Travels with my Donkey by Moore Tim

Author:Moore, Tim [Moore, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

'Is your donkay?'

There was a man at my bed, but he didn't sound as though he was about to smother me. I opened my eyes: once more, almost everyone had left. The man had kind but terribly furnaced features, the face of an amiable wino. 'I have also a donkay outside. If you come to the garden we can be talking.'

Twenty minutes later we were, across one of the pub-garden trestle tables out the front. Another ass-hauling pilgrim! This was an auspicious encounter: Donkey Livingstone, I presume?

Jean was from Belgium, and in the early stages of an extraordinary undertaking: from his home near Brussels he would lead Pilou to Santiago, then to Rome, and finally to Jerusalem. The pilgrim hat-trick — I was dumbfounded, and utterly humbled; in that moment I confess to coveting my neighbour's ass. 'Yes,' he coughed, rolling up what even at 7.30 was evidently not his first cig of the day. 'But I have five years.' He lit it, sucked in, blew out. 'This is the best thing I can do. That anyone can do.'

It wasn't a good time to expect positive reciprocation of this statement. The nocturnal goings-on had merely supplemented the groaning catalogue of bad things that were still better than what I was doing, a catalogue which when Shinto had started up again at about 2.30 was updated to include borstal and getting your face stuck in a badger set. Instead, I said, 'How do you get him over bridges?'

Jean smiled, deepening a dozen already deep creases. 'It's not so much a problem. I attache the long corde, and I walk to the other side, and I wait.'

'Wait?'

'For fifteen minutes.'

'Right, and then you pull like buggery.'

Jean might have been Belgian, but he had a Frenchman's flair for facial outrage. 'No! He come across after five minutes.' He straightened his back, intimidating me just as Pilou had intimidated Shinto. 'Never pull a donkay.'

There was an awkward silence here, but I'd learnt by now not to fill it with a blurted enquiry into what had inspired this epic mission. It was bad form to ask someone what their pilgrimage was about, on a first date at least. Particularly so in Jean's case: I found out later that the year before his wife had died. He'd had Pilou ever since, and despite knowing nothing about donkeys had trained him up himself.

It was odd the way information passed along the line, a Chaucerian chain of news, tittle-tattle and, yes, slanderous, unfounded rumour. But at my speed you never heard who or what lay up ahead, only what was coming from behind, Chinese-whispered on by passing pilgrims. In the previous week I'd seen rival donkey crap on the camino and Shinto had certainly smelt it: the reason I hadn't heard about Jean and Pilou was that until the day before he'd been ahead.

'You're saying I'm faster than you?'

'Of course,' said Jean. 'I have five years. But also I don't walk on Saturday so much, and today, on Sunday, never.

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