So which part of that does Simeon think is true?

‘Don’t be literal-minded,’ Simeon says the next day. ‘Anyway, it was the seventies,’ as if that was explanation enough. He’s got more interesting news for Jericho. He was right, you can find anyone in Moresby. All he had to do was ask someone from the settlement behind the university, who asked someone else, and yes, he tells Jericho, there are people from the mountain in town. Not many, but a few, and they’ve been waiting for this news. They’ll be round to find you, he says. You don’t need to do anything.

Sure enough, within the week a small, chunky man with a thick beard and eyes that bulge like eggs appears at the guard post outside Laedi’s house. He is a clerk in Fisheries, younger than Jericho, and utterly unsurprised to see him. The chiefs had said he would return this year. Lilla, the chief of the women, had had a dream.

‘Wantok,’ he says. ‘Brother,’ embracing him with a hand to his arm and a nose brought close. ‘Rovane.’ The mountain word for welcome.

His name is Young Albert. He has the air of a man executing a commission.

‘Albert is my father,’ he says, and Albert swims into Jericho’s mind, the young mimic appearing and disappearing at the edges of Leonard’s film. For the rest, Jericho is uncertain as Young Albert lists more names – an arc of kinship – names he recognises from the chart Leonard has made for him, but they are without faces, without blood or history.

Jericho takes Young Albert into the house. He stands in the large room as if he is an auctioneer making an inventory. He shows no interest in the view from the window, though he takes in the curtains, along with the size of the table, the number of chairs, the drawers in Laedi’s desk, the telephone, the television, the books on the shelves. He stands in front of the bark-cloth on the wall, the filigree of the hooked vine the chiefs had long ago sent down to Rika.

‘Nogi,’ Young Albert says.

He goes to the framed photographs on the sideboard and picks up one of Bili and Jericho as children perched on the branch of a tree that is overhanging smooth water. In the distance, out of focus, is a wall of green.

‘This is from where?’ Young Albert asks.

‘From the fjord coast,’ Jericho says.

‘Aaron’s place?’

‘Yes.’

Jericho sits with him at the table, and Young Albert’s noticing eyes turn to him as if he, too, is on the inventory. Jericho feels at once too large and too small, encased in the shame of remembering back to the visit he’d made to the mountain as a young teenager, his surly behaviour, his rejection of everything he saw. Does Young Albert remember? Jericho cannot distinguish which of the boys he’d been; it was as if he’d closed his eyes, closed his mind. And now, here he is, wanting to open them, but not knowing how. Faced with kin, he’s as uncertain as the teenager he’d been.