It’s some kind of emergency station constructed by one of the ranchers who owns some of the land that is frequently used by those who cross. There are water barrels, tinned food, printed maps in different languages and lists of phone numbers, but most surprisingly of all there is what looks like some kind of totem pole. The camera traces its form in close-up. It is slender, about eight feet high, and appears to be a combination of carved wood and ceramic mosaic. The tile colours are blue and green with lines of mirrored glass and frequent inserts of shells and what might be slivers of bleached bone. There is a short crosspiece a foot from the top that is fringed with feathers. We are given no explanation as to what the pole is or its purpose. The light frazzles on the tiles and dances back against the camera. Is it some ancient religious artifice? But why is it here with the water and supplies? And it’s not the only one because, as the camera pans across the landscape, more appear. Perhaps it’s some burial ground. Then we’re looking over the bars of a wooden gate at an adobe-style ranch building with white walls and a veranda. A woman, possibly Mexican, possibly partly Native American, with waist-length silver hair, is walking towards the camera waving her arms and telling whoever is filming to leave, that they are trespassing and have no right to be there. A man lurks on the veranda, a dog lapping round his legs, and then it comes towards the gate and begins to bark. The camera ignores it and focuses on the man. It brings his face into close-up and then freeze-frames. The subtitles ask me if I recognise anyone. At first I don’t. All the changes, the ravages of unforgiving time, and then I shake my head, not because I don’t but because I do, and as I sit staring at the frozen screen I slowly realise that the face belongs to Ignatius Donovan.

What does it mean to have this sudden and unexpected re-emergence from the past of two former men whose existence until this moment has been confined to my memory? My default mode is anxiety, of not feeling safe, and I feel that rising steadily. I like if at all possible to have my past under some kind of control in my head, but the appearance of these two revenants threatens that attempt at self-sustaining composure.

Corley’s contact, however tentative, has placed me, if not exactly under suspicion of complicity – I like to think my unblemished CV would surely allay such a crude conclusion – but no doubt, with others, I am being watched in the hope that they will eventually catch him making further contact and before he does whatever it is that they fear so much. Part of me wants to simply walk up to the black SUV and tell them that I don’t know where my former friend is in the world, but then I ask myself whether I would tell them if I did know and suddenly am not sure of the answer. And it’s because everything in this life gets more complicated when the personal gets involved, no matter how much time and effort the system gives to depersonalising the contexts in which they wish you to operate. So even history itself is no longer laid out before you in accessible objective facts but becomes jumbled and coloured in your memory by the intensely personal shimmer of things that passed through your being, almost like light slowly filtering through the stained glass of seemingly random moments recalled. But without an overall design or pattern, so that it’s impossible to make full sense of it. And while these fragments from the past are inconsequential in comparison to the broad sweep of events, and despite their supposedly lesser significance, they are what linger in the memory and continue to shape the view we have of ourselves and what happened to us.