The comparison with what Jonathan says in his diaries is striking. But Lebanon’s Western hostages were men with pasts – men who had something to try to fit back into, men whose old lives welcomed them home rapturously when they returned – while Jonathan . . . Well, here’s somebody who had no past. Free at last, he faced a nihilist’s dream at a nightmare’s extremity: no foundation, no family, no friends, nobody at all to welcome him, no home town, no background, no education, not even a childhood he could call his own – nothing to return to. Like God Himself, he had to build his world from scratch.

He says in his diaries that he spent his first weeks in Denver in a strange, heightened state. Sudden noises caused sudden spasms of anxiety in his chest. There were sudden memories so vivid and so painful that they took his breath away. His body had a robotic feel, remote, alien, controlled, or so it seemed to him, by knobs and levers operated in some distant place; his head felt watery on top of his neck as though it were afloat in an amniotic sac. The new things seemed to glut him – the goose force-fed so its liver will fetch a higher price on the market – and having glutted him, kept coming. He hesitated just outside the door to the Home Rule Bar, considered making a dash for it, realized there was no place to go (and besides it was probably too soon after the event for a Wanted poster to have been printed in Denver), so steeled himself and entered, half in a dream.

Heavy smoke, kerosene lamps, brass, mahogany, mirrors, bottles: so far, pure Hollywood again. But the people, these heroes of the railroad, and heroes most assuredly if you run to that sort of thing – these weren’t Hollywood at all, an unwashed, unkempt, hog-like lot who drank so hard and so fast that mustaches, beards, vests, eyebrows, draggle-locks of hair on their heads or straggle-ringed bald pates: all glistened with whiskey and bubbled with suds from their beer. Towels hung along the bar to wipe away any splashings that got sucked up their noses or slopped down their backs; it was a matter of pride to wipe away with the towel nearest no matter how filthy the towel was, and filthy meant filthy: nobody washed the towels. They hung on their hooks until they rotted off and fell to the floor to mix with the tobacco-spit and dog shit that made up a permanent slurry there. Honky-tonk thumped at full volume. Dogs barked. Men shouted; they vied with each other – who could shout loudest? who longest? – they guffawed, snorted, choked on the fierce brew the Home Rule served, stamped, pounded the bar, clanked their spurs if they had them and their icons from the railway if they had those – brakemen’s light, switchman’s hammer, fireman’s stoke, whatever.

College stood at the bar, a bottle and glasses in front of him. ‘Pour yourself a drink, Johnny,’ he shouted. Speaking in a normal voice was out of the question.