The overlay of memory – the curse of memory – lives in him, is him, even as he feels her breath moist on his face. His hands know the shape of her shoulders, the curve of her waist, the swell of her hips, and it is this, only this, the now of her body, her warmth, her taste, her smell, that can banish the past, drawing him into a present emptied of everything but her.

That evening he does not return to Laedi’s house where he’s been sleeping since he arrived the week before. In Bili’s wide bed, under the white veil of the mosquito net, he lies face to face with her and together their minds return to memory. Do you remember? they ask, and they do, all of it, right back to the first kiss the year Leonard brought Jericho back to the mountain when he was fourteen, she just sixteen, and the next, a year later, when Laedi brought Bili to Oxford to see Don, there between wives, a kiss at a fair in St Giles. So much remembering, and with each memory another kiss.

Before they fall asleep, still face to face, Bili rests her hand over his eyes. ‘You’re in Papua now, remember,’ she says. ‘If you look too long into a woman’s eyes, she’ll take your soul.’

Bili rises early. Jericho – who has been known to joke that he works in a gallery because he can do nights but not mornings – rises with her. His eyes open to the silver sheen of ocean outside the window, the cool of dawn, and he is awake, ready for the day. He drives with Bili to her office. She parks the car on a flat stretch that was once grass where as children they played netball, and together they walk up the steps to the Environment Legal Service. Within days he’s ceased to wonder that this was once the teachers’ room, as he opens the louvres, lets in the morning air and turns on the overhead fans. In other buildings that were once classrooms, other offices are opening for the day. People call out as they climb the steps, open doors, stand on walkways to catch the breeze from the water.

Bili has her own office within the office, a corner walled off from the large room that houses the service. Her desk is piled so high with papers that she’s barely visible from the door that announces ‘Director’. In the outer room three desks are arranged under the fans. Two are in use, one by the receptionist and assistant, another by a young lawyer, two years out of university. That is the full extent of her staff, though others come in to help, visiting lawyers who put in time pro bono. The third desk once had a salary to go with it, but funding is tight, and it is now piled with files waiting for attention. Bili clears them, adding to the piles already teetering on the floor. ‘You might as well make yourself useful,’ she says, dusting off the chair. Though Jericho has no knowledge of the law, she sets him to work.