Leonard laughed.

‘The mission kept its papers in good order,’ Gina said, ‘but not when it came to photographs.’ She handed one of the envelopes of negatives to Leonard. ‘Can any of these be salvaged?’ she asked. ‘Looks like the cockroaches have been in there.’

Leonard held them up to the light. ‘Some,’ he said. ‘But it’d be a tricky job. Looks as if they were developed in a lab.’

‘Yes,’ Gina said. ‘They were sent down to Australia.’

‘Rika could do something with them. Couldn’t you, darling?’ he said, turning to her.

So Rika began to work for Gina – half a day here, half a day there – fitting herself onto the table where the historians worked. In the darkroom, makeshift but adequate, she worked from the old negatives and developed her own film. She hadn’t liked Leonard offering her up like that, but she became fond of Gina, and the library with its bustle and noise that didn’t concern her. And she liked the silence of the darkroom, as she always had. It was where things settled, internal things; or if they didn’t settle, they moved and morphed so that the edges that jabbed at her one time were different the next.

Every time she was there, she felt the present growing in her. She put it down to Martha with her clear gaze and unguarded talk. And to Laedi with her stories of moving between the cinemas of Brisbane and the village across from the plantation, where she slept by the fire with her skin-sisters and woke in the morning to sweet potato cooked in the ash. Neither of them was split as Rika was split; they hadn’t had to leave one place so far away to find another. Or was it another part of herself she needed to find? But in the darkroom, developing her film, she felt a subdued sense of excitement, remembering their drives around the harbour, their afternoons on the beach. The talk. The talk surprised her. Not theirs but hers, after so many years of keeping fast to herself. She told them about the Botanical Gardens, which she passed on the way home from school, and how she went there to escape the girls and the gloom of the house on the canal, with its drawn curtains. Until Leonard began to visit, her mother’s books had lain untouched where she’d left them. When Martha looked surprised at this, Rika saw it in a way she hadn’t before. In the unexpected release of that moment, she told them about the man from the Antilles who’d found her in the orchid house. She told them about the rush of feeling that came upon her, but nothing of its consequence. Was she a fool to admit to that? Would they see beyond what she’d revealed? She hoped not. If she kept it to herself, maybe it would vanish eventually as if it had never happened.

Outside the darkroom Rika rarely thought like this. Each day swept her along. Martha said Gina was having an affair with Alex Penrose. It was the talk of the anthropology department.