Rika was down the road at her house, in bed. It was true, she’d taken this death as a warning. Simbaikan continued to spook her, and when she reassured Rika of her own strength, which would keep her alive a long time yet, it made everything worse; the reassurance she wanted wasn’t about her, it was about Aaron.

Standing by Rika’s bed with a glass of fresh ginger and lime, Laedi said, ‘Get up, Rika. Where’s your courage?’

Laedi’s view, given on her platform when Milton arrived, was that a fear spirit had got into Rika with her mother’s death, that was all. Bad fears do that, they come in under the skin when you’re weak, or open, or too young, as she was, just a girl in a cold country with no sisters.

Wana said Rika was the vegu, a grasshopper creature with long empathetic feelers, and that was the reason for her fear. But Milton said no, Rika imagined what other people thought or felt; she imagined what she wanted them to feel, or would have felt if she were them, but her thinking was always tied to herself, and when she got it wrong, her imagination turned her mind to fear, because in fact she wasn’t a vegu. She put her feelers out into the world, touched other people and then let her own heart beat out the message that came vibrating back to her.

‘Go down and see her,’ Laedi said to Milton. ‘She might listen to you.’ For he was the vegu. He had the capacity to get inside other people, not her. It was what made him an actor. He could shed his own skin and inhabit another. Which may be why it was to Milton, more than to anyone else, that Aaron turned. He was the only person who could arrive at the office without disturbing its taut surface. Aaron would give the thumbs up if he could get away, and Milton would go outside and chew betel while he waited. Then they would sit in the shade, and Aaron would breathe in, taking strength from their talk.

Rika was sitting at the table with Wilkie, eating toast, when Milton came reluctantly down the path.

‘Will you take Aaron out to the river this weekend?’ she said, putting on more toast and passing him the jam. ‘He needs to get out of Hohola.’

Wilkie rolled his eyes and put his hands to his head in a gesture to Milton that said Rika had become deranged by this death.

‘If he wants,’ Milton said, shrinking himself down to an ear.

‘He’s always better for being out there.’

‘It’s not me. It’s the river.’

There was a pause, then Rika said, ‘Eremiah’s back.’

Milton snapped back into his own shape. ‘When?’

‘Last week sometime,’ Rika said. ‘Milton, listen. He’s got worse. He says Aaron’s sold out - though it doesn’t stop him drinking our beer. You’ll see tonight. He’ll be here for sure. In Hohola.’ Milton took the sneer in her voice to be Eremiah’s, not hers. Hohola, where the black actors and stooges live. ‘You’d better watch out, Milton,’ she said. ‘You really are a black actor.’