In the golden light of that morning, Rika brought the lens in on Nogi’s eyes. She shot off a roll of film, capturing the clear gaze of a woman who had no reason to pose, no concept of vanity. And as she did, the thought came to her that she had an exhibition. It was a thought that excited her, and also made her ashamed.

WHEN THE DANCING HAD FINISHED AND THE CLANS HAD RETURNED to their villages, Rika was at the river with Janape, sitting on the stones, enjoying the warmth of the sun. Above them, parrots were darting back and forth, squabbling for seeds. In the river Josephine was squeezing the last of the shampoo onto her hair. Women on their way back from their gardens were washing sweet potato and taro in the shallows. A baby was asleep in a large string bag hanging from a tree on the shady bank.

Rika lay in the water and let her mind return to swimming with Aaron at the town beach, out past the children, floating as he dived beneath her, his body liquid in the water, and bursting up through the surface into the air, saying, come down with me. Diving down, her hand in his. And then she was back in another river, far back when her mother was alive, a holiday somewhere, when she swam in the shallows of a smooth, gentle river, opening her eyes to the silky movement of weeds, surfacing to sunlight and her mother on the bank in her apple-green dress.

Though the current was turbulent in the mountain river and she could hold her head under for only a moment, she felt something in herself that was both grief and resolve. The time had come: she must face Leonard, her own failure of courage, and find her way back down the mountain to Aaron. She’d sent a letter to Popondetta with a man taking peanuts to the market. Otherwise there was no way to tell him that she loved him no less, that it was not Leonard but the mountain that had snared her. She dipped her head under again, and coming up into the air she was comforted by the presence of Janape. Was friendship the word? She didn’t know what the word would mean to Janape, with its implication of choice. Friend joined to sister. She didn’t understand enough to know if there were friendships within the clan that were different from the way they understood the web of connections that held each person as part of the whole. Could an outsider be a friend? Or was it a word that belonged in the hapkas world of exile?

Rika heard voices hollering from across the river, at the top of the ridge. Janape stood up.

‘From the airstrip they come,’ she said.

The women washing vegetables stopped to listen as the shouts bounced across the valley to the village and answering calls ricocheted back. They joined the yodelling, but from all the talk, the raised excited voices, the dropping-back into a busy silence as the vegetables were returned to string bags for the climb to the village, Janape said only, ‘A policeman brings home the boy.’