From a car two up, with its windows down, comes the sound of loud rap music and I can see heavily ringed fingers beating a rhythm on the outside of the driver’s door. We edge forward a few more yards. Close to the motorhome a young family huddle at the side of the road while an officer with an open notebook takes a statement. It doesn’t look as if anyone has been seriously hurt but parts of both vehicles litter the edges of the highway, the debris of bruised and twisted chrome hastily kicked to the side where light fastens and feeds on it.

We move again. This is the point of no return. We have almost drawn level with the officer directing traffic. Shades hide his eyes and, despite the heat, his crisply pressed uniform makes it look as if he has just come on duty. There is a broad wedding ring on the hand he uses to beckon us forward. Ten spies were bad, two were good. A small boy singing a chorus on a wooden pew, doing the actions with his hands. Were the ten spies bad because they couldn’t see the goodness in the Promised Land revealed to them? But did the two supposedly good tell all of the truth? I can’t be sure any more. Can’t be sure in those seconds, as we draw ever closer, who is in the back of the SUV I am driving. All it would take is for me to wind down the window. But I drive slowly on with a friendly wave of my hand and, strange as it is, in that very moment I begin to feel a lightness in what I am doing, rather than a weight, almost as if I am unburdening myself of something and yes, just maybe, this is my own act of atonement.

I am already disorientated, disconnected from the things I believe are the ballast in my life, but in some unfamiliar way I have started to think of them as cargo, cargo that has broken loose and that, when the storm hits, might be jettisoned. Jettisoned to help you stay afloat in swirling and dangerous seas. Abandoned to help you reach the safety of shore and that in life instinct might be as good a guide as any. And yes, during the long hours of that journey in my mind my silent companion becomes my secret sharer who at a particular location and at a particular time will slip ‘into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny’. After I pass him over in the parking lot of a run-down mall he shakes my hand and I wish him luck but I never see him again except a year later on the front pages of newspapers and on my television. And whatever romance Conrad’s words have engendered in my head is dispelled in time by the weight of his fate, his solitary confinement and vilification in the columns of those national papers owned by vested interests. My name comes into public proximity with his only once, when I sign a petition calling for his release from solitary and a review of his sentence. That of course is going to change if I ever let this story find a place in the world. But I care about other things now.