ‘Is he a cowboy?’

She laughed, a proper full-throated laugh, and he smiled to see it, the way she threw her head back, and her hair swung, and her eyes changed shape.

‘Not a cowboy then, I’m guessing,’ he said.

‘Not a cowboy,’ Alison said. ‘A musician. John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett? No? Anyway, I found this T-shirt at a jumble sale in Paris, and I figured it’d be wasted on the French, so I rescued it.’

Paris, thought Michael: a jumble sale in Paris, a cinema in Pamplona.

‘So,’ he said. ‘I now know who Wild Willy Barrett is, but who are you?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Who are you?’

She looked at him steadily. ‘I told you that already. Alison Connor.’

‘No, I mean, who are you? Are you for real?’

Daft question, she thought. What did he think? That she was a figment of his imagination? She drained her beer, and put the empty glass down on the table. ‘Yep,’ she said. ‘I’m for real.’ She stood up, and he felt a rush of panic. ‘Please don’t go,’ he said. He wanted to say never leave my side, but what kind of weirdo would say that on first acquaintance? As it was she was regarding him with uncertainty, as if she felt a little sorry for him, and couldn’t quite decide what to do. He stood up too, and dug into his pocket for some pesetas, which he piled in a heap on the table.

‘That’ll be about three times too much,’ Alison said. ‘You’ll make his week.’

He couldn’t place her English accent; she sounded nothing like any of the Brits he knew in Adelaide, and as they walked away from the bar he asked her where she was from, but she only smiled and shook her head. ‘That’s a very un-Camino question,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you know it’s all about where you’re going, not where you’ve come from?’

‘Right,’ he said. He was aware that he was following her now, uninvited, but she didn’t seem to mind. He adjusted the enormous pack, silently cursing its weight, and the way the camping stove dug into the small of his back.

She glanced at him. ‘What exactly have you got in there, pilgrim?’ she said. She was laughing at him again, and he couldn’t blame her. There was she, unfettered. There was he, with a world of material trappings on his back.

‘Where you off to now, Alison?’ he asked. ‘And wherever it is, can I tag along?’