When Gina left, Rika sat on the stool, her shoulders slumped forward, and wished she could cry. Instead, a dry, shut feeling.

That evening Rika didn’t go to Laedi’s. Exams were over, students were returning to their villages. The winds had started, blowing a fine-powdered dust under doors and sending sudden gusts of leaves across the road. With Simbaikan about to depart and Don about to return, Rifle had sold the drum from her fire. Those who were left stayed inside, and that evening they noticed a car parked in the road outside. Martha thought it was the neighbour from the bursar’s office who yelled at them to keep the noise down. Sam had seen him cruising around the housing compound at night as if on a patrol. But it wasn’t him. No one recognised the driver who sat in the dark, smoking a cigarette, and when Sam walked over to ask him what he wanted, he wound up the window and drove away.

When Rika hadn’t turned up at eight, eight-thirty, nine, Wana and Martha walked over to her house and found her sitting in the middle of the floor. She was looking at her wall of photographs. Jacob on the hill was there. The pattern of swamp. Mela at her village. Close-ups of Laedi, her hair, her bare feet. Simbaikan at the market with Bili on her shoulder. Sam and Wana at a market; Milton with his ukulele; Rifle and a sack of vegetables. A close-up of Aaron in the library, his face turned to the light of the window. A gallery of her new life.

Pinned to the side were the morning’s shots from Eremiah’s protest at the South African ambassador’s visit, the first demonstration in Port Moresby. There was a shot of the ambassador scurrying up the steps of the plane that’d take him back to Canberra, his alarm visible as he turned to look at the students with their placards. Go Home Racialist! Another of Eremiah, his hair on end, looking more than ever like a carving on the top of a house pole, his fist in the air. There were the shots she’d taken from the bonnet of the car as the police ran towards her, and of Jacob yelling at her to get down, seconds before Aaron reached up and pulled her into his arms. Beside them was the picture cut from the South Pacific Post of Rika flanked by Aaron and Jacob, each with an arm pinned behind them by the police. Her face was turned to Aaron. A very public moment.

And now in the silence of her house she sat on the floor. In front of her, in its tarnished silver frame, was the small photograph of her mother that she’d brought from Leiden.

Wana picked it up. ‘Your mother?’ she asked, looking at the young woman with her hair in a roll.

Rika nodded. Tears were close.

Wana’s mother was a nursing sister. She took canoes between villages to deliver babies at night when there was no one to drive the hospital dinghy. ‘She’s a vegu, a grasshopper creature,’ Wana said. ‘Like you. Long, sensitive feelers.’