He was twenty-three, and it was his first time in America. He found the company of Americans made him stiff and formal, though these were qualities he was unaware of in himself before. His vocabulary felt embarrassingly large and accurate, though in conversation he had a recurrent sense of inarticulacy. He was doing research for a doctoral thesis, but knew he was ignorant of the simplest things in the landscape he had come, in part, to see. Still, he anticipated discovery; as he sat frowning into the sun, with little breezes curling over his naked back, he felt he had Americas in him – he had never been so alert or so free.

A little way off from the concrete standing he scuffed over something white and squatted down to pick it out of the dust. It was a rough piece of sanitary porcelain, about three inches square, with the letters SEMPE on it, perhaps part of SEMPER, forever. He smiled at that, and because there was also an architect called Semper, so very different from Frank Lloyd Wright. With a quick suppression of ethical doubt, he opened his knapsack and dropped it in.

Back at the pick-up his driver sprawled behind the open passenger-door and smoked a cigarette. His blue T-shirt was dark with sweat, and his cheeks were red in his wide brown face. He raised his eyebrows as if to say “All done?,” and Robin said, “Did you get it cleaned out?”

The boy flicked away the stub and stood up, shrugging his head from side to side and tugging up his belt. The open bed of the vehicle wouldn’t have passed any very exacting inspection, but it was probably good enough for this dusty country. Robin assumed that no worse damage had been done. “Go back,” said the boy, in a way that was both a question and its answer, but also held a hint of a rebuff.