‘Come up, come up,’ Jericho calls, rousing himself from a nap while the village is quiet after the labours of the morning. Hector, dozing on another mat, wakes with him.

‘Nelly, here,’ Lilla says, indicating the girl, ‘she comes to learn the medicines with you. You will show her, okay?’

Nelly blushes and puts her hand to her face. She is not yet married, with the shy look of the girls who follow Jericho with their eyes, then giggle and run away when he tries to talk to them.

‘No one much is sick,’ Jericho says. ‘Not many come for medicine.’

‘Nelly will show you.’ Lilla gestures towards his boots.

Putting his boots back on is not what he wants. Or a medicine run. Hector rolls on his side, grins, white-foot man, rolls a cigarette. Lilla is looking through the box to see what Meg has sent. ‘This,’ she says, taking out antibiotics, antimalarials, paint for tropical ulcers and boils. Nelly puts them in her string bag. ‘She must learn,’ Lilla says. ‘Come.’

She leads the way to the far end of the village, to a group of houses where the ridge drops away, close to the forest. In one house an old man with a watery cough is sitting beside his sons. In another, a woman with a fever lies glazed and grey. He reads Meg’s instructions, gives one lot of pills to the man, another to the woman. Lilla calls the children, all of them, and Nelly lines them up, all shyness gone, calling back the ones who run away, making them show the ulcers on their legs. She has a tight hand around the wrist of the small boy, who’s reluctant to show Jericho the sore in the crease of his groin.

‘Every day,’ Lilla says.

And indeed every day, late in the afternoon, after he’s returned from the garden with the men, or from Obi’s educational tours, after his smoke with Hector, his nap, Nelly is waiting at the steps. She takes him to houses where people are sick. The woman with malaria recovers, the old man doesn’t. He rattles and wheezes in the dark, refusing to come out of his sleeping room. His sons shake their heads. Jericho asks Obi to send someone down with a note for Meg. ‘How do I know if it’s pneumonia, or TB? What shall I do? He’s too sick to walk down.’

He already has a letter to Bili ready to go down to Meg and Presley at the post office. He adds another page about Nelly and the medicine run, the strange sense of replay with her in the role of Janape, which is not a comfortable transposition. He thought he was here for the past, he tells Bili, and finds it’s when he forgets the past, and they do too, that it’s best. The worst is when they go galloping into the future. There’s been no talk of the guesthouse for a while, he says, ‘fingers crossed’. He stops himself from saying he hopes she’ll come up here one day, see the mountain with him. Instead, he writes that she is with him in mind, he talks to her every day. ‘I’m not sure when I’ll be back. It feels important to stay. Or rather, that if I don’t stay I won’t have done whatever it is that coming here is meant to do.’