Coming into the village, a woman with a worn face called Janape onto her platform. Rika listened to their voices, one soothing, the other forceful. Without language, she listened as she might to music, and something in the timbre of the frayed, angry voice struck her as a warning. When Janape called to Rika, she climbed the ladder steps warily. The woman was sitting with her legs straight in front of her, her back ramrod straight. She was painting black pathways on bark-cloth folded on her knee, a mass of angry shapes whirling across the fabric. She beckoned and patted the matting next to her, where Rika was to sit. She took a betel nut from a small bag and offered it to Janape. Curious children appeared at the edge of the platform and were shooed away. ‘Go now!’ she told them, including Lilla. ‘Women talk.’ She looked straight at Rika, fixing her with sharp, determined words that seemed, though Rika couldn’t be sure, to be making Janape uneasy. Janape was stripping the skin off the betel nut and didn’t look up when she translated.

‘She is the mother of Josephine boyfriend,’ she said. ‘Big trouble for boy. He is in the village at the airstrip.’

‘Hunter?’ Rika asked.

‘All the same. She wants him come home. That village at the airstrip is making him sick. She ask you to bring him.’

‘How?’

‘Maybe Leonard will bring him.’

‘How?’

More words came from the woman, spoken slowly, directed at Rika’s eyes.

‘What is she saying?’

Janape shrugged. ‘Mother of Hunter crazy a little maybe.’ Was she being evasive? She stood up for them to leave. The woman went back to her painting – roadmaps of fury.

Underneath the house two pigs were resting. As Rika climbed down the ladder they blundered off towards the bush. She felt clumsy herself, following Janape and Lilla through the village, not recognising paths, not knowing where they led, not knowing what was said.

Under another house, a boy was sitting hunched as if he were cold. ‘Diki,’ Janape called quietly, and the boy hobbled towards her. She took the soiled bandage from his leg and frowned at the putrid sore. It was not healing. It was long and narrow, running the length of the boy’s shin, with raised, puckered sides and a deep ugly crater.

‘This one no good,’ she said. ‘It go down and down.’ She filled the crater with white powder and counted out more pills

‘Will that fix it?’

‘Maybe. Maybe no.’

‘Should he go to Tobias?’ Rika asked. ‘Can someone help him get there?’ The boy was limping as if the pressure of his weight was painful. ‘He could stay there and go to school.’

‘He go to school before,’ Janape said.

‘Why isn’t he still there?’

‘It not a good place. He want to come back to the mountain.’

The boy said something to Janape, a low murmur, and looked towards Rika, his eyes pooling with tears.

‘That place give him the sore,’ Janape said. ‘No good for him, going there.’