When I had finished, the night was too early for sleep and so I went to look for Corley, but when I knocked on his door there was no reply. I hadn’t seen him in the best part of a week. I wondered if he was working somewhere or if he was sitting in the Continental like some spiritualist trying to summon the creative stimulus of Graham Greene. The apartments were quiet and even Madame Binh was nowhere to be found. Not wanting to go back to the solitariness of my room, I headed down the stairs and went outside where the day’s clammy heat still lingered and seemed to cling to my face like a mask. A dog sniffed round the base of the tree in front of our gates and from some bar a street away drifted the sound of music. I had started to become increasingly conscious of personal safety and didn’t want to walk far from the security of the apartments. There had been a couple of incidents in the city, mostly in the Cholon district. A week before, a shoeshine boy, no older than eleven or twelve, had exploded a grenade in a restaurant. And there was something else that had begun to shadow my days in that city and for which I had no name but that would come to be an unwanted companion in all the different places my life would take me to live.

That night I went no further than a walk to the Continental, where life appeared to continue undisturbed, and it was there coming out of the entrance that I encountered Corley. Even before he was close enough to speak to me in slurred speech, it was clear that he was drunk. In his hand was his notebook and he had a pen wedged behind his ear, which didn’t make him look rakish so much as a builder about to measure up a job in order to give an estimate.

‘You OK?’ I asked, simultaneously stretching out a hand to catch him as he lurched sideways.

‘I’ve drunk too much. I’m wasted, Mikey, and everything’s fucked. Help me get home.’

He draped his arm across my shoulder and we made an unsteady way back to our apartments. A couple of street urchins tugged at our clothes for money and then scampered round our feet so that we almost tripped, and I had to stop and pay them to go away before we could proceed again. Somehow I managed to stagger him across a busy road as Saigon’s crazed welter of motor vehicles, bicycles and motorbikes coursed frantically around us. Two young women walking in the opposite direction put their hands across their mouths to hide their laughter, releasing it only when they had passed. And a cyclo driver offered his services but we were close enough to make it back without his aid and paused only once more for Corley to empty his stomach against the base of the tree where a short while earlier I had seen the dog. I stood a little way off, conscious of our mutual embarrassment, and then helped him to his room under the disapproving eye of Madame Binh who had come out of her apartment to see what the noise was and who shook her head and muttered incomprehensibly under her breath.