For the rest of the day, Graham treated me as if my recipe had been changed and my flavour was unpleasant.

‘Am I to be idle for this entire year? You do still have a naval service?’ ‘We expected you would need more time to adjust—’ ‘Is the sea still wet? Can one still float ships upon it?’

You don’t look Cambodian, one early clown had said to me, then glowed like a pilot light because the interview was being recorded for staff monitoring and training purposes. He’d get a warning for that one. People say this to me a lot, and what they mean is: you look like one of the late-entering forms of white – Spanish maybe – and also like

When we sleep, we enter the hadal valley of REM, and through our dreams we process the day’s events. But people with disrupted, non-linear sleep cycles – for example, people suffering from PTSD, whose excessively high levels of noradrenaline blocked REM-level dreams – couldn’t enter deep sleep to process their memories and chemically defang them,

I watched him for a while, interested in the way that only his fingers moved. Most people ripple with surplus motion unless they are concentrating, but Graham only ever moved the parts of him that he wanted to move.

Despite my mother speaking Khmer to us at home, I hadn’t retained it through my formative years. I came to my heritage as a foreigner.

I was shy of Arthur. Most friendship quartets don’t function in squares but in lines, and Arthur and I were the furthest away from one another.

Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.

The neighbourhood made its noises, which all sounded like something else. The wind in the trees sounded like rushing water. The squirrels chattered like children. Distant conversation recalled the clatter of pebbles underfoot. I felt I should have been translating them for him, as if he didn’t know about trees.