So Milton set himself up on his table and taught himself to type. For a few weeks, maybe a month, he looked better each time he came into town. All his anger poured onto the page as he banged away at the keys: anger against Tessa for when she’d turned her back as if he’d never been there. He’d made a scene, that’s what Tessa called it. Okay, let it be a scene. Thump, thump went the typewriter. Anger at Tessa. Anger at the playwright who arrived back in Melbourne from New York boasting about having met Allen Ginsberg, swaggering around with a joint in one hand and Tessa in the other. The arrogant shit. It turned out he was a cousin of Tessa’s sister’s godmother, whatever that was. These white people who wander the world peddling their belief in the artist freed from the primitive demands of kin and clan, they’re as highly regulated and interconnected as any Papuan. It turns out to matter as much to them who their families are, and who they have engaged in obligation and the play of status. It’s just not as obvious, and they don’t admit it. You’d need to be an anthropologist to make sense of it. He’d make the obvious joke, but no one much found it funny, though at first when Tessa dropped him, people still called out to him in bars; that was something. But when he drank too much and said what he felt, and let the anthropology joke not be a joke, there was a turning-away. Not a fight, as there would have been in Hohola; a fight and still a place to sleep. In Melbourne there was nothing overt, just a change in tone and eyes pitying him, and then even that was gone. Who would know, who would care, that he came from a line of samuna men?

No one wanted his plays anymore. His poetry was returned with a note. A new government was in power; hadn’t the prime minister himself renounced Australia’s colonial past? Times were changing. ‘Wake up, man,’ he was told. ‘Write something else.’ He’d thought it was the plantation manager he hated, but now he knew it was Tessa and her oh-so-smart white theatre friends.

Okay, if that’s what they wanted, he’d write something else. He’d write about them, write about Tessa. Ha!

The problem was that Milton wasn’t a good hater, and hating made him sick. The words that he thumped out by day came back at night and gave him bad dreams.

When Bili joined him in hating Melbourne, he wouldn’t have it. When she said it was too flat with too many houses and too many white people, he made her stop. Laedi reminded Bili that her father was white and her mother half-white, which made her three-quarters white, so she’d better get used to it. Bili scowled and said the Highland quarter was a very large quarter, so large it made up to a whole. She wasn’t bloodless like white people, she could bleed. And right there at the table she picked up a knife and nicked the soft pad of her index finger. A bead of dark blood swelled and dropped onto the table. ‘See,’ she said. Daisy, with her sweet nature, shed a tear for her sister, and for the white people of Melbourne. Milton picked up Bili by the shoulders until her face was level with his, and shook her. ‘You ever drop Highland blood again, girl, and I’ll beat you. You hear. You’ve got good blood. All of it’s good blood. You be proud, girl. You be proud.’