He tries the historians. At least they have narratives to tell, like the Japanese troops landing on the north coast in July 1942. They’d have seen the mountain from their battleships, looming over them as they crossed the plain. He reads of the old priest at an Anglican mission who was mending a deckchair when the ships came into view off the beach. Who knows, he said, they may be our friends: otao naso. Jericho likes that. But the old man was wrong. Nuns were massacred, villages looted. Men were taken for labour and women hid in swamps and forests. The Japanese didn’t go onto the mountain. For them it might as well not have existed, just another peak in a fearful range. It was the Australians who walked up there, interrupting an initiation, rounding up men and boys to work on the Kokoda Track. It was heavy, relentless work, carrying wounded soldiers in one direction, and heavy ammunition in the other.

His mood does not lift.

More books and papers appear on the table. He toils his way through government reports on village resettlements after the war, and the spread of plantations. He even reads the regulations for village latrines. They are oddly interesting.

‘How are you going?’ Laedi asks.

‘Depressing,’ he says. ‘Even the fonts they use are depressing.’

He’d rather talk of personal history, but Laedi is like Bili, resolutely in the present. He sees how hard she works, hears enough of the fights and manoeuvres that go on in her department. There’s rarely an evening when she isn’t at her desk. There was one, early on, when they talked of that long-ago visit to Oxford when she’d brought Bili to see Don. They’d all had lunch together at a pub on the river. Rika and Don had argued. What was it about? Jericho asked Laedi. All he remembers is feeling alarm at the adult order starting to tip, but Bili was there, and so was Leonard, and he took them for a walk along the towpath. Laedi said she couldn’t recall what the row was about, and when he asked her how the afternoon ended, her mouth puckered. ‘Not well,’ she said. He’d wanted to ask, What was it that burst you apart? but he was afraid he knew the answer, and that it was him.

All he ventured to ask was whether it was true that after Aaron died and Leonard came for him, Laedi thought he should stay here, be educated in the country. For the country. ‘That was the thinking, then,’ Laedi said, smiling. Leonard said she’d wanted to adopt him, raise him with Bili and Daisy. He looked at her, wondering what it’d have been like to have her as a mother. Would he now be in London, looking for Leonard?

He doesn’t let himself form the thought of Bili as a sister.

After days of reading – toil that goes unnoticed by Bili – Jericho begins to lose his taste for penitence. When Bili sends him out to the university on a task that will barely take an hour, he stays for the morning and walks over to the Literature department to find Simeon, who teaches there. He met Simeon with Bili when he first arrived. He’s a poet. Laedi has his books, small volumes, which Jericho read during the bliss weeks. When he goes back to them in penance, he finds a language he understands in the words of a man who’d left his village for the mission school, who’d studied at Stanford University, who feels at home in America. There are poems about shopping malls and poetry readings and rap dancers, as well as poems about canoes and masks and raskol kids in the settlements. There is a short story about going home to the village, his children bored within days and his relatives emptying every kina from his pocket. And yet, for Simeon there is something there in his place, some painful something that can be found nowhere else but in poetry and the songs of his ancestors, who sailed to the beach in the evening sun.