I was stabbed. In the core of me, I knew what an unspeakable insult had been given to a beautiful woman and how mortified she would feel to have brought someone like that to the family. I wanted to put my arms round her.

‘The cooking was done,’ she said, ‘the fire dying … but still …’

I knew men like that, I wanted to tell her – hearty, ignorant, drunk, full of themselves.

‘What’s more, he did it in front of my father, brother and uncle.’

We were on the edge of town, the road had straightened and widened. Lights were on along the distant streets and in the tall buildings.

‘What did they do?’ I asked.

‘They took him and threw him in the sea.’ She laughed.

‘Did they stand on him?’

‘I think they did.’ She laughed again. ‘Maybe not long enough.’

‘Come again next time,’ she said as we parted. ‘I’ll cook another fish.’

As I went over these parting words, which I did again and again in the days to come, I could make nothing more of them than words of friendship, of a host to a departing visitor, or at most words of a sister to a new brother who would be welcome to return.

I went about my work and, as I walked the decks looking out over the endlessly deep and endlessly wide ocean, I couldn’t put our conversation, her face, her shame, her laughter out of my mind.

How could Ela have spoken to me about something so dreadful, so personal and shaming, when she hardly knew me? My head couldn’t get rid of it all, and in some ways I was thankful on the home run to have the distraction of the seeing ghost.

That’s my tooth story.

When it was time to go, Chappy believed he would be leaving with me.

‘You’re stopping here,’ Mum told him once she understood his thoughts. ‘You’re not going off working on any boats until you get meat on your bones,’ she said, growling as though he were a son of hers.

What I understood, as he and I attempted to converse with each other by means of signs and antics and a word here and there, was that though Chappy didn’t want to work on the boats and didn’t want to leave the country, he thought he would try to get a job at the waterside. He didn’t want to impose any longer on our family. Several new words had been added to ‘kai’ and ‘wai’, learned mainly from the gummy mouth of Grandmother Nunu, who had taken him in hand because of his affection for her cow.

Grandmother came in during our conversation and had her say. ‘Your work is here,’ she said. Up on her feet was Grandmother, milking a cow, feeding hens, bringing wood, pulling weeds, watering plants, digging potatoes, scraping corn, demonstrating to him.