In this way a week passes, then Obi returns to work with the men – Jericho’s cousins – who are clearing a garden an hour’s walk away. They set out with their bush-knives and axes, and when Jericho asks if he can join them, Obi says, ‘No, it’s okay, we are going to work, no need for you to come.’ So he stays behind like a girl, hanging around the village with nothing to do but listen to the chatter inside his head. The next day he picks up a bush-knife and, without asking, he accompanies the men. It is hard work, hacking at the forest, digging out stumps; his arms ache from it. The ground is uneven, a steep slope to a river. He doesn’t stop for the pain, the ache in his shoulder. Obi’s wife, Doris, gives him a leaf to rub into the blisters. He wraps a cloth around his hand and returns to the garden the next day. He thinks he sees respect in the way the men look at him. He forces himself on. The work moves to the cleared soil, and Jericho takes off his boots, barefoot like his kin, feels the muscles of his feet and the earth between his toes.

When they stop for a smoke and sit along a fallen tree trunk, Napo’s eldest son, his cousin Hector, sits beside him, puts his foot alongside Jericho’s and laughs. Jericho’s foot is slender compared to the splayed shape of Hector’s mountain foot, which has walked unshod for more than thirty years. Hector tells a story of a white woman he saw in Moresby, when he was there, long ago, at the city mission. She had little tiny feet, this woman, like pig trotters, and high heels, and over she went and couldn’t get up. The police were called, and a van carried her away. Hector slaps his thighs at the memory of it, and everyone laughs, Jericho too.

‘How long for these to become mountain feet, do you think?’ he asks, looking down at his toes.

‘Long time yet,’ Hector says. ‘You stay with us many years. Then you have mountain feet.’

When it comes time to return to the village, Jericho ties his boots together by the laces and slings them over his shoulders. Obi frowns and tells him to put them on.

‘They’ve been working all morning,’ Jericho says.

‘For the forest, they are no good,’ Obi says. ‘Too soft.’ He lifts his foot and shows the tough under-skin, like a leather sole.

So Jericho sits on the ground, wipes the mud from his feet and pushes them back into the boots. But something has shifted, and he knows it.

That afternoon, Hector comes onto his platform, lies on a mat, rolls a cigarette and asks Jericho about his life in London. White girls, are they white all through, inside too? Has Jericho lain with them? He has? Yeah! ‘It’s good that you come back, cousin-brother,’ he says.

When Hector leaves, Jericho looks out as mist blows in. The chatter in his head has slowed. Maybe it’s the effect of hard work, this unaccustomed feeling of stillness. It returns again the next afternoon, and the next, whether it’s mist or sunlight that fills the space between the mountains. As the days pass, the air around him seems to lighten, as if a veil is lifting. Snippets of language return, submerged sediments lift up.