Travels with my Donkey

the church was pebble-dashed. If there was no sign, even the most archaeologically tenuous, of the King's Palace that gave the town its name, then I was accustomed to that. So it had been with the phantom three castles of Triacastela, and the many unhospitalled Hospitals I'd passed through.
    A couple of staircase-circumnavigating detours led to an encounter with Evelyn and Petronella, turned away at the seam-bursting refugio and now in search of alternative accommodation. 'Could you save a twin room for me and my brother?' I asked as they prepared to walk off. Then I looked round and he was sauntering up the alley towards us.
    Group hug-ins had become second nature for most at this stage of the pilgrim game, though for an Englishman they were at best fourth. Extricating Simon from an entwinement of hot female arms I introduced him first to Shinto, and then, after a brotherly parade about the more obscure backways of Palas de Rei, to the art of lashing a donkey to an old bulldozer in a small area of urban undergrowth. 'Is that a bowline knot?' Simon asked, nobly excising the words 'supposed to be' as I bent the last snake double and forced him gut first down the well.
    Simon is a bit taller than me, and as is often the way with big brothers, a bit older. You won't be familiar with an early seventies ad campaign for Ideal evaporated milk, and if I am it's because of a chord deeply struck by its concise analysis of the fraternal dynamic. 'My Ideal day is a day by the river, both of us fishing, big brother and me. He shows me how, and I catch the big one...' I can't remember the last line, but at the end they both go home to enjoy some apposite comestible reward, perhaps condensed flan scooped snarlingly from a rusty bucket with clawed hands.
    As boys we never actually went fishing, but there were plastic Spitfires to be camouflaged, and seaside dams to be constructed, and improvised explosive devices to be detonated. Simon showed me how; yet, however frailly metaphorical, I never caught the big one, unless it was a chest infection or a telling-off. So here we were, three decades on, both of us pilgrims, big brother and me. This time, I figured, I'd at last be able to show him how, but passing that tangle of rope meekly into his hands it was clear that if the tables had turned, then they'd turned full circle.
    Our wasteland was handily overlooked by the rooms Evelyn and Petronella had located, above a bar and with here-be-pilgrims clothes-pegged washing lines strung beneath each window. We swished and bundled saddlebags up the stairs and into our tiny, spartan room: nothing electrical beyond a bare bulb, and furniture fashioned from varnished pallets. 'Is it always like this?' asked Simon, gingerly propping his enormous rucksack against a wall of uncertain geometry. 'This? This is great,' I called out, flumping down on my institutional bedstead with a smile, a rusted twang and the English-language copy of El Pais Simon had been given on the plane — the first newspaper I'd been able to make proper sense of for more than forty days. If he appeared slightly taken aback then at my delight in such modest facilities, you should have seen his face when I filled the bath with Fairy Liquid and soiled clothes before jumping in.
    With crude oil still coating much of the Galician seabed a year after the Prestige tragedy, I'd been told not to expect oral contact with the region's most noted marine delicacy. But I'd seen a pulpería during my trans-Palas wanderings, and when Donald popped his head into our bar and said it was active, we necked our chilled ales and went straight down there. Pulpo is octopus, and you don't leave Galicia without trying it.
    'It's like pregnancy, this,' said Donald as our jolly, hair-tossing waitress found a place between the many jugs of rosé for a wooden plate piled with pepperoni-sized discs of chilli-slathered sea-flesh. One of Donald's daughters was imminently expecting, and when he wasn't phoning home for an update he was constructing complex analogies. 'You know, at this stage of the walk you just want it to be over with.'
    Indeed so, I thought, laboriously masticating a mouthful of Creole washers, but how awful to fuck up at this stage, like the woman I'd seen wincing hopelessly along backwards to try and spare her tendons, like one of the gay singing Italians who we saw being hobbled by his boyfriend towards a bus-stop the next morning, like the sixty-nine-year-old whose 1993 memorial,