That’s enough. Em tasol,

Bili

Well, he thinks. And then, with a jig that rocks the bamboo slats of the floor, he says ‘Yeah,’ and in a high five slaps the hands of Obi’s boys. Yeah, they echo. Yeah!

THE FACE OF THE DAY

MARTHA DIDN’T THINK SHE’D SEE THE FJORDS AGAIN, and when Jericho’s invitation came, she hesitated. Going back without Pete would be hard. She hadn’t returned, even to Moresby, while he was alive. He made his field trips alone, while she remade her life in Sydney. She’d see Laedi when she was down in Sydney, and Wana occasionally; Bili not often enough. But yes, she would go, for Jericho’s sake - of course - and also for her own. It was time she faced up to the past and made her own reckoning with it.

Since Jericho’s visit, she’d found herself back in those years, waking most mornings to memories ignited by the surge of love she’d felt for him at their lunch by the harbour, and again the next day when he came to her flat. She’d made a cake for him and they’d talked by the window looking over the park. After he left she’d taken out the box of photos, most of them Rika’s, that had been untouched at the back of a cupboard. Pete joked sometimes that they should sell them, make some money on her, but they rarely even looked at them. There was years of dust on the box. The only photo they’d kept in view - framed and on the wall - was one of Pete with Aaron and Milton out by the river. In it Pete and Aaron, in very short shorts, were about to swim; Milton, still in a shirt, was on the rocks with his ukulele. Aaron was smiling into the camera. ‘So young,’ Jericho said, taking it off the wall, bringing it to the light of the window. ‘And now only Milton is alive.’ Pete went with a heart attack, four years ago.

Martha has one night in Port Moresby, and she stays with Laedi. Leonard isn’t there. He’s gone to speak at the university in the Highland town near where Laedi was born and Simbaikan lived until she took herself back to the village to die. Leonard is to fly across to the fjords with Laedi at the end of the week, Martha going ahead on the flight that stops at Popondetta, where Milton will join her. They’ll have two days alone with Bili and Jericho, who are to meet them there from Collingwood Bay, where they’ve been with a German television crew, making a documentary on logging in the Pacific.

In Laedi’s house with a view over the harbour, Laedi takes the chair with its back to the window, and although Martha watches the sun set over the mountains, it’s their platform in Hohola that is vividly before her. The houses have gone, Laedi says, under the freeway. Maybe just as well – erased, like their lives there. On the sideboard is the photo of Bili and Jericho as children on a branch hanging over the fjord. When Martha looks at it carefully, she realises Rika must have taken it on that last visit, just before Aaron drowned. Laedi nods. Even so, she likes it, she says, it captures something of how they were as children.