Milton does not sound surprised. Has Laedi worded him up? Probably. ‘It’s time, eh?’ he says.

From the Martyrs School where Milton teaches, the mountain will be in the line of his sight with nothing to obscure his view.

THE JERICHO ROAD

ON MILTON’S SHELVES, JERICHO FINDS A ROW OF JAMES Baldwin paperbacks. The paper is yellow and flaking, the covers have warped, the glue of the binding has been eaten by cockroaches. It’s not the climate for books. Still, the pages are readable, and while Milton is teaching over at the school, Jericho sits in his house and reads. He chooses the slimmest, the most thumbed, with a corner turned down.

‘They’ve got the world on a string,’ he says when Milton comes sloping back up the hill.

‘Ah,’ he says, ‘The Fire Next Time.’

‘I expected it to be angry.’

‘He knew angry, every step of it. Took me a long time to learn that a writer can’t write angry without knowing what anger does. Then he can write. Then his words are true.’

‘I’ve read you angry. That first novel.’

Milton ignores him. ‘I’ve seen a lot go down on anger. I nearly went down myself.’

‘Martha told me.’

‘Ah, Martha. You saw her?’

‘Yes, in Sydney, on the way through. We talked about those early days when I came to live with Rika. My mothers.’ He laughs. ‘On that platform of yours.’

‘Theirs, you mean. They loved it – thought we were all one big family, a new kind of clan.’

‘Weren’t we? I remember it – everyone there, the meals. Bili’s games, all of you talking. It was comforting.’

‘It was. When I came back from Melbourne, oh, I was angry. I’d sleep there all day, and at night Rika and Martha cooked, and Aaron got Sam and Pete talking like Melanesians. Yeah, I liked it. They were friends, looked after me. I thought they were friends. But when it all went wrong here, they left, the whole lot of them.’

‘Were you angry?’

‘We hated them for it. We’d read Baldwin, caught his way of thinking. Rufus Scott, all of us. No, that’s not true, there were a lot of us figuring out how to get that string working for us. Get it from the masta, reel in the money.’ He made a sound that might have been a laugh. ‘The ones who didn’t … Well, here we are.’

Where they are is in the living room of Milton’s house, in the row where the teachers live, set back from the school buildings, the classrooms and dormitories. It is the lunchbreak, and over at the school students are milling around, the girls sitting under the trees, the junior boys chasing each other.

‘You still teach Baldwin?’ Jericho asks.

‘Sure I do. A foundation.’

‘They still want to be Rufus Scott?’ He gestures across to the school, which they can see from the table where they sit by the window.