They sit like this for a while, Young Albert looking, and Jericho feeling less like a host pouring lemon water into a glass than a specimen laid before a naturalist. It is demoralising. Then Young Albert leans across the table, shakes Jericho’s hand, says it is good, gut tru, that he’s returned. He will tell the chiefs, and he and Jericho can go back to the mountain and set up a business. There’s too much corruption in Port Moresby, and his children’s teachers don’t turn up to school.

‘They learn bad ways,’ he says. ‘Bisnis is better. We make money for school fees, for medicines, for ourselves.’ He beams. ‘No corruption.’

He is one of the boys who was chosen by the chiefs to go to school on Leonard’s fees, paid year after year so there’d be men who could earn money for the villages, advocate for them, take over the role of outside provider. Jericho knows the agreement that was made when Leonard went to the mountain after Aaron died, the time he talked to the chiefs about bringing him to England. And he knows Leonard offered the school fees in part so that the burden wouldn’t fall only to him. Leonard didn’t want inheritance to become an encumbrance. But how can it be anything else when Young Albert tells Jericho that most of them who went to school don’t like life in the town, and anyway there aren’t enough jobs? There are a few in Popondetta, but there is never enough money. And in case Jericho has not understood what Young Albert is saying, he repeats that he’s been waiting all this time for him to return, so that he can go back to the mountain ground where his children should grow. ‘Bisnis,’ he says again, beaming. ‘Together, we start a bisnis.’

‘What sort of business?’ Jericho asks reluctantly.

‘Ecotourism,’ Young Albert says, taking from his bag a large brown envelope of papers. The envelope is grubby, bent around the edges. He’s done a bisnis course. He pulls out diagrams and columns of figures, and photographs of guesthouses from an ecotourism office in town. He passes them across the table to Jericho.

‘I have a business plan,’ he says. ‘You and me, us two, we shall be manager. The Mountain Resort.’

‘Oh my God,’ Jericho says to Simeon. ‘They want me to manage a resort. It’s like now I’ve returned, what am I good for? Never mind, how are you, how’s it been for you all these years away from us?’

Simeon laughs. ‘Be realistic,’ he says. ‘You’re an investment. That’s why they gave you out.’

‘No, it wasn’t. I was given, if that’s what it was, because I had no land and no rights. That’s what the chiefs decided and what I’ve always been told. I was some kind of original burden.’

‘That too,’ Simeon says. ‘What kind of a life would it have been, a hapkas kid hanging around useless? This way you’re a resource. Don’t you get it?’