At the bend above the trade stores, Rika could see over to the road into town. The Chinese store-owners were nailing boards across the doors; the women who sold betel and lime were packing up and hurrying away. The trucks that congregated there had gone. In the distance she could hear the crack of metal on metal, the wail of sirens. Standing there was eerie, as if she was on some kind of dividing line. Behind her the shadows were beginning their slow creep down the hill and from that direction the air was fragrant with the late-afternoon scent of eucalyptus. In front of her, out in the valley, she could smell danger rising like the dust drifting up from the road.

It was here that Martha found her, just as three boys, all soft edges and spindly legs, came scrambling up the hill towards them.

‘Aaron says to go to Laedi!’ It was Aaron’s nephew Wilkie, his wiry plaits bobbing. He was breathing in wild gasps. ‘Everyone’s fighting. New Guinea want to kill Papua, everyone dead.’

‘Calm down.’ Rika caught him by the shoulder, holding him steady, and the others slowed, hopping from foot to foot.

‘A big fight,’ Wilkie said, pulling himself free. ‘We’ll chase them out.’

Rika kept her hand on his shoulder. ‘Did Aaron say to go back?’ she asked. The boy shot her a sideways look. ‘He didn’t, eh?’ Her grip tightened. Wilkie hung his head and the other boys shuffled and looked at the ground. Fifty years earlier they’d have been on their way to warriors already, but the old initiations had ended and they were just kids in town for school.

They told Martha and Rika that they’d been on the stand with Aaron and Pete in a large crowd of coastal Papuans. At the end of the match they were cheering. ‘Clapping and dancing,’ Wilkie said. They didn’t see what happened, only that people were spilling out of the stands to fight and it took a long time to get away. Girls were crying, and Aaron and Pete kept stopping to help them. Outside in the street were cars with smashed windows. ‘A big noise,’ Wilkie said. When the police arrived with batons and tear gas, the crowd ran on towards Boroko, breaking the windows of trade stores, stopping cars, smashing windscreens. Highlanders who were chewing betel at the back of the Boroko Hotel joined the fight and blocked the road.

‘A white person’s wedding got frightened,’ Wilkie said. ‘Ladies in white dresses were all running about.’ The boys had recovered themselves and were laughing, imitating the white ladies and the hats on their heads.

‘So how did you get back?’ Rika asked.

They’d waited a long time, talking to some men Wilkie didn’t know. ‘A white man came talking to Aaron,’ he said. ‘Government man, maybe.’

‘Derek?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You know Derek. Somare’s man. White man.’

‘Maybe.’

‘So? What happened.’

‘Nothing.’ The car had gone away, back to town with a policeman. The boys had left at last, in Pete’s car with Aaron. They got through the roadblocks, that’s all they’d say, and then Pete stopped at the turn off and Aaron sent them up the hill to Rika.