He was close to my face but I didn’t flinch and the only resistance I felt open to me was to return his stare and not step back or falter. So we stood like that for a few silent seconds and then he spun on his heel and started to walk off to wherever he was going to have his drink. But then he stopped and called back to me, ‘You should join the one true faith, Mikey, if you’re so squeamish. Light a candle, say a Hail Mary, absolve some of that guilt you cripple yourself with.’

I said nothing and watched him go to whatever bar would best serve his purpose. I didn’t have the oblivion of drink or Hail Marys to fall back on, so I simply returned to work and lowered my head to the papers on the desk, and at lunchtime I didn’t sit under the garden canopy with Danh and Corrine but continued working, trying not to think of a man who believed he was going to be traded, that he was going home. I never saw him again, don’t know what happened to him and whether he ever made it back to his family, but if he did I know that I must exist in his memory, as he does in mine, and both of us must wish it were not so.

After that I fell out of contact with Donovan for a couple of weeks – he didn’t request my services and I didn’t go looking for him and instead kept my head down and wondered how long it would be before I was ordered home. I did eventually go to Vung Tau, but not in Donovan’s car – when I told Corley I wasn’t asking for it he managed somehow to inveigle a beat-up Renault whose engine threatened to give up at various stages of the journey and whose shot suspension allowed us to feel every bump and pothole on the road. Setting out, it felt good to sidestep Saigon for a few hours, and I’d had enough of its coffee-coloured river and somehow had started to think that the sea and even swimming in it might offer a restoration, however temporary. But an hour south of the city the sky darkened and it began to rain, really coming down so that the wipers struggled to clear it and I had to concentrate on the driving. Corley sat with his feet on the dash and was uncharacteristically quiet. Since the night he had made me read his book neither of us had mentioned what he had witnessed and I think we both believed to do so would take us places neither of us wanted to be, and from where we might not return. He never spoke about it again in my presence and I supposed he had compartmentalised it, put it in as distant a room as possible and locked the door.

I thought of telling him about Donovan and some of the work I had done for him – in an attempt, I suppose, to shoulder some of what he was feeling – but didn’t, not least because I was frightened my revelations might leave me damaged in both our eyes. And as the rain continued to beat against the windshield, I knew that my earlier self-comforting but hopelessly mistaken belief that somehow the existence of a moral code held me at a decent distance from what we had done, and continued to do in this far-off country, could no longer be sustained. As that reality coursed through my consciousness, a constant companion through the rain and miles of flooding road, I wanted to be back wherever I decided home was.