‘You don’t like ecotourism.’

Jericho sighs, fights back frustration. ‘Your villages are rich, you know that. Do you want them to turn into villages like the ones on the Kokoda track, with white people walking through and too much money for the young men and not enough for school fees and the old ways going?’

Hector has joined them, squatted down beside them, chewing tobacco. ‘He talks tru,’ he says. ‘He can’t stay here for the guesthouse. Soon he goes.’

‘I have work in London,’ Jericho says. ‘I have to go back to it. It’s where I earn money. Without a job I can’t help you, and Leonard will be old soon. We must find a way that Hector and I can work together, with you - all of you - when I’m not here. When I’m in London.’

‘A long way.’ Obi’s voice is doleful.

‘Yes. A long way. But other opportunities. In England, in Australia, people like to buy art, beautiful art, with stories of the place it comes from. They buy art from all over the world. Africa. Asia. They pay big money. Hundreds of kina.’

Obi whistled. ‘For cloth?’

‘Maybe. See? It’s a different way of thinking.’

‘We must ask the chiefs.’

‘First, can I look at all the cloth, talk to the women, take photographs? With Hector? Would that be okay?’

The chief of painting, a squat woman with tattoos on her temples and a pierced septum, welcomes Jericho and Hector onto her platform. Yes, she says, they can see the cloth. She has asked the women to bring it, and there they are, sitting behind her on the platform, crowding around the steps, with cloth folded in their bilums. They unwrap babies to show the swaddling cloth and begin to unfold their paintings in a great pile on the floor. Obi shouts across to a group of boys playing a game with stones under a tree. He tells them to rig up lines of bush-rope on the dance ground so that the cloth can be displayed. With it swaying in the early morning sun, Jericho thinks of Rika and the Surrealist Map of the World. He’d liked that story until he told it to Bili, in London that disastrous time. ‘You expect me to applaud the surrealists for claiming a place they never bothered to visit? Cheer them for making New Guinea large enough to be visible in Paris?’

He packs the thought away and returns his attention to the work at hand. There is much to be done if they are to make a record of the art that is here in the village. All day he and Hector are busy, measuring cloth, photographing it, taking notes. Working beside his cousin, Jericho is happy. Or rather, he thinks that the state he’s in is a form of happiness he’s not encountered before. He knows the pleasures of a day’s hard work, and he’s enjoyed working with others. But this is different. As if the work he does in London has, on this day, become fused with his life here. The equipoise of art. Where does that come from? He can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. Today, now, somewhere inside him a new shape is forming.