Travels with my Donkey

determination, as if startled and angry to find himself on some stupid wet road in Spain. 'Right, you bastard, let's get this over with,' said his quarter-to-three ears and brusquely striding gait; after five weeks of trying to tap into his reserves, I'd somehow struck the mother lode. I was always astonished by the power and heat Shinto managed to synthesise from raw grass, but the human body is a less efficient machine; fuelled by a pair of unenthusiastically ingested Marie biscuits I struggled to keep up.
    About 3 clicks up the hill a tiny old woman motored past, elbows working furiously either side of a colossal pack. As I watched she slowed, then stopped, clasping and unclasping her left hand around something that wasn't there. She turned and walked back towards me, dead eyed and robotic. 'Ma canne,' she muttered blankly as our paths crossed. Her stick was back in Villafranca, and she was going to get it. I thought about the 6-kilometre round trip that lay ahead and felt my pre-knotted innards contract in nauseous empathy. Painfully accustomed as we now were to the medieval concept of speed, the unclaimed clothes and even cameras at almost every refugio reception emphasised that this pain was only bearable if every step was a step in the right direction.
    The N6 passed beneath the motorway that had sucked away all its traffic, and slalomed us up to a village where barrels the size of covered wagons rotted under thunderstruck oaks.
    Something wretched happened to me at a Super Spar in the next settlement along: driven in by an enfeebled lust for Coca-Cola, I watched in frail disbelief as the girl at the till emptied her cash register in laborious demonstration of an inability to give precise change for a €20 note. 'That's fine, really,' I pleaded, pressing the money at her and demanding to be overcharged, a display my family and friends would certainly have found interesting. At first she didn't understand, but when she did I found myself fixed with the sort of bewildered distress you might expect after shaking an infant niece awake to tell her Father Christmas was a drunk.
    Running on pure pilgrim power I stumbled on after my bloody-minded donkey, pausing now and then to do something brief but terrible behind a tree, supplementing the arc of tissued awfulness that backed every convenient trunk and bush along the camino. It was flat now, but soon the dense rain that had been screening the worst of the forthcoming peaks came down to remind us that this was very nearly Galicia, the urinal of Spain. Cyclists sluiced by, supplementing the poncho-fed canal running down into the top of my boots. The drumming on my plastic head-cowl built to a spastic crescendo, and when it got there Shinto abruptly slammed in the anchors. He just stopped dead at the side of the road, Mohican mane flattened, an unbroken stream trickling from each horizontal ear. I looked at him: all he needed was a Hamlet smoking soggily in the corner of that flabby, wet gob.
    Lacking the wherewithal for a showdown I leant back against the hard-shoulder crash barrier, blowing drips off my nose for perhaps ten minutes,- then, as suddenly as he'd stopped Shinto started again, covering a brisk half-click before coming to a jarring halt once more. It was as if he'd been switched off, as if water had got in his electrics. During the fourth cycle we approached a large petrol station, and noting the generous canopy over its attached car wash I pulled off the road. Passing the pay booth I exchanged glances with a pump attendant through the glass. It's a tough job, said his. And nobody has to do it, mine replied.
    No one was claiming this as a high point: not me as I disconsolately fumbled biscuit parts into my damp and trembling maw, not Shinto as he browsed the dieselly weeds poking up behind the jet-spray lance. There was evidently some sort of quarry hereabouts, and every two minutes or so a gigantic truck full of boulders would pull up with an explosive pneumatic hiss, sending Shinto off in panicky, taut-roped semicircles around the compressor I'd lashed him to. Shuffling over to tighten the knot I caught sight of my reflection in the spattered Plexiglas: tanned but consumptive, a wasted, refugee vacancy in that hollow face.
    After an hour the rain abated, and after another we packed up and tentatively set forth. The hills, now that we could see them, were stacking up dramatically around us, the occasional rugged precipice topped with the ruin of a castle