[Preface. ONE. TWO. THREE. FOUR. FIVE. SIX. SEVEN. EIGHT. NINE. TEN. ELEVEN. TWELVE. THIRTEEN. FOURTEEN. FIFTEEN. SIXTEEN. SEVENTEEN.]

If in the end the pilgrims had managed to obtain about eight hours sleep, this was, alas, between them. On an individual level they each felt that the sleep they had grabbed was a couple of stunning pockets in the air rather than the normal rich abysses.

Sitting out at the picnic tables in the early-morning sunshine, Pablo was irritated by how his mind seemed to be tumbling around his eyes like a hectic butterfly. It was only able to glance off each new impression or idea rather than land on it. He knew that a good malty espresso would bring a grip back to his consciousness. What they called coffee in this hostel was, however, as characterless as rainwater.

He had not been the first to turn out that morning. When he reached the French doors he saw the slender figure of Erica waiting in the sunshine beyond the tables. Although her back was to him, he could read at once from the slightly infernal atmosphere prickling around her that her face was scowling and hot. Next Zbigniew had appeared, looking very patient and in his grey suit rather like (Pablo thought) a father who is collecting his daughter when the lights come up after a Saturday-night disco. He spread out a consoling arm and she stepped in to be enfolded.

Lukas was also watching this couple. He and Blanca were sitting in the breakfast area and trying to dig dollops of some shiny, slithering white grease out of miniscule plastic pots, to scrape onto heels of old bread. Lukas was growling at the fussiness of the labour and at the scarcity of moisture that had been transferred to his bread. He writhed wolfishly in his chair and then lurched forward, baring his teeth. Blanca glanced up at him. His voice broke out over the breakfast pots, sounding unbearably tuneless and croaking. “Can we get away from these guys today?”

Her face became hard like a mask. “Is it really the time, man? We all shared this wonderful thing, where we sang…  uh… this….” There was a click in her voice and she had found the word. “This ceremony,” she rasped diplophonically. “You want to spoil this, eh?”

“I have my needs. We have a good time when we are making love.” He said this as if it was a fair summary of some minor practical consideration, like the weather on the road. “And we are never alone now.” He flapped his slice of bread to indicate the couple who were departing outside. “They are assholes and everybody hates them but hey, they are smart in how they are doing it. They are getting out there now, with the birds and rabbits and all the things that are making love in the fields, in the forests, out in the sun…” He glanced down at the buttery slime on his blade and frowned, as if he had just noticed it for the first time.

Blanca hesitated. She wanted to insist that they must stay in with this current gang of pilgrims but she then sensed that there was a terrible trap pit gaping beneath such a suggestion. Just one more step and there would be a cold plunge and then, up again at the bottom, she and Lukas would be transformed into those unrecognisable beings with glaring witch heads who were hissing spiteful abuse at each other. Relationships had always ended like this for her, much as a supermarket always ends at a payment. So she nodded, scrunching together the napkin on her plate and sitting back. “Well, let’s go then.”

She hoped that he was not offended by how brave she must be looking. But to her relief he sniggered, a sound that she realised she had not heard for several days now. “Don’t worry, they will catch us up again, these motherfuckers. We will be sitting outside a bar in the afternoon, drinking our vermouth and rolling a cigarette, and they will all come piling in.” He pulled that old smirking face that she found had similarly slipped from her mind. “‘You have dared to try to escape from us but muh haw haw it is impossible!’”

“I will get our bags,” she said.

In the lobby she saw that while she and Lukas had been plotting to get out ahead, others were already ahead of the getting ahead. James was standing waiting at the reception desk, his green jacket on and his rucksack now up on his back for the day. Blanca was about to call out a displeased “good morning” to him when Sarah had stepped between them.

Sarah was addressing him in a new, ringingly genteel voice that Blanca had never heard before. Then this voice had dropped but Blanca nonetheless caught a furtive mention of “books.”

Ah yes, a brief outline flickered against the wall of her mind. Lindsay had been trying to find some new novel to read.

James cocked a critical eye at Lindsay, who had been standing behind Sarah, and his voice was surprisingly cool. “What titles do you have?” She bent down and began to hurriedly unpack books from her backpack in a little pile for him.

Sarah did not look very happy. Perhaps she had assumed that James would benevolently present her daughter with a book and that they could both then scamper victoriously away. She was unprepared for a negotiation.

Lindsay held up Oliver Twist with an air of aplomb. She could have been a magician who had just produced a live rabbit and who was expecting applause, congratulations, and an immediate capitulation. Yet Blanca frowned at this book; its cover was unpeeling and its pages were sliding out of their binding like a clumsily-shuffled deck of cards. A story that could be only held together with a firm hand. But she was not ready for James’s reaction and neither was Lindsay. 

He laughed. 

“No, no,” he admonished. “Come on, this isn’t serious. It isn’t anything.”

Lindsay quivered in disbelief.

Inwardly, Blanca cackled. So a fight was on, was it?

“¡Arrea!,” she sneered. “Listen to this loco! This is one of the biggest books in the world, it is a film, a musical, that great song… ‘Oleaverrr, Oleaverrr, whoever heard of this boy wanted more…’ eh what do you mean ‘nothing’?”

“There is no reality in it,” James said mildly. “It is a book set on a planet where no humans have ever visited, a planet without any oxygen-based life. Oliver is more a vapour than a human being… there has never been any child like him… he just isn’t real. It is nothing. A book in which nothing is real. Everybody got going is a cartoon – utterly, wretchedly good or evil or just silly – and by dint of this scheme nothing is real.”

“Don’t nod like you are listening to Socrates,” Blanca raged at Lindsay. “When you are young like her people are good or evil, this is real life… it is what life is like. It is still what life is like for me, eh, actually. Don’t spoil the book for her. It is a great book.”

“Well, some reality is smuggled in in the Artful Dodger,” James conceded. Lindsay realised that for the first time he had looked her directly in the eye and strangely, for such an airy, minor-looking man, his eyes gleamed like steel. It was like when some glint from a melancholy sunset is caught against the eye of a teddy bear sitting on a bookshelf, giving the toy a strange nobility, a suddenly unearthly aloofness. “The Dodger is a role-model for a young person, not Oliver, who is all the time really being carried along a wave of privilege. Just a wimp and an aristocrat, all being carried along on a wave. But what’s next?”

Lindsay was knock-kneed in trepidation. What she had thought was her finest book had belched humiliatingly and expired. Miserably, she presented her second: The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier.

“Ah, no, this is good.” To Lindsay’s relief, James was nodding approvingly. “Unfortunately, though, I know it inside-out. It is like being at home in my own kitchen; I know where absolutely everything in it is. I read it again only a couple of years ago.”

“But you should read it again,” he advised Lindsay. “It might mend the mischief done by Oliver Twist. A pickpocket is the best character in this novel too.”

Blanca smiled but at the mention of pickpocketing her eye had sidled inquiringly over Sarah. It struck her that whenever Lindsay’s mother was flushed out of polite, transactional exchanges, into spontaneous conversation, she promptly faded away, becoming rather like that reception girl who had just collected James’s key and who was now left listening helplessly to them quarrelling.

It was increasingly hard for Blanca to understand, in fact, what made Sarah the adult and Lindsay the child. They looked like a pair of scared, blundering children who were egging each other on and cringing over each other’s mistakes, within some puny, flimsy world that they were both rolling along between them.

“And there is a third?”

Yet Lindsay did not appear to be even bothering with the third. Looking away, she held up An Underwater Adventure by Willard Price.

James also looked away, his head tilted unreadably, as if he was at once looking down his nose at this book and glowering jealously at it from under his eyebrows. But there was no mistake, Blanca realised. He wanted this one.

“We can trade,” he volunteered.

Blanca bounced forward, as eager and laughing as champagne coming out of the bottle. “Eh, don’t mess this up,” she urged Lindsay. “We make him pay hard for this one.”

James smiled. Blanca appreciated that there was something rather childlike about him too, a strange passivity at the base of his character. At best he could be fun or diverting but he did not really belong in any serious conversation amongst adults, any more than a beach ball or a frisbee would do.

Blanca wanted to bring Lindsay in. “So what is so good about this book? Sell it to him.”

To Blanca it appeared as old and tattered as Lindsay’s other books, with the exception of the softly jolly tropical colours on its cover. Despite the cheerfulness of the turquoises, the cover was illustrated with a scene in which a monstrous shark had swerved into the so-far unpanicked vicinity of two athletic young divers. Blanca fancied that most of the storytelling in this book would be struggling to reach where its cover had arrived at. The characters would be silly plastic young bimbos, speaking in a slang from the 1970s, and floating in a plastic pool with their plastic sea monsters.   

Wobbling with unconfidence, Lindsay’s voice sounded painfully pure and clear, as if she was a soloist in a choir. “I… uh… I read it very quickly… uh…” her voice faltered, “you read it so quickly you can’t remember what happens.” She laboured to recover. “It is very exciting,” she insisted emphatically.

“It is an adventure, a super page-turner,” Blanca warned James. “And so what do you have?”

James presented The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides by James Boswell. Blanca gazed at it in bewilderment. Next she had grabbed at it and she was leaning over it, inspecting its pages.

“Is this an adventure? Eh, that book has them fighting a shark. This book will need to have them fighting something just the same as a shark. They do this, in the Hebrew… the Heebrad…?”

“Hebrides. But no,” James confessed, “it is not really an adventure. The opposite, in fact. The characters become even more like themselves rather than being changed.”

“This is no good. The girl reads adventures. What is next?”

Whereas Lindsay had proceeded from trout to tiddlers in what she held up, James’s books grew only more stupendous. He unveiled Die Traumdeutung by Sigmund Freud. “It means ‘the interpretation of dreams,’” he informed them importantly.

Blanca was outraged. “This guy was one of the biggest perverts in the world. He should have washed out the whole brain with soap instead the mouth…”

“This is unfair. She will have an experience reading this book.”

“She would have an experience being tossed around the town square by a bull…”

James blinked and nodded eagerly. “Yes, all these things are necessary to shaping the psyche, as the doctor had explai…”

Blanca peered at the book. “It’s not even written in English…”

“German is English,” James protested. “Just without the French words. A more urgent, serious English.”

“She can’t read it if it’s not written in English.”

“Why, I think she can. She would start by chanting its words out loudly and slowly and after a few months…”

“I am not marching along up and down the hills next to some little Adolf Hitler…”

“Listen,” James appealed to them, “I am not joking about this. If someone had made me read Die Traumdeutung in its original German when I was ten years old, I would be at least eighty by now. I would have jumped forwards many decades in my personal development.”

“You want to turn Lindsay into a little German old lady? No – no, no, no, no! Ah, but what is this?” Blanca swept up a greasy manuscript that was hanging loose in James’s arms and she held it up to the bright sunshine that was already at the window. To her amusement James began hopping around her like a schoolboy, making futile attempts to grab it back.

“No, what is it really?” Blanca studied the pages. “It is a book that has not been written yet?”

“Its working title is The Roll of the Bells. It’s being written by a friend of mine… for publication, yes, but on a website where we post fiction.”

Blanca opened a random page and read.

Jesus, she thought.

An oak inn-sign, where still the last ray of that day’s sun trembled in the treacly varnish. “See if there are rooms,” Laurus commanded. He stood out in the road, sucking with a boar’s ferocity on his nutmeg cigarette, his eyes white and unseeing and unheedful of the ash that fell in fluttering dots across the lapel of his black trench coat.

Brenda, alone, much like the single osprey feather pinned to her velvet turban, complied. “Ah, what is it, it is nothing…” she breathed.

Within, her entrance had startled a lad from his bumblebee questing around the drawers of the reception desk. An ephebe with gently peach-textured skin and hay-sweet sunnylocks. “May me and mi novio a room procure?,” Brenda murmured, the mead of her voice dropping to a thrilling, lucent honey.  

“There are no more rooms,” the boy blushed.  “There is only… a mang-er.” He unhitched the unfamiliar word selfconsciously, as if unfastening a form of undergarment that he had never encountered before. “To get the key you can do me a special favour.”

And his eyelashes swept the air ever so lightly, in a skilful, eloquent movement, to indicate downwards.

Wheezing, Brenda clambered to her knees.

Once she was deep into fellating him, a strange jarring impression seemed to cleave her brain into two separately-comprehending fractures. It was rather like when a mirror is shattered and the shards reflect dissociated details from within the same interior.

Or it was as if in the youth’s ecstasy his face had been projected like a torch beam across this room and it was now watching her from the far doorway. Yet it was no longer bathed in triumph and it was instead sopped in a shram of dismay. And below, this face seemed to be wringing a pair of pale hands disembodiedly. 

Then Basilio, the owner of the albergue, slumped into the room. “Oh mama!” he wailed. “I am in Hell, I have walked in on Sodom and Gomorrah, here in my own parlour.”

“Bbrrgggggguuhhhhh,” Brenda tried to respond anxiously. But her mouth was still full. 

Next the truth had flared, white and refulgent. The young man who had sought “the favour” did not even work here. And it was then that Brenda remembered Gabe and Whynot, the twin monks who haunted this stretch of the pilgrimage, one angelic and the other dastardly, one a diligent distributor of alms and the other a merciless highwayman…

Blanca tittered. “I cannot understand any of this. It is worse than the German must be. It is like a fantasy story, set in the Middle-Aged times?”

James looked startled. The question had never occurred to him.

“It is not finished,” he pointed out quickly. “It is unfair to take it by surprise in that way. My friend begins with a story that is raw and realistic and next I make improvements to the style. His first language is not English, you see. This is what you have just read, the story with my corrections. But it will go back to him and he will pour more realism into it. In such a manner we attack it from different angles and we will eventually knock it into something human.”

“But Lindsay can’t read this. I would say that nobody actually can…”

“Hmmm, yes it is as if a schoolchild is seeing a teacher first thing in the morning, when he is unshowered and unshaven. But eventually it might be presentable for a mass market and for readers like her. It needs to be real but also ideal. The characters are alright; it is just finding a way of showcasing them.”

Blanca handed the manuscript back.

“The most difficult thing is for it to be real,” James continued, largely to himself. “Always little mistakes, subtle errors, slip through, however vigilant you are.” He paused, dissatisfied.  Why was Blanca smiling with such a mysterious, knowing expression, considering that she could have hardly absorbed anything of the manuscript during the couple of seconds that she had been scanning it?

Buttoning An Underwater Adventure inside his inner jacket pocket, he puzzled and fretted.

“We have to go!” Lukas called merrily to Blanca from the doorway. “Now you like bothering that little girl more even than you do smoking your million cigarettes.” They all admired his sparkling merriment and only Blanca detected the irritation swerving vastly below the surface.

Blanca apologised to Lindsay. “I’m sorry but me and Lukas want to get out and walk today. We will meet again in the evening probably.” She turned to Lukas. “Eh, I was helping to find a book for her.”

“Oh I have tons of books.” His rucksack happened to be unbuttoned and he abruptly flung a hand into it. Blanca suddenly wondered why it had not occurred to her to ever approach him about the book problem.

She now saw that there were indeed several paperbacks strewn amongst Lukas’s belongings. He retrieved one and stared at the cover. “I read this on the plane; you can have it if you like.” He tossed it to Lindsay and, helplessly, dutifully, with a clap of her hands, she caught it.

It was hard not to quail a little at the sight of it. An inky wash with a pig’s head weeping blood and the words Lord of the Flies.