In the heat of a Port Moresby night, Jericho, at thirty-six, feels tears of self-pity roll into his pillow. He hears the whirr of a mosquito inside the net and doesn’t care. Let it bite him. Let him die up here, let them return his body to the earth of this accursed place.

He forgets the nights he lay awake in his flat in Shoreditch, woken by dreams of tall trees shading the sky, a landscape of dark ridges, sudden clearings of brilliant green inhabited by beings with high heads, feathers dancing in the white, shining light of the moon. He forgets the longing, and the fear that he will be expelled, cast out, never to return to that memory place of earth smells and comfort dimly recalled.

He forgets Leonard sagging low in his chair, his pipes arranged in the large clay dish beside his chair, saying, ‘Yes, maybe it’s time to go back. Time to reclaim it, or let it rest.’ He forgets his response – ‘But I couldn’t live there’ – and Leonard’s reply that he didn’t know that: ‘It’s one of the things you need to find out.’

He forgets the softness in his own voice when he speaks of Bili, and he forgets Leonard saying, as if it were a fact as certain as the stars in the sky, that his love for her should be enough to take him back, across the world, even to a town like Port Moresby.

PENANCE COMES IN MANY FORMS.

There is the craven penance that takes Jericho to Bili’s office each morning, suffers her haughty displeasure and humbly performs the tasks she sets. He collates testimonies from the Collingwood Bay landowners. He catches the bus out to the university to look up cases, find reports.

It is penance, and he endures it. He doesn’t retreat. He doesn’t use his return ticket, or escape to Sydney. He sticks it out, day after day, into the winds of July when the town swirls with dust. He endures the heat and the mosquitoes, the blank evenings and long, exiled nights. And Laedi’s kindness, which he takes for pity, until imperceptibly it transforms into impatience as the days pass and his mood does not.

Her view is that he’s mistaken his longing for a forgotten mother and pinned it onto Bili. ‘When you came down from the mountain,’ she says, ‘it was Bili you wanted, more than Rika. She was your replacement mother. Your sister-mother. Don’t you see?’

He doesn’t.

‘You were little, only five – too young to remember. Janape came with you. Do you remember that?’

He shakes his head. ‘I’ve been told, but I don’t remember.’

‘Rika insisted. She said that if you were to come to us, you needed a bridge. She didn’t want it to be more of a wrench than it had to be, so Janape came, but she didn’t stay long. She didn’t like being away from the mountain. At least that’s what we thought at the time, but over the years I’ve wondered. She was wise, Janape, and she knew that staying would make it harder. She was going to have to leave you sometime. It’d been decided.’