‘Children don’t belong to just one person,’ Aaron was saying, as if she didn’t understand something she understood perfectly well. ‘In our world children are adopted, or taken up by other people in the family, in the clan. It’s common. Not remarkable.’

‘But not by white people,’ she said.

‘Rika,’ he said. ‘It can be ours. We can raise him, and then maybe another from the fjords.’

‘Jericho,’ she said, and her heart gave a curious leap. Was it possible? Could she turn a child who was Leonard’s into a child of her own? ‘A gift child’, they called him. Could it be that redemption was possible? That she could return from the closed, dark place where she’d been these last weeks? That fear and shame need not rule all of her life?

‘Are you sure it’s what Janape wants?’ she asked Tobias.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s what she wants.’

‘Isn’t she sad?’ Rika looked at him, intent and insistent.

‘Yes,’ he said, meeting her gaze. ‘She is sad. Sad tru.’

‘She’s sad and she still wants this?’

He nodded. She saw his eyes and somehow, just, she believed him, and while part of her wept for Janape, another part rose to the prospect of this child.

‘Jericho,’ Bili said. ‘My Jericho.’

The gift child from the mountain.

BOOK TWO

2005–6

Birds of paradise

sing at brief intervals,

yet, as time would destine

this to be, vanish into the depths of massy

green, into the depths of some dark ocean.

Sometimes a lonely

bird whistles …

Russell Soaba,
Naked Thoughts: Poems and Illustrations, 1978

HAPKAS

FROM BILI’S APARTMENT HIGH ABOVE THE TOWN beach there is a clear view out to sea. From her balcony at the top of the building, if he risks vertigo and leans right out, Jericho can see down, past towels hanging over lower rails, to a sheer drop of rock. At the foot of the cliff where the land begins its slope to the beach, there’s a tangle of vines and a high fence topped with razor wire. It’s the only place he’s been in these first weeks of his return from which there’s no view of the ranges, not even a glimpse, or of the clouds that shroud them. Looking out to sea, the high spine of Papua is behind him – but he cannot escape the mountain, for when he turns, there in the light of Bili’s sitting room he can see the large bark-cloth that hangs from her wall. The jagged peaks of mountain, all reds and browns and blacks, pack the cloth with energy. Among them, perfectly placed, is a large star, painted in burned yellow behind the dots that give it light.

‘What makes it so beautiful?’ Bili asks, coming out from the light and standing beside him. ‘All these years I’ve had it, and it still surprises me. I go for weeks without looking at it and then, suddenly, it jumps out at me as if to say, don’t forget.’