‘Did you see these?’ Aaron startled her. He was holding out a colour photograph of a fine plumed headdress. Yes, she’d seen it. It had passed in front of her that afternoon with Gina; another folder, another elaborate spray of feathers, that’s all she saw, nothing more. Her plaits were pinned up against the heat again, and she’d cut her fringe short so it stuck out from her forehead like a tiny awning, and still she could feel the sweat at the back of her neck, her brow. She brought her attention to the headdress. She saw the fineness of the black, dancing plumes. Attached to them were tufts of soft white feathers. ‘Are they sewn on, these white ones?’ she asked. It was hard to make out.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s big work. Underneath feathers from a cockatoo.’

‘And the black feathers?’

‘Black cassowary.’

‘Not bird of paradise?’

‘Not those. These.’ He passed her another photograph, the red of the ragianna, the red plumes she’d seen attached to those shrivelled bodies. The colour of henna.

‘And here.’ Another photo, another angle on the black cassowary headdress. ‘A very good one. Old. Collected 1908.’

Sam came round the table to look. ‘Would it have come through the traders?’ he asked.

‘If it’s in Europe, yes,’ Aaron said. He looked at the back. ‘Unless it was part of a collection. There’s no note to say it is. Just the village in Papua. Owen Stanley Range.’

‘How do they do it?’ Rika asked, looking at the white feathers.

‘They’re tied on,’ Aaron said. ‘It’s delicate work, sometimes they use a flying-fox bone as a needle.’

‘So much work,’ Rika said.

He smiled. ‘There’s nothing like it,’ he said. ‘A lazy afternoon, in the shade, talking as you work.’

‘How long since you’ve been home?’

‘Too long. Not since before I started my MA.’

‘Are you going back?’

‘At the end of the semester break, in July. There’s a feast and I’ve got permission to go.’

Sam looked up. ‘The old man’s letting you go already?’

‘How long?’

‘Only for a week.’

‘For a feast?’ Rika asked. A whole week, for a feast?

‘Not just any feast,’ Aaron said, with that half laugh of his. ‘A ritual feast.’

‘You are getting the treatment,’ Sam said, amiably enough. Aaron was on a local salary, half what he was getting; he didn’t begrudge the perks.

Rika returned to the photograph Aaron had handed her. At the back of the headdress, low down, was a kind of cape – enough to cover the neck – of white and black cockatoo feathers, alternating, over lapping, cut into regular and precise patterns. Above them, the seeming disorder of the black plumes with their carefully sewn white.

‘At night they dance,’ Aaron said. ‘All you can see are the white feathers moving.’

‘They dance at night?’

‘When the moon is full. On the mountain, your husband will see it.’

‘Leonard,’ she said. ‘Yes.’