Popondetta is a dispiriting town. It spreads out around a grid of trade stores that sell their goods through hatches protected by heavy wire. The streets are filthy, with garbage piled up in small hills that have to be negotiated, along with the women who set out a cloth with their wares for sale. Single cigarettes, betel and daka, plastic packets of lime, string bags made with trade-store nylon, garish colours. It’s flat and hot in town, under every tree there are people waiting for the PMVs and trucks that rumble in from the villages depositing more people. Wherever you look there seem to be people waiting. Jericho buys the things Meg has listed – cooking oil, rice, sugar – returns to the hospital, then walks over to the post office to see Presley. He’s busy inside and Jericho goes round the back and waits until he comes out, his basketball cap in place, a snazzy red and white shirt.

‘Hey, brother,’ he says, slapping Jericho’s hand in a high five. ‘That steam. Man.’ He puts his hand to his head and staggers a few steps, looking just as Jericho felt when he hauled himself to his feet in the cells.

‘How did you get back that day, ill like that?’ Jericho asks.

‘We didn’t.’ He laughs, takes out his tobacco, rolls a cigarette. ‘They put us on that truck, okay, up to the start of the track. We walked out of sight and went to sleep in the bush.’ He hands the tobacco to Jericho, who shakes his head. London man. ‘Two nights, then our heads could see again.’

‘The others? Where are they now?’

‘On top. They go home to the village. The chiefs got angry. They used up all the peanut money. None for the village. Now they must grow more and come to the market here in Popondetta. Not as much money here. For Moresby it is better, but then the money goes. In steam.’ He slaps Jericho’s hand again, dances a little jig. ‘You go up the mountain, eh? Big walk!’

‘Soon,’ Jericho says. ‘Soon I go. Maybe.’

‘You white man! Soft!’

A few days later, Napo turns up at Milton’s house. He has Obi with him. They come down the road on their wide, calloused feet, and wait under a tree until Milton comes up from the school. ‘Milton,’ they call. ‘We come.’

Jericho is asleep inside, Langston Hughes open beside him.

‘Lazy bugger,’ Milton says when he comes into the house. ‘You’ve got visitors.’

Jericho gets up, shakes himself awake and goes outside to face Obi, whom he hasn’t seen since that visit with Leonard when he was fourteen and full of resistance. As Leonard’s translator, Obi would have been witness to Leonard’s anger at his gracelessness, his rudeness and turned face, the long hours spent hunched in his sleeping bag listening to music. He was there when Leonard confiscated his Walkman. ‘Enough,’ he’d said. ‘You’re to get up now. At once.’

‘Ah, Obi,’ Jericho says, shaking his hand and Napo’s. ‘A long time. I behaved badly. No good at all. I am ashamed.’