When Martha took her a bowl of rice and vegetables, Rika moved across on the crate. ‘Stay with me,’ she said, toying with the food. They sat in silence for a while, listening to the sound of the radio coming from the house and people in the street calling out, asking where Aaron was.

‘Two years ago, when we were in Leiden, I had my IUD out,’ Rika suddenly said. ‘Two years, and nothing. Do you think it’s a punishment for not telling Aaron about the abortion? Do you think I’ve put a curse on myself?’

‘Of course not,’ Martha said. ‘You were young, hardly to blame.’

‘I was fighting them off as they wheeled me in. They gave me an injection. I let them kill it.’

‘Rika, at that stage it’d only have been cells.’

Rika winced. ‘Don’t try to reassure me. It doesn’t help.’

To Martha her voice was a blade, and it cut.

It was two in the morning when Aaron returned. A car came slowly up the street with Wilkie running behind. ‘Government car again,’ he said, swinging himself up onto the platform as Aaron got out, spoke to the driver and walked wearily across the yard, shaking hands with the men who’d gathered out on the street. When he came into the light, Martha noticed that his skin had a greyish tinge, and she saw Rika’s face darken.

‘You’re right,’ he said to Pete as if continuing a conversation already started. ‘I have to leave the university.’ He sat down, took a beer from Sam, rolled a cigarette and turned to Rika. He put a hand on her arm, a gentle gesture. ‘I’m taking Somare’s offer,’ he said.

Her eyes met his, and held them. She said nothing, but her eyes spoke for her. Are we to give up a child for this?

‘I have to,’ he said. ‘There is no other choice.’

‘No,’ she said, though the force had gone out of her voice.

In the distance they could hear the rumble of army trucks heading out of town. ‘Roadblocks,’ Aaron said. ‘They’re putting them up for tomorrow. To keep people from coming into town.’

‘Papua besena,’ Milton sang in a mournful voice. ‘Papuan separatism, the forgotten hapkas child.’

He’d returned from Melbourne declaring himself hapkas - adrift between cultures, an existential misfit. ‘It’s our fate,’ he told Rika. ‘Hapkas, both of us.’ He was reading Camus and drinking too much.

Rika was glad to have him back.

AARON FACED AN EDGY, UNPREDICTABLE ENERGY IN THE HEAT OF THE next afternoon when he stepped forward to speak. He’d been on the road since morning, marching with students in support of unity. Angry Papuans joined the march at Koki market, where there’d been more rioting that morning. Rika and Martha drove past overturned stalls and tear-gas canisters and police vans. Unlike the marches of five years before, there was no place for whites, so they left the car at the mission and went on to the parliament building with Laedi. There they stood on a slight rise at the back of the crowd looking down to the harbour with its still, gleaming water. Highlanders came sloping along, keeping their distance in a show of strength that had the police hauling them away if they raised an arm to throw the small hard stones they carried in their string bags. Dockworkers came swinging up the hill, chanting as they ran with high prancing steps.