‘We were in the village,’ she says. ‘As you know, we went down with the canoes after the New Year celebrations. Jacob was with us, which made it easier; Angel too. And on the station with people in from everywhere and the dancing and the races, the greasy pole and the speeches, all seemed well. But when we returned to the village and Jacob and Angel recrossed the fjord for the climb to his village, I could feel that something had changed, and it wasn’t only that Rika and Aaron now slept in the guesthouse. Rika didn’t go to afa Noah’s house, or to Aita’s. You and Bili did, and Aaron, of course. But Rika, no. There was a strange kind of static in the emotional air, as if a storm was brewing, quite at odds with the sky and the flat water.’

‘Why wasn’t Laedi there? If Bili was there, why not her? Why just you?’

‘Hasn’t Laedi told you that?’

‘She said she was in the Highlands.’

‘She was with Simbaikan, for the celebrations there. Bili was meant to go with her, but she didn’t want to be parted from you. She refused. Not just refused, but refused.’ Martha lifts her arms in a gesture that says what can you do with a girl like that. ‘I was there by fluke really. Another pair of hands.’ There’s no laughter now. Her lips purse. ‘Useful Martha. That was me.’

‘And Pete? Where was he?’

‘In Sydney. His mother had had a stroke. A bad one. We’d probably have had to leave Moresby anyway.’ But that’s not how she feels about it. In her mind it has always been Aaron’s death that ended those years which remain, despite it all, and all that she’s come to think, bathed in gold. A tarnished gold, maybe, but still, gold is gold.

‘So,’ she says, returning to the story. ‘It was a clear afternoon, our third in the village, when Aaron went out with the canoes. You and Bili were playing with the children in the water, jumping from that tree with branches hanging out over the water – you must remember.’

Jericho thinks of the photo in Laedi’s house, of him and Bili with water below and a shimmering wall of green behind. Around it he has concocted something that he doubts is memory. Ominous. That’s the feeling, the sensation of the photo.