‘I think I have a fever,’ he said. He held a damp handkerchief to his face.

For two more days it rained. Leonard lay in bed, hot to the touch, shivering and sweating. His skin was a pale grey, his eyes without his glasses looked sunken and moist. Rika read Tobias’s instructions for the remedial dose of quinine, Janape counted out the pills.

With Leonard trembling, unable to speak, remorse filled the hours. The rain fell and the river rose. Boja stood tutting at the door and called into the foggy rain for Janape to boil up water. Hunter’s mother was in the cookhouse with her and she cackled when Rika went in.

Janape sat beside Leonard. She held his head as he drank and coaxed him to eat the yam she’d prepared. She sang quietly, as if to a child. Leonard smiled at her, fell back to his fever.

‘For better or for worse,’ he murmured when Rika went in with lime and ginger in hot water. ‘Love and curse. I promised your father. Old Piet. Love and worse.’ Tears and sweat covered his face.

Janape helped him up to drink the liquid she had prepared and turned the damp pillow. The clouds rained grief and fear, the duty of tears. Rika stood looking out into nothingness. Aaron was beyond the cloud, beyond the reach of her mind, and yet she wanted him with the full force of her being.

On the last day of the rain, as it began to ease, Leonard’s fever abated. Boja came to sit with him. Janape and Rika sheltered in the low-roofed, smoky cookhouse as yams roasted in the ashes. Rika’s legs were restless; whichever way she sat, they wanted to move. Her fingers tapped impatiently on the floor.

She wanted to tell Janape, explain why she would soon be leaving. She felt she owed it to her new sister-friend, and suspected that anyway Janape had heard enough to know. She wanted to ask her to look after him. But Leonard didn’t want the village told; they wouldn’t understand, he said, and could turn against her. And she didn’t want him humiliated here as he was by the talk in Port Moresby. So her fingers tapped on the floor while Janape sang a low, quiet song with words she didn’t translate. ‘Just a song,’ she said, when Rika asked.

The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Where there had been an intolerable emptiness, the peaks of the mountain returned to view. Wisps of cloud hung in the valleys below, but above was a taut blue sky. Lines of bush-rope were strung between houses; blankets and bark-cloth were hung out to dry. Thatched roofs steamed in the midday sun. Roosters crowed again. Albert mimed old men walking through mud. Dark patches on the walls began to fade as they dried. Children came back to the platform and Leonard, coughing and pale, crept out to sit with them while Janape attended to their sores.