‘Where is he now?’ Rika asked, though she knew the answer.

‘With Somare and Derek,’ Wana said. ‘They want him in the office. Seriously this time.’

‘No,’ Rika said.

‘Yes,’ Wana said. ‘Rika. This time it’s yes. This time he’ll want to. We all do, we can’t not be part of what’s coming.’

Over the radio Aro’s calm voice repeated that there was no cause for alarm, the police were on the streets, stay inside, order would soon be restored.

Wana understood what Aaron was up against. A western education had pulled them both out of tribe and place; they understood what it meant to be able to make individual choices about their lives. Yet there was an ancient seam inlaid in them like the drumbeat of a heart. Wana knew that had Aaron been able to live by temperament alone, he could have chosen a life not unlike the one Leonard had retreated to in his Oxford college. In that life he might have taken Rika back to Europe and lived modestly as a scholar. But his was not that life, and no choice could make it his. It wasn’t just an accident of birth; it wasn’t just obligation, or the vanity of knowing they stood on the brink of history; and it wasn’t simply a residue of tribal consciousness. It was a nasty little hook, an existential paradox that was like a curse laid on them: the knowledge that they had choice made choosing impossible.

This is what Rika would never understand. She thought choice meant being able to select a life for themselves, no matter how often Wana told her that wishing and wanting would get her nowhere when it came to Aaron’s future. She might as well rail against the weather.

Milton understood the peril and consequence of falling in love across the lines of race and culture. ‘She’s doomed,’ he said gloomily to Laedi. Their years in Melbourne had overlapped, and a bond of some sort had been forged between them there, each privy to the humiliations of the other in that foreign city. He’d arrived back earlier in the year, blistered with anger and shame. Tessa had tired of him, as anyone could have told him she would.

On the evening of the riots, he turned up on Laedi’s platform after dark. He was living out at the river, and had hitched a ride into town on a truck. He’d looked at the broken glass, disappointed there wasn’t more. He was after material. ‘Policemen everywhere,’ he complained when he showed up in Hohola.

When he saw Rika staring out along the street into the dark, as if that would bring Aaron back where he belonged, he said, ‘He won’t choose her. Not if it comes down to her or Somare. He won’t even choose himself.’

But Rika’s will was strong, and so was her fear. She pulled a crate to the edge of the platform and sat there looking down the street, brooding, waiting for Aaron.