‘Build a link through the people in town.’

‘There probably aren’t any. There’re less than two thousand of them all up. So few, even you hadn’t heard of them. Us.’

‘Them,’ Simeon says. ‘No one’s heard of everyone. There’ll be some in the settlements for sure. You can find anyone in this town. I’ll do it for you.’

He stands up, puts the books in a bag for Jericho. ‘Come,’ he says. ‘Let’s have a coffee.’

Jericho reads Milton’s poems, and thinks he recognises himself in the line about the hapkas kid who stands on the edge of the saltwater and watches the ships, waiting for his father from the other side of the strange wide ocean. He turns to the imprint page and reads the date of publication. 1978. Yes, it fits, and the line too about the bird of paradise. Aaron, he supposes, vanishing into the depths of the sea.

‘Was Milton writing about Aaron?’ Jericho asks Laedi.

‘Don’t take him literally,’ Laedi says. ‘He’s not reliable when it comes to how things are.’

‘Or were,’ Jericho says.

‘That too. He’s a writer.’ Her voice isn’t dismissive exactly, but clearly she doesn’t think it worth taking Milton seriously for an account of any facts.

He tries the same question on Simeon, even though he was just a kid on a river when Milton was writing of the massy green, the lonely bird whistle.

‘It’s sure to be true,’ he says in a cheerful voice while he goes on sorting the papers on his desk.

‘True how?’ Jericho wants his full attention, and doesn’t get it.

‘True in the way poetry’s true,’ Simeon says, which is no more help than Laedi’s dismissal of it as not fact-true. ‘Have you tried his first novel? Plenty of truth there.’ He stands up to take it from his crowded shelves. He knows exactly where it is. The Jericho Road. When he puts it on the desk, Jericho starts. He hasn’t heard of the Jericho Road, and Simeon has to tell him it was where the parable of the Good Samaritan happened.

‘You’d better read it,’ he says.

Jericho starts it that very day, carefully opening the badly printed edition with pages falling out. Simeon says he’ll kill him, should he lose a single one. Laedi is in the islands visiting community training centres funded by her department, so Jericho reads as he eats alone in the kitchen. He reads on in bed, the lamp angled through the mosquito net, staying awake into the night to finish the story of Baldwin Rufus, once a mission boy, who goes to Chicago to study Martin Luther King; Baldwin Rufus, the impractical revolutionary who, on his return, seizes the plantation, sets up his republic, where reading is the order of the day and his small band of conspirators march around with the one gun they have between them. When they march over the Kokoda Track, that dangerous road, they are ambushed only by their own irrelevance. There is no rebel army to meet them. No police to arrest them. No press. Nothing. Singing as they march up the last rise into an empty clearing, there’s nothing to greet them but forest, and an audience of birds. Behind them lies a track they don’t want to walk again. There’s nothing for it but to walk on past the plantations until they find a truck to give them a lift down the scarp. In town, Baldwin Rufus goes to find his liberal white friends. The wife is alone in the house and she lets him fuck her as if that’s a revolutionary gesture in itself, and something about it disgusts him even as it adds piquancy to his rage, more so when her husband returns and gives him a beer. He gets drunk, vomits and sleeps on the couch of the forgiving whites who call him an intellectual as if all is redeemed if he makes a theory of it.