Finally, despite the confused satnav and a printed map seemingly designed to hide rather than reveal, I arrive at the entrance to a ranch that I see with a jolt is named Canaan, the letters formed in a ceramic mosaic built into stone pillars, the tiles dust-smeared and chipped. And as I drive through and head down a long dirt track without a dwelling in sight, it seems to me not that I am entering a Promised Land but some remote Charles Manson hideout from where I might never return. But as I venture further I know I have finally come to the right place because, turning a bend, I pass the same type of poles seen in the video. Again, about eight feet high, constructed from wood and decorated with ceramic tiles, and garlanded with wreaths of feathers, bones and shells. There are words written in different places but too small to be read from my distance.

The house itself is made from stone and wood, the lineaments of some old adobe still distinguishable at its core, with more modern appendages added on in a haphazard way. To both sides are outbuildings, including something that almost resembles a barn, and beside it a corral where four horses fidget and flick their heads at flies. A veranda shadows the house frontage, so when I pull up I don’t see him at first and when I get out into the flaring heat of the sun it is only his disembodied voice I hear.

‘You’re a long time coming, Mikey. Almost thought you weren’t going to make it. Welcome to Canaan.’

He steps into the parabola of light and I look at him in the flesh for the first time in over forty years and for a second time struggle to recognise him. Dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, the strength of body that once distinguished him has deserted, leaving a gaunt figure, his face sun-spotted and grizzled. He stands with hunched spindle shoulders, his thin neck a stretch of tightened skin. He wears a red bandana and his hair has long gone, only the faintest smear on his temples hinting at its former colour. This old man no longer bears any resemblance to the Ignatius Donovan I once knew so much as a braidless tribute act to Willie Nelson, marooned in a desert waste land. But when he called me Mikey the cadence was exactly the one with which I was familiar and suddenly time finally collapses in on itself, the decades rushing from my grasp like a deck of cards in free fall. His voice speaking my name ricochets in my memory, bouncing off things I had heard him say, the conversations in his car and elsewhere, and so, despite his appearance, in the single use of that word I find myself slipping back through all the intervening years into the relationship we once had, regardless of my determination to establish something utterly different.

‘Come aboard, Mikey,’ he says. ‘Step inside out of the heat. Meet Melissa.’