Another person in town that weekend was Tobias, the medical officer from the aid post on the mountain. He’d been transferred to the hospital in Popondetta soon after Leonard left, and had worked his way up to deputy director. He was in Moresby for a health department meeting and had stayed on for the proclamation. Like Milton, he thought it’d be an event, a historical moment, though in his case it wasn’t for art that he wanted to be present. He wanted to be able to tell his grandchildren. So he was also among the small crowd that gathered while the administrator signed the papers and became high commissioner. It was a quiet event, not much of a moment, and walking back down the hill, he fell in with Milton. As boys they’d been at the Martyrs School together, and there was much to talk about as they walked though the empty town, and caught a PMV out to the suburb where Tobias was staying. His sister was living there, married to an orderly at Moresby General Hospital. It was somewhere along the road, riding in an unusually empty van, that Tobias asked Milton if he knew where Rika was. Still here, he’d heard, out at the university, married to Aaron – did he know of her?

‘Sure I know Rika,’ Milton said. ‘Lives down the road from where I’m staying.’ They slapped hands, there on the PMV. Yeah!

That was how Milton came to be the first to hear the story of Janape bringing Jericho, the hapkas mountain child, down to Popondetta to find Tobias, so that he could find Rika. ‘A gift child,’ they called him. It was time for him to be sent out to school and then to his father. ‘Shit,’ Milton said on the PMV, and then again that evening while Rika was at the reception. He pondered the news of this child coming now, when all hope of a child had gone, and whether, at this time of grief, Rika could accept him. ‘Shit,’ he said again, sitting in Tobias’s sister’s house, drinking too much beer. The blurry outline of a novel hovered somewhere, and with it the thought that the lives of friends were not the stuff of fiction. Or were they? A poem. Perhaps a poem. In the voice of the hapkas kid.

The next morning, Milton and Tobias set out for Hohola. Everything remained quiet, eerily so. The trade stores were closed; street-sellers had packed up and gone. There were no trucks. The PMV that picked them up was almost empty. It was as if the population had been cast under a spell.

At Hohola it was the same; trade stores were boarded up, and just one old woman was under the trees with betel to sell. Milton went across to her – they’d need replenishments with the task facing Tobias. He passed one to him with his lime pot as they climbed the hill to the house. Neither of them spoke as they walked, slowly, breathing in the quiet of the morning, a dog barking somewhere in the distance.