‘That’s how we remember him,’ Bili says. ‘We only knew him young.’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean at the time, when we were kids, he was old, and huge.’ Jericho lifts his arm way over his head. ‘And now we’re older than any of them were.’

‘Grown-ups are always large,’ Bili says.

‘It makes me sad.’

‘Why? It’s how it is. No reason to be sad.’

‘If he hadn’t died,’ Jericho says. ‘If he’d lived, would he have grown fat and slumped?’

‘Would he be corrupt?’ Bili says. ‘That’s the question.’

‘God, you’re tough,’ Jericho says. On the phone Leonard had said to remember that she has her vulnerabilities too, but in the mood he’s in now, he can’t see them.

‘Realistic,’ she says. That word again.

‘All that hope. It must make you sad.’

She shrugs. If it does, she isn’t saying.

‘Losing Rika,’ Jericho says. ‘That made you sad. You hated it. You said so. In London, remember?’ She had, in his bed in that cupboard of a flat. He remembers the sorrow in her voice when she described how empty it had been, going back to the house after seeing him and Rika off on the plane with Leonard. Then Martha and Pete went back to Australia. Everyone gone, and they were just a family in Hohola, the platform no longer used, the tin taken off the roof, the table dismantled for its planks. Gone. All of it gone.

‘A long time ago,’ she says, and at that moment, just as her mouth settles into a firm line, Simeon arrives, flustered and dusty.

‘We’re looking at Aaron,’ Jericho says, pointing him out in the photo.

‘It’s making Jericho sad,’ Bili says, and this time Simeon is on Bili’s side.

‘Sentimental,’ he says. ‘Idealism’s always sentimental.’

‘I’ve heard you say it was the best of times, back then before independence,’ Jericho says.

‘For writing. That’s different.’ He’s as sore as a bear. His mobile has been snatched on the road coming in and he’s only had it a month. ‘What are we celebrating?’ he says. ‘Independence for what? For this?’

‘Come back to Laedi’s for a beer,’ Bili says and all the way in the car she and Simeon bicker. Did independence come too soon? Whose interest was it in? Papua New Guinea’s? Australia’s? Is neo-colonialism any better? Than what? Than the grip of Asian loggers?

Jericho has no opinion. He can’t grasp the idea of Papua New Guinea as one place. It’s too big, with too many parts, too many tribes, too many tampering hands. Split, like his memories. The mountain and the fjords: different places, different memories. Different masks. No. Different deaths. He skitters back from this thought. In the back seat of Bili’s car, he consoles himself by looking at her head. Her hair is tied back, but wisps of curl escape and fall into the collar of her pale blue shirt. He can see the clasp of the necklace he gave her.

All evening he is silent as the talk flies around him. He hardly listens, it’s the usual discussion of alliances and deals and betrayals that split one governing coalition and form another. Somare is prime minister again – three years of stability, Laedi says, and she expects it to continue. She serves in his cabinet. When Bili criticises his environmental policies, Laedi sighs. ‘It’s better than it used to be,’ she says, and the talk returns to Somare back at the start, and the hopes they had. Real hopes. Despite all that they saw, all that they knew, there was still reason for hope.