‘Men do not always understand,’ Lilla says.

‘So Janape lay with Leonard?’

‘They lie. They lie very quietly. Soft. Soft baby spirits. Leonard gave the baby to Janape, she grew the baby inside her. The same as always.’

‘Nothing to do with the ancestors?’

‘Ancestor spirit, that’s all. The ancestor spirit brought Leonard, brought Rika.’

‘How? I mean, why them and not the others who came?’

‘Look,’ she says, pointing across to the clouds gathering on the high peaks. ‘It’s like the cloud. It lives on Huvaemo. Sometimes you see it. Sometimes it comes down and catches all of us. Sometimes it is spirit, and like the rain, sometimes it is the mountain that sends it, sometimes it is something else – it comes from somewhere else. But when it is ancestor spirit, mountain spirit, we know. We know when Rika came, she was for you. She and Janape were like sisters. Janape’s baby is all the same as Rika’s.’

‘Did Janape think that? Did she think that me going to Rika was the same as staying with her?’ He can hear the terseness in his voice.

‘She was sad. A little sad. She knew.’

‘Knew what?’

‘You must go. She is sad, and you must go. The mountain wanted it.’

So it was her duty. All that dancing, and here he is back in the same tangle.

‘When did she get sick?’ he asks. ‘How soon after I left?’

‘A little soon. When she come back from Rika’s house. From Port Moresby. The plane maybe make her sick.’

‘Is that why she didn’t go to Popondetta when Leonard came to talk to Nanaji? Did you go?’

‘No. I stay with Janape. She was sick. Big fever.’

‘Did anyone tell Leonard? He could have taken her to Moresby. To the hospital.’

‘She did not want. It was kastom sickness.’

‘She knew about medicines.’

‘Sometimes medicine is good. Sometimes, no good.’

‘Were you with her when she died?’

‘Yes. She die quietly.’

‘When?’

‘After Leonard left on the plane.’

‘When he took me to England?’

‘All the same. She die, release your spirit. Let you go to Leonard’s place.’

Tears are sliding across Jericho’s face and he does nothing to wipe them away. They come silently, without sound or movement from the body.

‘The dance,’ Lilla says. ‘The dance brings tears, often it is the same.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Jericho says. ‘Big work. I don’t know how I did it.’

‘The spirit of Janape helped you.’

Jericho is not so easily comforted. His Englishness has returned and does not believe in spirits.

Lilla puts her hand on his chest. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘Janape is here. Listen and hear me.’ She takes a cloth from her string bag, spreads it out beside Jericho. She has come to tell him the story of the first ancestors who came out of the mountain, high on the peak where the water runs hot.

There were two of them, a man and a woman, but the woman did not have the birth canal that could bring forth children. So the man cut the cleft in her body, and in return, she went into the forest and cut the first tree. From the wound in its bark, she made the first cloth, which she gave to the man, her husband, in gratitude for the power he gave her, and the children born to them. This originating exchange, Lilla is telling him, brought to life both babies and their art. On the cloth beside him, she has painted a large pyramid mountain of solid black, with a triangular section at the top left unpainted. Inside are two small beings, the first figures he has seen on any cloth.