Young Albert watches as Jericho goes for aspirin, brings water and fruit to the table, a loaf of bread, a jar of jam, to compensate for his weakness, his incapacity, his guilt.

It is then that Young Albert tells him, again, about the war and the Australians interrupting the initiation, taking the boys to work on the Kokoda Track. There was no choice, the police marched them down the mountain with their guns. And he tells him about the Japanese who came from who knows where, an empire from the sun, and afterwards, when the big fight was over, about the Australians walking down to the coast, landing their planes and driving their jeeps, shouting out to everyone that they were masta again. And how they captured the men who’d worked for the Japanese and marched them to a special place where they killed them dead. The Australians had a machine for killing men, Young Albert tells him; the father of one of the chiefs saw it when he was still a boy, down on the plain with his uncle. He tells Jericho how he is related to this man who saw the machine, and how many children he had, and which of the children live still, and how many children they have, all the way down until they reach the room in Laedi’s house where the relatives to the witness of this machine sit. It was kept, Young Albert says, at the top of a small house. The Australians walked the men to be killed – Orokaivan men, all of them – up the steps to the platform of this house. The machine came down on top of them, round their necks like a large pair of scissors. When the soldier pulled the lever – Young Albert demonstrates with a hefty yank – the head flew sideways. Dead.

‘Did the Australians hang collaborators?’ Jericho asks Laedi.

‘Some,’ she says, ‘but not in public.’

Simeon says it’s a metaphor and there’s no point getting into statistics, or explanations of hanging. Anyway, is rope better than giant scissors? ‘It had the effect they wanted,’ he says. ‘What did you do? Don’t tell me: you agreed to do business, any business. You’d agree to anything after that.’

‘Vanilla,’ Jericho says. ‘I’ve been reading up on it. It should grow at that altitude, and I think I can afford it. Only it takes seven years to mature.’

Simeon laughs. ‘White man,’ he says. ‘White-man guilt.’

That night Young Albert takes Jericho to his house in Gerehu, where his wife and her sister and his mother have cooked a large feast. The room is small and full. The paint is old, and the windows covered in tough wire. Mats are spread out on the floor, and Jericho is invited to sit. Small children push their fingers into his hair. ‘Like yours,’ he says, and they shake their heads. ‘Hapkas,’ they say. Young Albert’s old mother shoos them away, and sits beside him stroking his arm, murmuring in the language he cannot speak.