Rika hadn’t read the novel, she was pouring chemicals into dishes. She switched on the red lamp, it turned her a weird colour. She wasn’t listening. She was concentrating, running film through the enlarger. Her face was set, as if she’d lost all sense of herself. A vessel – that’s how Milton’s grandfather had been, the old samuna man, knowledge acted through him as he became samuna spirit.

Milton watched Rika work, and when the image shimmered up through the paper, he was back where he was, in the darkroom. He watched as she manipulated the lens of the enlarger. Photography was like writing. A small move here, a little more, a little less, a slide this way or that, and the image changed. Or if not the image, then its meaning, its emphasis. You didn’t just look through the lens and press, any more than you tell a story, full stop. She handed him the wet sheets and he pegged them onto the line. First there were the ones he wanted from the play. One of him leading the chorus, another in which he barely recognised himself from the ferocity of his eye. He liked the way he could become someone else, anyone really, if he put his mind to it. And he liked it in the darkroom, with Rika working and him thinking. So he stayed on while she made some prints for Mela. They were of a visit to Hanuabada, Mela’s village on the edge of the harbour. White people didn’t go there. Mela with a row of children, their mothers grinning and beckoning. These were duty photos, he supposed – what the village wanted. The shots of Laedi were more interesting. He saw fascination in them, Rika’s or the camera’s, he didn’t know – all those sharp, close images of her face, her skin, her belly. He wasn’t sure what to make of this frank gaze. And then a series of images that might be poems: a roof dipping towards water, the play of reflected light.

‘Those roof lines,’ he said as they drove back to the university. ‘They put a song in my head.’

‘Sing it,’ she said.

‘San I les, olgeta les,’ he sang.

‘Kilaut go kam.

‘Na tevil bilong solwara pairap long kappa.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Idle day.

‘Shadow of clouds.

‘Salt water spirits sleep in the roof.’

‘Teach me,’ Rika said. And he did. Her first pidgin song.

‘Tok Pisin,’ he said. ‘That’s what we call it. A language. Pidgin’s what the planters call it.’

‘No good, that,’ she said, and they sang all the way back along the road.

‘San I les, olgeta les.

‘Kilaut go kam.

‘Na tevil bilong solwara pairap long kappa.’