Travels with my Donkey

excellent. Sucking on Capri-Suns we scanned this strip-lit environment and its scattering of smartly cardiganed Spanish peregrinos, the handbag-carrying hundred-clickers sharing our hallowed penultimate ponderings. And we laughed, and were still laughing when we slid our trays into the rack of empties and retired to our room.
    This was an airless, fetid eight-bunker, one of fifteen such in each barrack block, and our six fellow last-nighters were already locked into the gentle, automatic snoring of the hot and weary. Simon tutted quietly, but I felt oddly comforted, almost nostalgic: it had been four days since last I'd shared my sleep with pilgrims. And, I thought, as the mattress planks took my weight with a splintered sigh, at least an earthly lifetime before I ever would again.
     

Fifteen

     
     
    W aking in a cell crowded with grubby, mumbling strangers, pulling on underwear foot-laundered in last night's shower and still perhaps four hours from comfortable dryness, shampooing with household detergent: it seemed that almost everything I was doing I'd never do again, unless I took my trousers down at a North Korean border post.
    Or unless this whole business had indeed left me strangely changed beyond repair. Maybe I'd return and decree bedlinen a satanic extravagance. And hot water. Certainly there was a worrying moment when Simon dropped his old socks and pants in the bin — his wife Catherine had dispatched him with a disposable wardrobe — and I restrained only with difficulty an urge to retrieve them.
    Bright eyed and, yes, bushy tailed, there was the large grey animal who had earlier conducted another of these last rites, for the final time drawing his master from unconsciousness with that klaxon reveille.
    Shinto fixed me with a look hungry for adventure, eager, almost intelligent. Bareback in the hock-high meadow grass, he called to mind a gold-rimmed, hand-retouched collector's plate in a colour-supplement advert: 'Alert to the Call: a fresh spring morn, and this lively little Pyrenean jack has been exploring. (Penis not to scale.)' Scrutinising him with a sense of potent déjà vu I suddenly recalled the dream his braying had cut short: Shinto had been awarded a prize for special achievement at some sort of pet pageant, but as I led him through the crowd with applause in my ears and a Tobleroned lump of pride in my throat, there between us and the podium stood a taunting trio of stairs...
    For the last time I squatted down by his side, upturned hoof in lap and scraper in hand, the submerged percolations of that huge, warm stomach bubbling in through my ear. I might not quite have fulfilled Hanno's prediction by eating from the same bowl as my donkey, but for a week now his chaff and my crusts had shared the same sack. Sighing and puffing I packed and repacked the bags, and brushed and rebrushed Shinto, trying not to think that this was The End, the final instalment of a forty-one-day life within my life, but at the same time unavoidably aware that it was and willing myself into a suitable climactic frame of mind.
    At the mouth of every hut behind us were groups of pilgrims facing the same inner turmoil, grooming themselves for an appointment with eternity like corpses in a coffin. An ironed shirt kept flat-packed at a rucksack's fundament now retrieved for the benefit of St Jim, a comb pulled through sun-mangled hair. Simon nudged me and inclined his head, and through a bathroom window I saw two faces pressed close to a mirror: an elderly man shaving his middle-aged Down's Syndrome son.
    It wasn't until 9.00 that we left, exchanging knowing, bracing nods and half-smiles with those around us, like students massing outside the hall of their final examination. It was a steep descent round the perimeter of the Monte de Gozo complex, and as our strides lengthened with the gradient so the skies above suddenly darkened. No sooner had we broached the outskirts of Santiago proper than those guiding towers were smeared out by a flash downpour, one so violent that by the time I'd extracted and unfurled my poncho Shinto had slammed in the anchors. 'Um,' I said, through a curtain of hood drips; then there was a creak and a crank and a big up-and-over garage door beside us pivoted aloft.
    Inside the dim void thus revealed stood a blasé, full-faced mechanic, who thumbed us in whilst critically assessing the tiny cigarette stub pinched between his thumb and forefinger. In a minute there were half a dozen of us in