Stan.

The row leader job is decided by the office at the end of the season, going off the sheet. Stan has been passed over twice in a row, and the second time was for the same reason as the first: at the very top his name does not appear. To whoever closes the day with the sheet he says, without raising his voice, that he went slow that day and that the rows should go under his cousin Solofo's name. The two standing there know he has gone faster than anyone. That night he closed the notebook at the same hour as every other night.

You get up to his mother's village by the paddy. The last time he went in he was sixteen: he set the sack down in the doorway, stayed standing and talking from there, and went back down before it got dark. There was no slammed door and no argument. He stopped going up, and that was that; now they meet at the crossroads. On the t-shirt he is nineteen, beanie on and amber eyes wide open. The aye-aye, by the way, is the only primate in the world whose incisors keep growing for its whole life, the same as a rodent's: in the eighteenth century it was filed among the squirrels.