‘You did.’

‘Anyway,’ Jericho persists, ‘you gave me to Rika.’

‘We did not know how to find Leonard. I knew that she was in Moresby, I knew that Aaron was a good man. Leonard was in England. Too far to come back.’

‘But he did. When Aaron died he came back.’ He came back to get Rika, to get him. His first act as a father.

Obi shakes his head. ‘No good Aaron died. He was a good man. He would make good government.’

Jericho sticks to the main point. ‘When Leonard came back and talked to the chiefs, did you see him?’

‘Yes. He came to Popondetta. Two days he was there. The chiefs come down. Big talk with Nanaji.’

‘Some people wanted me to stay in Moresby, go to school, become part of the government. Nanaji didn’t want that? Nanaji told Leonard to take me?’

‘Nanaji decided. Leonard is not a man of government. He is a man of good spirit. Better for you to grow on his land.’

The relentless logic sews Jericho up. Just when he’d begun to feel at ease, the past loosening its grip, he is back in this neat, tight bind. The question buzzing in his head is how does he give what is necessary when he has no wealth to give? Should he have left them to their disappointment and never have returned? Maybe they’d think he’d been stolen by someone along the road.

He thinks of Bili as he lies in his damp sleeping bag that night. He closes his eyes, but her face is imprinted somewhere deep inside him. Then another thought snaps him awake: was Janape offered to Leonard as Nelly was offered to him? Would Leonard have agreed? Surely not. He tries to imagine the scene, a little film playing in his mind, but Leonard doesn’t fit. Jericho contemplates the version he has lived with all his life, a tender love affair given brief expression. Was it nothing more than a story – a romance – adapted for the culture that taught him to read? Could it have happened like that here? He doesn’t think so. How could Janape be away for a night from a house of sisters and mothers without being noticed? Besides, Leonard knew that her absence would be taken as a form of betrothal. A surreptitious quickie? That also goes against everything he knows of his father. He’s back to the uncomfortable thought of an offer. He doesn’t like it, but it won’t be extinguished. He gets up, finds the rum bottle and in the dark of the night sits on the platform.

He thinks of Janape returning to the mountain. He’s thought only of her sorrow, imagining her as she left him in the house with Rika, another imagined scene from the story of his childhood – the bereft and weeping mother stepping onto the plane that takes her over the mountains into the dark of loss. The sacrifice of the woman who relinquishes her life so that her child can inherit the world. Sitting on the platform, watching the silvery moon, he thinks with a small lurch of the heart that it mightn’t have been like that at all. Returning here could have been a solace, more than a solace, a return to a centre, to the great breathing presence of Huvaemo and the ancestors and the clans. Her son, gift of the ancestors, could go with his father and see the new places of new people, but she belonged with the old people, with roots to hold the land steady. He imagines her sitting as he is sitting now, her sisters asleep behind her, and it comes to him that loss and contentment can exist together, one with the other.