He thinks of Aaron on the beach below Bili’s flat, where now no one can swim because of the pollution. There are concrete barricades in front of the trees where Laedi used to park after school. He thinks of the fjords, a fleeting moment of sunshine, Aaron lifting him out of the water into the sparkling air, and the dream that must be memory, dark and green and menacing, closing in. In this dream, this vision, which can come upon him asleep or awake, there is no Aaron, no order. Swaying giants bend down, dropping water and saliva on him, they smell rank and sour, and he cannot hide his face. He rolls into a small ball like an insect and Bili is rolled up with him, her breath salt-sweet. Above them the giants who once were orderly are fighting each other, large as trees. There is noise and rushing water and no one to carry him across. Bili wraps her arms tight around him, but underneath the fighting and the shouting all is still and silent, there is no air, and somewhere, he doesn’t known where, Aaron floats in that silence, head down in deep green water.

Under the drying sheets, Jericho raises his head a few inches. He remembers Rika’s story of Aaron beaten by the white men in balaclavas and left bleeding, face-down in the grass. That’s one story she tells, when she tells anything, which is rare. ‘They beat me into him.’ A kind of perverse pride. ‘They beat us together.’ Aaron got up. He crawled to the road. He stood proud in the town. He stood like a man. And here is Jericho lying under the washing for no better reason than he’s made an arse of himself in front of Bili. It doesn’t help to pity himself consigned to a life of exile.

He rolls over, looks at the patch of blue above, between the drying sheets and the next-door garage. Something in him gives a small laugh. He gets up, goes into the house, walks along the passageway to the kitchen. ‘Ah, Jericho,’ the women say, ‘good one,’ and he sits at the table with them, drinks tea and eats bread. They are talking about the wedding of the daughter of the woman who comes from Hanuabada, down on the harbour, the village that gave Captain Moresby his vegetable porridge.

Later that afternoon, Jericho stands on the veranda at the front of Laedi’s house and considers its colonial origins. He thinks of the civil servants drinking gin on this veranda and the curfew that forbade ‘natives’ entry to the town after dark. He is ashamed. Ashamed for the blood he shares with Commodore Erskine, or, if not blood, then heritage and culture. And he’s sickened by his own cowed behaviour, his irresolution, his snivelling self-pity.

He goes inside, finds the number Laedi has given him and rings Milton.

‘Please,’ he says, ‘I’d like to come over and visit you for a few days.’