‘Look at me, Mikey. I’m dying. Can’t you see? A strong wind blows right through me. Cancer. And there’s no get-out-of-jail card any more. No dodging this bullet.’

I express my shocked sympathy as best I can and in the moments of silence that follow I think of the afternoon when I watched him swim in the pool at Le Cercle Sportif and remember the flame of his hair disappearing and reappearing beneath the surface, the way the furious energy of his arms seemed to beat the water into submission. But callous as it might sound, does it change anything or just lend urgency to why I have come?

‘What are you doing here, Iggy? You’re clearly in danger.’

It is the first time I have ever used his Christian name and it sounds strange on my lips. The fire slithers shadows into the dark corners of the room while the sun-bleached wood hisses. At first he doesn’t answer and I wonder if he has heard my question. He stares at the fire almost as if that is where he is searching the answer and then he looks at me and suddenly I think of the wind blowing through him, the spores it carries like seed heads, slowly drifting then settling beyond the reach of help or cure.

‘The whole world’s crossing over, Mikey. The whole world. You know that already. The sea’s parting for them but sometimes it closes over them again. All of them trying to reach Canaan. And there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it and we shouldn’t try because the world is tilting and maybe it’s a way of setting itself right. Of finding its balance once more. Of paying what’s owed. You understand?’

I nod without fully grasping what is being said.

‘All over this world people trying to reach Canaan. In boats, hidden in the backs of lorries, on foot across deserts like these. Crossing over. You want to know what I’m doing here. All the world’s borders are broken and I’m helping them, Mikey, helping them cross over. Reaching out our hands to the needy. Some of them come this way across the desert – not all of them make it and there are times when it’s their lost souls singing on the wires that I hear. Sad songs trapped forever on the wires from souls lost in limbo where no hands can pull them free. If they do reach here we help them on their journey, give them supplies and shelter.’

A sudden collapse of wood in the fire sends sparks scuttling up into the darkness. We sit and stare at it, made shadows of both our former selves by time – Donovan through his physical degeneration and metaphysical reinvention of himself, I also at the hands of time and something else to which I’m not able to give a name, but which feels like the slow seep of uncertainty into what I had previously thought of as conviction.

‘Then we send them north. Just like the old days of the railroad, there’s a chain of helping hands, passing them on from place to place until they find where they want to be and are able to finally disappear into new lives. And I’m crossing over soon too, Mikey, so there’s things need to be done, things to be taken care off.’