Rika liked having Aaron at her table, and Sam. She arranged her days so that the two she spent at the library would coincide with theirs. She liked the way they sat back in their chairs and talked. She liked the contrast of their hair, one red, one black, both springy, growing long. She liked the way they joked and then became serious again. She liked the lunches they ate in the tearoom, fresh bread and tomatoes from a stall on the street. More coffee. There was a spring in her step as she came up the stairs in the morning. She stood at the window, looking down on the drab street, at white mothers shopping with small children, at local women with their string bags, bilums, set out for sale on woven pandanus mats, at groups of men smoking in the shadow of the awning over the bank. Her mind felt wide and capacious. Aaron had shown her the Surrealist Map of the World, and she saw how it pleased him that the surrealists had redrawn the map in 1929, doing what the European powers had done only ten years before with the Treaty of Versailles, carving up the world, remaking boundaries to suit the victors of war. Only the surrealists’ was not a map of conquest. Theirs was a map to celebrate the creative. ‘The poetic sublime,’ Breton called it. ‘Glittering visions of something other than that which we can know.’

Bang in the centre of the Surrealist Map of the World was the great Pacific Ocean. Off to the left, Russia was huge (they approved of the Revolution); Africa and China were small but well visible. To the right Mexico was large and so was Labrador, but between them the United States had very nearly been erased. Gone! At the left-hand edge of the map, England was a dot off the east coast of a large Ireland. Rika liked that. Australia had shrunk to the size of Tasmania (which didn’t feature at all) under New Guinea and its islands, which were so large the equator has to bulge upwards to accommodate them.

Rika traced the Surrealist Map of the World and made an enlargement of it on a large sheet of art paper. With ink and a fine pen, she decorated the map with tiny maro figures, and pinned it to the wall of the room where they worked.

LIFE, BEING AS IT IS, CONTINUED IN WAYS THAT WERE RESOLUTELY realist. Personal slights and rivalries arrived in Laedi’s garden as surely as the ukuleles and the gossip. The stars still shone in the sky, but down on the ground of the garden Milton didn’t forgive the editor of the student newspaper for abandoning a review of his play in order to write about the Kennedy assassination.

‘We shouldn’t be ruled by what happens to them,’ he grumbled, to which Eremiah, the editor, answered along the lines that it was his point exactly. ‘Shooting a planter, that’s easy. What to do next is the question.’ He told Milton to read what came out of the United Nations. ‘What will you know if you lie about and read novels? They’re seducing you. Making you angry. You kill the planter. They hang you. Go to the archives. Read the court reports.’