‘Some do. The angry ones.’

‘Like you? They want to write? Baldwin Rufus?’

Milton scowls. ‘It’s different for them,’ he says, sinking into thought. ‘No opportunities to write. Anyway, look at me. They see it’s useless. They don’t hate the whites the same way. Well, they hate them, but it’s like the weather – nothing they can do about it. They hate the politicians, that’s who they hate, their own skin. They read, they’re smart, they see who gets rich. Their parents work the oil palm, some have their own blocks, bring the palm to the road. The contractors collect it, the companies drop the price, or delay paying, or don’t pay, and when their fathers and brothers go to protest, what happens? Who ends in jail? They do.’

It’s a gloomy picture he paints. Laedi has warned Jericho not to take everything Milton says for true, he’ll always see the worst. He thinks of the work Bili does, her friends in the NGOs, the people who work against corruption. Laedi has some in her department.

‘Laedi says there are good things happening,’ he says. ‘I meet people in Moresby.’

‘Sure, there’re good people. There are some here, at the school. In town. Brave people, like Bili. I worry for that girl. Too brave. Always was.’

‘She’s tough,’ Jericho says.

‘You here for her?’

What’s Laedi been saying? A prickle of sweat, or is it shame, runs along Jericho’s spine. ‘I suppose,’ he says. ‘Partly.’

There’s a pause and Milton gets up, takes Jericho’s mug, puts the kettle on the gas. There’s a refillable tank secured against the outside wall.

‘Did Aaron love Rika?’ Jericho asks.

Milton rolls a cigarette, frowns. ‘Love?’ he says. ‘I don’t know. She was in him. She had him hooked.’ He pauses. That frown again. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I guess you’d say he loved her. He wanted her near him. Wanted her all the time.’

‘And the baby stuff? Rika told me once that Aaron thought there was something in her that rejected his sperm.’ Jericho had gone over to Paris to see her – she was living there, escaping Oxford. They’d had dinner, it was late, one of the few times she spoke of it. Really spoke. In the morning, when he asked her again, she insisted she’d never said it. That he’d never said it. The occasion comes back, and with it the frustration, the questions not answered, the pained look on Rika’s face. And, though he was in Paris, though he’d come over especially, still she went to her studio; you can’t disturb her in the studio, always the bloody studio, a rule from his childhood. He’d pounded the streets, furious, ended up in a bar in the Marais, and went back to London early.

‘That’s Baldwin again,’ Milton says. ‘Slam that white womb, again and again, and the fear somewhere inside that it was mocking him, mincing his sperm, chopping him up.’

Down at the school a bell clangs. Milton gets up, gathers his books. ‘Remind me to tell you about the time they came to the river and there was a snake,’ he says.