Getting into bed beside her sister, despite the lingering oil and tobacco smell of a man and the milky baby smell of Moana-Rose, despite dried-out timber and rancid air and the stink of soak water, there was still the familiar, comforting smell of sister. There were memories of talking, arguing, sneaking into the store to dip their fingers in sugar. At night in bed there was always Moana-Rose’s plea, ‘Tell me about our mother,’ who in those days Oriwia was adamant she could remember.

‘She was very beautiful,’ she would say.

‘But how? What like?’

‘Her face was pretty.’

‘What like?’

‘Like the angel of the Lord who cometh nigh.’

‘What about her hair?’

‘Two plaits, one at each side, taken up and crossed on top of her head. Long at the back, formed into ringlets and tied in a bunch. She had a long, blue dress from her neck to the floor. Velvet.’

‘Blue, like what?’

‘Like the eyes of the Son of God made Man in the church of Saint Michael. A large white collar covering her shoulders. Long sleeves.’

When her parents married, they’d gone to live in Jimmy’s village, which is where Oriwia and Moana-Rose were born. But not long after Moana-Rose’s birth, when Oriwia was two, their mother had become ill with typhoid fever. The people of that village earned money through trading in flax, and Jimmy was away carting when his wife fell ill. On his return, she begged him to take their daughters back to her own village until the outbreak had come under control. ‘Take the children to my relations,’ she said. ‘Dorothea will be able to feed Moana-Rose. Take them away, there’s something bad in the water here. Go now. Don’t touch the water.’

Jimmy agreed that he would take the children to his wife’s village. It was a four-hour journey and, with the baby slung against his chest and Oriwia seated in front of him on the horse, he set out along the beaches before making his way inland through the creek beds and up over the hills by way of the bush tracks. He arrived in the early afternoon with Oriwia asleep over the horse’s neck and Moana-Rose wet, hungry and crying.

For the next year, Dorothea had two babies to nurse, her own newly born Tiakiwhenua, and now Moana-Rose.

‘Grandson,’ Oriwia said, ‘I told you that Aki was your uncle by double adoption. That first adoption was when Dorothea became mother to Moana-Rose and me, and we became his sisters.’