Hector is adept with the tape measure. He draws up a sketch of each cloth, writes in the measurements and the names of the designs. He asks the artists when they use a stick to paint, when they tie grass to the stick and cut it to make a brush. He asks them where they make their paints, and from whom they learned the designs. He makes notes for the chiefs.

‘How much school did you do?’ Jericho asks.

‘Grade eight.’

‘You didn’t say.’

Hector laughs. ‘You think I am a bush-man, that’s all. You’re like Captain Cook. White-man boots, same as yours, they come up higher.’ He marks the place on his leg from the pictures he’s seen, and laughs some more. ‘Captain Cook!’

Jericho puts an imaginary telescope to his eye, as if surveying the horizon.

Other young men arrive to help, some with pencils of their own, yellowing exercise books. Hector sets them to work, and all around him on this bright morning there’s a clean, focused energy.

Among the faces bent to their task, he sees the shape of his own nose, the curl of his hair, the set of his eyes. A strange experience after living all his life as a face that has no reference point. Are you Indian? African? Jamaican? No, I’m Melanesian. What? Where? After a life of that, it feels good to find himself among faces that are like his, among people who can fix him in generations going back, to look around and see familiarity. There is even a woman who, at a certain angle, has a look of Bili. She turns and the hallucination fades. No, nothing like her. Brenda is her name. Six large hangings are hers. She has the sweeping line of this village, and the intricate cross-hatching of Obi’s village. His village.

‘Yes,’ Hector says, ‘her mother is there, in our village. She married here, in this village.’

‘You have both,’ Jericho says to this woman, Brenda. ‘Two village wisdom.’ She laughs, and he glimpses Bili again. The set of the forehead, maybe. Something about the hair. But her skin is darker than his. Darker than Bili’s. She doesn’t look hapkas.

‘What is the name of your mother?’ he asks her.

‘Josephine,’ she says.

‘You know her,’ Hector says. ‘You gave her medicine. You talk to her down below. She has the bad foot.’

Yes, the woman with the twisted foot. Josephine. The connection clicks in his mind.

As he and Hector work on, the thought presses at him: Brenda and Bili. He doesn’t know what to do with it. He hasn’t been able to send word to Bili since he’s been up here. No one has gone down to the road. He will write a letter tonight and ask Obi if it can be taken down to Meg, or to Presley. He needs to write to her anyway. The more the bisnis takes shape in Hector’s mind, and in his, the more he realises the scope of what it will entail. It will need a structure. A co-op, perhaps. An arts centre. He has no idea how such things are established. There must be procedures and precedents. Bill will know; he can’t do this without her.