‘Imagine sleeping with him,’ Martha said. ‘She’d have to be desperate.’

‘She doesn’t look desperate,’ Rika said. ‘I like her.’

‘It’d be like sleeping with a jelly. A bristly jelly.’

Rika and Laedi laughed. They were driving out of town again for the day, taking Rifle, who’d bestowed himself on Rika as her gardener, to the rubber plantations, where he had bisnis to do with his wantoks in the labour barracks. He was another distant relative of Laedi’s, and he’d arrived at Rika’s door with a band of men carrying shovels. Before Rika and Leonard knew it, they too were living surrounded by mounds planted with corn and pumpkin, stretching all the way to the road. Not even the side of the house was spared. When Rika had presented Rifle with packets of seeds – capsicums, aubergine – thinking she might as well have some vegetables of her own, he’d looked mournful and begun a long story about bad soil, and Rika hadn’t had the heart to insist.

Now he was in the front seat of the car beside Laedi, urging her on, chin forward, clicking his tongue in disapproval as Martha and Rika laughed in the back. He said something to Tamba sitting beside them, whose expression was equally dark. Bili, on Rika’s knee, joined in the joke.

They’d left town early, driving past the last of the trade stores and roadside markets, inland along the river until the road narrowed and began to climb, twisting up through bends so steep that Martha and Rika stopped laughing. Ferns and vines hung over the cliffs that rose above them on one side and dropped away on the other. Above was rainforest; behind a hazy ocean. At the top the land flattened out, as if catching its breath before rising again to the mountains. Rifle urged Laedi on, past hamlets and villages, until they left the dappled light of the forest for the strange silence of the plantations. It was as if the birds had taken fright at the rows of rubber trees marching over their land. Rifle had the window down, calling out to men who were walking with buckets hanging from their shoulders.

At the barracks they let him out with the bag of cigarettes and bottles of rum he’d bought from the sale of his cabbages. An old man came over to greet Laedi, pushing his face into the car to marvel at Bili, the little hapkas child. He grinned at her, his old hand gentle on her cheek, his few teeth stained red from chewing betel. ‘You go this way,’ he told Tamba in their Highland language. She got out to follow his gestures that seemed to point upwards into the sky, directing her to the best place on the river. ‘All the same as a Highland river,’ he said. ‘Very good.’

Back in the forest, birds chattered and flew and the air was perfumed and sweet. It was less humid. Tamba sat in the front watching the sun, her head out of the window as Laedi turned the car from this track to that until they came to a stop beneath whispery casuarinas. They walked down to the river, spread out a rug and lay under the trees. They had books, a picnic. Rika took her camera into the trees to experiment with the dapple of light. She stood on a rock in the river and focused down on the tumble of the water.