In the trees the red ants weave their leaf nests lined with a soft fleece of cobwebby fluff; the grenadilla slowly ripens on the hedge; the thornless roses grafted by Janine’s father bud and bloom. The cream roses are streaked with a flush of pink, the petals bear the faintest blush, the stalks smooth, free of visa, the poisonous, vicious red-tipped thorn. The shiny black millipedes scuttle on feathery legs and snails hide in the cool mossy shade safeguarding the glistening moisture of their flesh that soon dries in the heat. The bees fly in and out of their blue-painted hives, their buzz presaging a threatening sting when they are smoked out and the thick honeycombs taken out. Janine has felt the sting, the red swelling with the white needle embedded in it. Her father had carefully removed it and Mungo had rubbed it over gently with white chunam that was cool against the soreness.

Among the flowers and trees scurry squirrels and millipedes; bees and wasps buzz around; birds carry wisps of straw for nesting, butterflies rest on the thornless roses and caterpillars eat slowly into the leaf. Who can think beyond the here and now in this garden, the preserve of innocence where you can smell the earth and air, the plants and the ripe fruit, the mangoes, guava, jak and passion fruit. The golden orioles, yellow as the segments of ripe jak, flash on the branches. Mungo has so much patience sitting by the child hour after hour in this timelessness of childhood in which Janine never seems to grow up.

Mungo and Janine pick up small pebbles, place them on the back of their hands, toss them into the air, then catch them in their palms … ’Athuru, mithuru, dambadiva thuru’, they chant … ’athuru mithuru, athuru mithuru ….’ Or Janine tucks herself into the hammock of Mungo’s lap, into the striped cambaya cloth, and intones the incantation that she has learnt: ‘Kaputu kaa, kaa, goraka dain, dain, Ussi kaputa!’ and she springs up and waves her arms wildly to shoo away the crows that fly away, flapping their wings, crying raucously, to perch elsewhere, their purple black beaks tearing apart the carrion flesh of dead bats and maggoty flying foxes.

Rather than be separated from Mungo even for a moment, Janine would prefer that the whole world go up in flames. Fire. At the bali ritual it had sprung from the burning torches to surge skywards, the darkness slit by streaks of crimson like the blood-red winking eyes of the black cock bird slaughtered in the rituals that exorcise the demons that dwell all around you, your mind crawling with white-bellied snakes with black markings like the speckles on the trunk of the coconut palm. Dark brown snakes, black ones, snakes wreathing the head of the demon …