There’s a boy watching him from further down the bank. When Jericho sees him and waves, he shoots out of sight, back towards the school. I won’t tell, Jericho wants to shout over the tumble of the river, but there’s no one there to hear him, just a slight movement in the trees.

He lets himself into the water again. On the far side of the river the current is strong and it sweeps him round the bend, away from the pool where the boys swim, before he can get back, climb out on the rocks and pick his way up to his clothes. He lies on a rock watching the river flow past, and thinks of a friend of Bili’s in Moresby who told him about the junction of two great rivers near where he comes from in the Highlands. The smaller of the two – which is large enough for them to have to make rope bridges to cross – is stopped by the flow of the bigger river, which is so fast, so dangerous, there’s no getting across it at all. You can swim at the junction, this man said, for the water from one river is stopped by the force of the other. It’s as calm as a swimming pool. ‘Where does the current go?’ Jericho asked. Was it tugging away underneath? Bili’s friend, who works for an NGO, laughed and said yes, maybe, but swimming across the smooth surface you’d never know.

Jericho doubts that this is true, but he likes the image. Milton says life’s a road not a river. He called that first novel The Jericho Road. The one about Baldwin Rufus. Last night, Milton told him that Martin Luther King had spoken of the Jericho Road in his last speech, on the night before he was assassinated. It took the Good Samaritan, ‘a man of another race’, to risk his own safety by stopping to help an injured man on a dangerous road. ‘A dangerous road’ the Jericho Road; steep, with sharp bends through ravines on its climb up to Jerusalem. Dr King had driven it himself. What happens, he’d asked, if we don’t stop to help those who are injured, or in need, especially when they are left to die on a road ‘conducive for ambushing?’ A good question, Milton said.

Jericho was sitting with him at the table by the bookcase. He’d taken the novel out during the day and it was there on the table with them. The Jericho Road with its black and red cover of an angry mask. Jericho has never read Martin Luther King; he’ll look up the speech when he gets back to Moresby. It was April 1968 when he was assassinated, the month Leonard and Rika arrived in Port Moresby.

Milton told Jericho that the point of the story for him wasn’t the Samaritan. It was the road and how we walk it. That was true for independence when he was writing the novel. It was true of Baldwin Rufus and his failed rebellion. And it’s true now, for each of us. The road we walk is the road we make. Lying on the rock, Jericho thinks about it. Was Milton warning him to be careful of the road he makes for himself? As if he could. He can’t see anything resembling a track, let along a road. Roads. Rivers. Nothing is any clearer, and there in front of him, if he lifts his head from the rock where he’s lying, the river is tumbling past. There’s no uncertainty about its direction. Over at the school he hears the clang of the bell and the voices of children between lessons.