‘At the airstrip?’

‘Janape says it’s a bad place, that village. There’s an evangelist in there now. He’s not teaching the syllabus, and the inspectors don’t get there like they used to. He says independence is coming up, he can teach what he likes. He doesn’t have to teach the white man’s way. Raise children for Jesus.’

‘Janape never thought much about Jesus.’

‘It’s not only that.’

Tobias was looking to Milton as if for help, but he’d sunk down low, so low that the contortion of his face made Pete realise what Tobias was struggling to say. Don flashed into his mind. So that’s what it was. A reckoning, long avoided, come at last.

‘Hapkas,’ he said. Just the one word.

‘Hapkas,’ Bili said with a wide grin. ‘The same as us.’

‘Yes,’ Tobias said. ‘He’s a hapkas child. He looks it. He looks mixed race.’ Tobias opened his hands in apology. ‘He looks like Leonard.’

‘You mean Don,’ Pete said.

‘No. Leonard.’

Rika stood up. ‘Leonard?’ She went very pale. ‘It can’t be. It’s not possible.’

‘It’s what Janape says. She wants me to tell you.’

Rika sat down again. Put her head between her legs. There was a buzzing noise in her ears, and the voices above her grew distant and faint. She’d never thought Leonard would have a child. It wasn’t a thought that in all those years she’d come near to thinking. There was something too pale about him. His penis was thin, and the stuff that flowed from it was pale and watery. Everything about Leonard was pale. She’d enjoyed herself with him, it wasn’t that, but the enjoyment came from her; she made it, not him, and she enjoyed his pleasure in her as if something of her remained outside, watching. With Aaron she was helpless against the pleasure he gave and made for her. When her body swelled, awoken by Aaron, everything he left was a gift, and the giving of it so vibrant that her body could feel it hours later.

If fertility had a feeling, it was once her daily fare; if fertility came with rings of pleasure, then she should have been the most fertile of women.

The baby should be hers.

The baby should be theirs.

Above her, she heard that Janape had walked into Popondetta. Tobias had noticed her in the crowd of women outside the hospital. He saw her in the morning and again in the middle of the day, his attention caught by the golden streaks in the child’s hair, the straight, prominent nose. Was that it? Or the urgency of the mother, and her focus on Tobias rather than on the nurses and orderlies whose job it was to move people into line. And he could see that this woman, this child were not sick. He knew they were from the mountain, he recognised the skin, and then, in the afternoon, he realised that the woman was Janape, so changed was she from the girl he’d shown how to dispense quinine and boil up sugar water for babies with diarrhoea. He walked over to where she was waiting in the shade, and took both of them into the hospital. The child had a large weeping sore on his leg, others between his toes, in the crease of his buttocks. Otherwise he was healthy. Janape too. A slight cough, nothing more. He took them to his house and fed them. He had a little of their language. Janape had taught the boy the English she knew. Obi had taught him more. Tobias learned that the chiefs had started to teach the boy early. Nanaji taking him to his house with the older boys, where he’d slept, collecting his learning. Then Nogi had said to Janape, ‘You take him down to the flat land. You take him to learn the new ways. Find Rika. When he grows more, she take him to his father.’