There was more, much more, but I stopped reading. I looked at him and just for a second it was as if I didn’t recognise him.

‘What the hell is happening here, Mikey?’

‘I don’t know, Corley. I don’t know.’

‘It’s bad, Mikey. It’s really bad,’ he said and then he turned his face to the wall.

There was nothing more I could say so I set the notebook on the small table beside his bed because I didn’t want to feel it in my hand any longer than I needed. But he insisted, despite my obvious reluctance, that I took it and so I carried away the one and only thing he had ever written that was true.

‘I’ll look in on you in the morning,’ I told him, wanting to leave, but he didn’t answer. Then, as I opened the door, I heard him say, ‘Turn out the light.’ And I left him there with his face turned to the wall.

Afterwards they made him write a story blaming the Vietcong for the killings.

The things that I had read drifted through my dreams and I woke early from a broken and shallow sleep. I waited an hour before I went to check on him. There was no answer when I knocked on his door and I gently opened it to find him sitting on a chair at the window, the gauze curtains shifting slightly in the breeze so that light brushed his face with changing patterns. The room stank of booze.

‘You OK, Corley?’ I asked.

‘I’m OK, Mikey,’ he said, staring into the street, and then after a pause, ‘thanks for looking out for me last night.’

I shrugged as if to say it was nothing. Voices and the sound of traffic seeped into the room from down below. Somewhere in the building I could hear Jim Croce’s ‘Time in a Bottle’. I asked him if he wanted to go out and get some breakfast but he said only if I wanted to watch him being sick again.

When he had finally returned to Saigon he had fallen in with some journalists – the hard-core remnants of those who had attended the official war briefings at the Rex that became known as the Five O’Clock Follies, and who had listened with barely disguised cynicism to what they were told and shared in-jokes. He had tried to tell them of the things he had seen but was informed brusquely that there was no yardage in it. That it was just another sad part of the ‘Mere Gook Rule’ and even more so because the guilty party was other ‘gooks’. Instead they had plied him with drink and he had been happy to go along with it, happy to sink into oblivion. He looked pale, more washed-out than I had ever seen him, and I knew it wasn’t only caused by his hangover. And the room itself seemed strangely empty, as if his very presence had reduced it to a void, stirred only by the light currents of air from the open window. I had thought I would give him his book back but I knew then it was kinder to keep it.