‘Come home,’ Leonard said. Home? Where was home? Where was there a home for Rika? For Jericho?

FROM THE WINDOW OF THE PLANE THE FJORDS COME INTO VIEW AS green fingers of land extending into clear blue water. At their tips a rim of pearl billows into turquoise reef. The plane circles over a line of outer reef, returns to land, swoops in low, disturbing the sea birds. The rise of the runway is just as it was, a bump of wheel on grass, and the plane comes to rest in the place where, at the beginning of 1976, they’d landed to celebrate the first New Year after independence. Ten days later a bowed and silent Rika was put back onto the plane, leaving Aaron behind, buried in his ground. That day the air was filled with high, crying wails, but as Martha steps off the plane on this day, the past is overridden by the beauty of the place, the glittering sun, the familiar physique of the fjord people, grown into a new generation. Waiting on the strip, instead of the kiap, is the manager of the resort in which they’ll stay until they go to the village – a rugged Australian just old enough to have been born and schooled there before independence, one of the few who renounced Australian citizenship in order to become a Papua New Guinean, and for that alone Martha likes him.

‘Resort’ gives the wrong impression. The government station was sold off after independence, at first as a place for divers living in the old dormitories. Slowly the ramshackle buildings were added to and resold – to the consternation of Giwi’s clans, who never had this in mind as they watched the fence go up around the wide verandas, and a terrace appear above the path down to the jetty. Martha tries to work out where the kiap’s house used to be, but nothing looks as it did. It’s as if someone has come in and rearranged the puny structures.

To Martha’s eye, they’ve rearranged Milton as well. The shape he makes in the air has changed: no longer a skinny silhouette of sharp angles and rapidly raised arms, instead a slightly rotund shape, a downward pressure in the air. His hair is greying. His gait is slow. Even so, she recognises him at once when he comes across the strip at Popondetta to join the crowded plane – a twin otter – for its flight along the coast. He climbs in and sits at the back near the door, calling hello and waving to Martha in her seat at the front.

‘Well,’ he says when their bags have come off the plane and they’re walking over to the resort, and have had time to embrace each other. ‘You look the same, Martha. Handsome. You told me once that was the word for women like you. Well, you’re still handsome.’

‘Older,’ Martha says.

‘True,’ he says. ‘We’ve seen a bit, you and I. And here we are with more to see.’