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asperity, and its fussy co-option of native artefacts, the interior was exactly what Tom had expected of the Consul.
    Then, above the steady pulse of the cicadas, which had swelled to occupy the sonic vacuum left by the departing cab, Tom became aware of the cooing and tongue slapping of native speech coming from below.
    Retracing his steps across the walkway, Tom made his way awkwardly down the steep bank to the underside of the house. Here, in the stripy cacophony of sunbeams, an arresting spectacle met his eyes: five heavy-set hillwomen were seated inside a long black town car. Tom immediately recognized them as being Handrey. This much he did know, for the tourist lodge the Brodzinskis had stayed at in the cloud forest was run by the Handrey Tribal Council.
    The women were chattering away to one another, the two in the front seats twisted round, so that they could address the three others sandwiched in the back. Initially, Tom found it incredible that they could have driven down here in the big black car, a vehicle he associated with the downtown of cities back home. But then, on looking more closely, he realized that the car was only a shell: the tinted windows punched out, the bodywork peppered with rusty holes. Two of the doors were missing altogether, and instead of sitting on Firestones, the automobile carcass was jacked up on bricks.
    The fat, jolly women were wrapped up in their chatter, just as their fingers were twined in each other’s wiry hair. They picked and pulled as they yattered, teasing out the cooties, which they then deftly crushed between their fingernails, before flicking them away.
    The women ignored him; Tom stared at them.
    He thought of the ads he’d seen at home: big billboards that had encouraged him to fly his family halfway around the world to this island-continent. On these, smiling Anglo servitors, clad in spotless white, were laying out tableware on immaculate linen, while behind them a towering rock formation burned orange in the low-angled sun. ‘We’ve set the table and checked under it for flippers,’ the slogan read. ‘So where the hell are you?’
    What was missing from these huge photographs, with their groups of grinning models, was the myriad of bit players: the insects. Tom thought of the leaf-cutter ants he’d seen from the balcony that morning, the black ants porting the Rice Krispies in the breakfast room, the crickets filling Adam’s backyard with their monotonous fricative noise. Up in the hills, he’d seen the gothic mounds of termites, which were five and even six yards high.
    And, of course, the billboards – which also featured laughing surfers on the beaches down south, and bubbling snorkellers on the Angry Reef up north – were devoid of black or brown faces. The natives, like the insects, were not a tourist attraction. It occurred to Tom that if the government had had its way, all visitors to the country would have seen of its indigenous people were their bright, naive patterns: black and white stripes, red dots and blue spirals, on T-shirts, sarongs and the tailfins of aircraft.
    The kids had all got cooties – Martha too. The foul-smelling chemicals Tom got at the drugstore had no effect, so, in the end, Martha had spent a good part of her vacation combing her children’s hair and her own. Martha’s patience frayed, as she pulled at the infested locks.
    These Handrey women were different. As he watched them, Tom began to appreciate that their delousing was part of an unforced intimacy, one in which their happy conversation was complemented by the reassurance of touch. They reminded him of the hefty Polynesian maidens painted by Gauguin, but what were they doing here?
    At last he ventured to speak: ‘Is this . . . Mr Adams’s place . . . the Consul?’
    The women went on ignoring him, and Tom felt himself succumbing to irritation, when Adams himself emerged from the dense shrubbery of the backyard.
    The Consul was sporting a broad smile, and a small,