‘Bili had to coax you out along one of the lower branches. You were timid, a mountain child, not yet sure enough about the saltwater to drop into it from up there. You sat on the branch for a long time, bracing yourself with your skinny arms, refusing to jump. Then suddenly you let go and plopped in. It took us by surprise and we missed it. All we saw was that it’d happened. Rika had the Leica with her on the mat, but her mind and her attention was with Naomi. She’d come to sit with us, which meant a lot to Rika. Most of the women were keeping away. They weren’t hostile. Just distant. We might have been tourists for all anyone would have known. So Naomi coming to sit with us, it was good. Rika had always felt closest to her, they called each other gháto, cousin, or sister-friend – you know what it means. Rika was trying to explain that her condition of infertility was not as Angel had described. Nothing had been drilled up into her, but the notion of a metal coil being inserted into her made no more sense to Naomi than it would to a woman in the suburbs of Sydney if you told her that the spirits of babies really do gather by a particular spring to wait for their mothers to sing them into the womb. I could see that the further Rika went down this track, the worse it’d get, but when I tried to stop her, she snapped at me. That’s when you jumped. As if you knew to save her. Rika leaped for the camera in time to catch you shaking the water from your hair, and blowing it out of your mouth. All the kids cheered, but Bili couldn’t get you back into the tree for a repeat performance. So you were on the mat with us when Naomi was on her feet, seconds before Rika or I heard the shouts and the conch from the canoes. “They’re coming in,” she said.

‘Looking out towards the horizon, we could see nothing, a smudge perhaps, far out in the calm shine of the sea, but the crying had begun, quiet at first, a rumbling sort of whisper gathering pace as the women and the old men came running to the edge of the fjord. Cry! Cry loudly! Oh unhappiness.

‘“Aaron,” Rika said. “It’s Aaron,” and though no one broke through the lament with information, and though I said, “We don’t know that, Rika,” we did. We knew. I don’t know how, but we knew before we saw. Before the canoes came in. The sky was very blue, and Aaron’s skin was grey. The faces of the men on the canoes were grim.’

At that moment everything was vivid, without subtlety. Stark. Oh unhappiness! Jericho and Bili screamed. That is what Martha remembers. An animal noise, registering death. All around them women were keening, their wails rising in shock and grief. Aaron, brother, do not leave us! Only Rika didn’t cry. She gasped. Her breath came in gasps, and then she crumpled, her knees literally folding beneath her as if all strength had gone from them.