‘They are roadways of the paintings,’ Janape said. ‘See? The snail, the vine, cassowary egg, skin of snake.’

Outside, Leonard continued on with his notes, drawing sketches of each painting, naming each recurring design as instructed by Boja and Obi. How slow he seemed. Had he always been like this, pinning everything down?

‘A good man,’ Janape said, and for a moment Rika thought her irritation, her treachery had been revealed, as visible as Lilla’s alphabet. But there was no rebuke; Janape’s smile was wide and clear, her eyes kind. ‘Come,’ she said, choosing from Tobias’s jars and putting them in her string bag.

Janape and Lilla led Rika past a line of houses, down a small slope to a cluster of dwellings built on stilts at the edge of the forest. Flowering plants grew close to the path. Two boys were climbing a pandanus palm for nuts, throwing them down to the ground.

‘I’ll wait here with Lilla,’ Rika said when they reached a house with people calling to Janape from the platform. She could see a woman lying on a mat. Better she waited here, out in the air, under the tree with large red flowers. But Janape beckoned to her. ‘It is good that you come,’ she said.

The sick woman was struggling to raise herself onto her elbow; her breast was swollen, drum-hard and hot. Janape took her whimpering baby, spoke quietly to the woman and pressed her hand against the breast. She tried the baby on the other side. A little sticky fluid came out.

‘Good,’ Janape said. She took a jar from her bag and gave the woman four pills.

‘Will she live?’ Rika asked as they left. What would happen if she didn’t? Up here, so far from anywhere?

‘We come back tonight. More pills. They are good. Two days. Four. She will be well.’

At the next house, built almost in the forest, Rika didn’t go up to see the man whose cough she heard through the plaited walls of his sleeping room. She walked back up the path to a small bank that looked down into a gully. White trumpet flowers were hanging from a branch beside her. She thought of her mother, face turned to the wall. And of Aaron in his bed in the ward, the police coming to take his statement. A ruddy-faced Australian with a spiral notebook, the whole ward watching, the crowd at the door, and not a word said as she sat beside him. ‘An investigation,’ the South Pacific Post reported, implying it was a raskol gang that had beaten him, when the whole town knew the truth. ‘The wife of Dr Leonard Powell, the ethnographic filmmaker, was present to offer comfort.’

When Janape rejoined her, they sat still, without speaking, the sun shining through the leaves of the tree. Rika could feel her strength, and let it comfort her. Memory loosened its grip; in its place, a welling sadness.

‘We go now,’ Janape was standing up. ‘Sister friend.’ Lilla took her hand and pointed across to the peak of Huvaemo, still clear against the sky. The air was fresh, birds flew in the trees and the grass of the path was soft.