The wild scatter of night stars seems to have shocked the universe into a sense of wonder and gradually it feels like the time has come to ask some of the questions that have seen me make this journey across the country, but I know already I have drunk more than I am accustomed to and this simple fact, combined with a growing confusion, blurs some of the pre-prepared sightlines along which I have envisaged this meeting. So already I feel less certain about its outcome, despite the number of times I have played it out in my head.

‘You said I was a long time coming? It sounded like you were expecting me. Expecting me after all these years.’

‘It doesn’t matter how long it took – I always knew you were coming, Mikey, and what is time anyway but the twinkling of an eye. I knew you would come to the wilderness because the wilderness is where everything gets tested and the future gets faced. And because you always need to know you’ve done the right thing. Always, Mikey. You never had a get-out-of-jail card like the rest of us – sometimes I wondered what you thought would happen to you if you hadn’t done the right thing. As you got older – and we’ve both got old – I guess the need to know just gets greater.’

He lifts the rifle and sets it on his lap, then runs his hand repeatedly along its barrel as if polishing it.

‘You want to remember and I’m trying to forget. Isn’t that the shit-kicking truth?’

‘What are you trying to forget?’ I ask, knowing I have reached the point when I want to push him, perhaps even cruelly, to – what’s the word? – a confession, a correction, a setting of things back in balance. I try not to make unnecessary moral judgements – it was an unwelcome impediment to the type of work I once did – but I am close to making one in this moment because I want to hear the words in his mouth. And I know it isn’t about redeeming the sins of our history, the things that were done, the bombs we dropped, the people we left standing on stairwells waiting for choppers that never came. For a young woman carrying his child. For all the names on the Wall. No, and despite the embarrassment I feel now I understand it is for something deeply personal, perhaps even hopelessly selfish, in the face of that greater history. It is for an abrogation of the insistencies that once governed our relationship. For, if not a validation of the young man I once was, but whoever it is I am now, and it is as if I finally need some acknowledgement that after all I had stood up straight and true in my own way and on my own terms, and in so doing had held fast to a greater truth than he ever had. That the meek had inherited the earth rather than the warmongers. And instead of speaking his words, as I did in that prison cell, my life has spoken in a voice of my own.