‘She is the sister-cousin of your mother,’ Young Albert translates. ‘She says it is good you are here – a man must return to his place, know his kin before he dies.’

‘Tell her,’ Jericho says, ‘I am sorry I do not speak her language.’

‘It’s your language too,’ comes the reply. ‘No good for a man to lose his talk. Lose his talk, he lose his mother’s bones. Grave, she means.’

‘I am sorry,’ Jericho says again.

‘It’s okay,’ Young Albert says, and the old woman speaks again, her hands patting the air and coming to rest on Jericho’s arm.

‘What does she say?’ he asks.

‘It is a long time before you die. You will learn to speak again.’

The meal is large and generous: great bowls of sweet potato, fish from the market, watermelon, tomatoes. Children lean towards the food, and the women hold them back to let the men, the visitors, take theirs first. The boys are hungry from the nights in the settlement. After the first plates of food are gone, everyone speaks at once. Jericho hears snatches of many stories, and deep inside him a kind of joy, such as he has never known, rushes at him in this hot, crowded room without a fan whirring overhead. It’s a feeling unknown to him in London, being a part of a clan, but even as he takes a breath and expands, he hears the words bisnis and resort and vanilla, and feels himself shrink as the spinning returns so fast there’s nothing left of him but a tiny speck.

More food arrives on the table – eggs, pineapple, biscuits – carried in by a young girl, maybe twelve, thirteen already, with shy eyes the exact colour of his own. She could be a sister, even a daughter. Something tender rises in him, a flood of imagining, of Bili as her mother, the same almond eyes, the same skin, soft and brown, not yet hardened by the sun.

The glow of belonging returns. Kith and kin. Blood of my blood. Union. Union, he thinks in the midst of his kin. There is no union. Just strangeness and wanting. Suddenly he wants to lie down, escape into sleep.

Later that evening, when at last the children have fallen asleep and the house empties, Jericho goes back to the settlement with Presley and the boys. The roads are full – cars, trucks, people walking – as if the whole town is going somewhere. They come to the fork in the road where he could turn towards the harbour and Laedi’s house, the comfort of his bed. He hesitates. The revolving door in his head, or his gut, wherever it is, turns from the knowledge that he should care for himself and leave, and round he goes, one of the boys again, wanting to be like them, liked by them. So he walks on with them towards the settlement. The pubs and hotels are shut. There’s nowhere to buy beer, the government closes everything down when the town is full and there are holidays and celebrations. As they walk, he realises that the movement around them is aimless. No one’s going anywhere, just circling about, retracing their steps, moving again, following another rumour of where the steam is. They pass scuffles and fights. They get a lift on the back of a truck. Grit blows in their eyes as they grind up the hill near the airport. The lights for the runway are off. It’s late.