Prologue: The howling bounces around the trees used for coffins.
Beloved: My memories shuttle back and forth, like blood going up and down from heart to hair and back. Memories are long and far reaching …
Gestures: Manila. A grey watercolour that has never dried.
Iraya: You have to weep not from the throat but from lower down, just as in singing, so you don’t grow hoarse, because it takes forever to get to the last note.
Testimonies: People walk to the river for many reasons. Some to swim, to wash, to fish, to make love, to fall in love … but they always return home.
River: I have never left the water, always fishing for a story and finding none but my own.
Epilogue: Finish it. Tell the world.

Descriptive contents
Prologue
The howling bounces around the trees used for coffins. 1997. It is a nightmarish flight to the Philippines for Luke McIntyre as he reads the mysterious manuscript about the Fish-Hair Woman. Who wrote it? His father, his lover Estrella?
Beloved
My memories shuttle back and forth, like blood going up and down from heart to hair and back. Memories are long and far reaching … 1987. The manuscript’s story unfolds. The soldiers take Estrella to the river, to retrieve the body of Tony McIntyre with her hair. In this walk to the water, her hair keeps growing, threading ‘the small and large histories’: life and death in the village of Iraya, the 1987 Total War and, earlier, the twenty-year Marcos dictatorship, the disappeared and the bodies found in the water, the myth of the Fish-Hair woman, and the Philippine’s history of Spanish and American colonisation.
Gestures
Manila. A grey watercolour that has never dried. 1997. Luke lands in Manila. He is taken under the wing of Dr. Francisco Alvarado, who has just arrived from political exile in Hawai’i, or so he claims. He is a friend of Tony, so he also claims. But Tony is nowhere to be found. Luke’s story gets snagged in a web of betrayal. He meets the doctor’s daughter Stella (is she Estrella?), and the mute and scarred Adora, a victim of strafing during the war. She and Luke fall in love. The manuscript ‘becomes real’: the Total War has caught up with their lives. The doctor is murdered. Possibly, payback for the atrocities he committed during the Marcos regime and, later, in the Total War—and for the corpses found in the river.

Iraya
You have to weep not from the throat but from lower down, just as in singing, so you don’t grow hoarse, because it takes forever to get to the last note. 1987. Back to the story of the manuscript: Stella’s family history embedded in the Total War. We return to the river and the retrieval of disappeared bodies and histories, and the fireflies hovering over the water that tastes of lemon grass. Dr. Alvarado was once a politician in Iraya, responsible for the disappearances during the Marcos dictatorship and the Total War. Like Marcos, the doctor fled to Hawai’i to escape prosecution; he took the child Stella, then Estrella, with him. Her sister became a communist guerrilla to fight the corrupt regime; her brother was co-opted into the government militia that fought the communists. Both were lost to the war.

Testimonies
People walk to the river for many reasons. Some to swim, to wash, to fish, to make love, to fall in love … but they always return home. 1987 and 1997. The past and present stories of Stella, Tony and Luke, the Philippines and Australia, Iraya and Manila—all return us to the river. Tony had a brief affair with Stella’s sister, the communist guerrilla, but he was also a friend of the doctor who facilitated his research for a novel on the war. In the midst of the conflict, the lovers disappear. Storytelling unfolds from multiple voices bearing witness, not only to the atrocities of war, but also to the tendernesses and heartbreaks of love. They are retrieved— with memory evergrowing like human hair.

River
I have never left the water, always fishing for a story and finding none but my own. 1997. After the doctor’s murder, Luke and Adora go to Iraya. All stories and storytelling come to a head, to a close. In the village Stella lays her dead, Doctor Alvarado, the father she had murdered as payback. She returns to the river, where she is shot by his military cronies—to make their involvement in the Total War ‘disappear’. Luke finally goes to the river, to where his father Tony was summarily executed in 1987. All have come home to the water, to one’s own disappeared truth.

Epilogue
2010, Canberra. Luke is about to publish the novel ‘Fish-Hair Woman’. In 1997 just before she was murdered, Stella left him her manuscript with a note: Finish it. Tell the world. Since then, he has read and re-read the story; eventually he ‘finishes it’ with his own and his father’s history implicated in the war. He is now married to Adora, they have a daughter. So whose story is this novel? Who owns it? He returns to the river with the little girl. To his surprise, the river and the story of the Fish-Hair Woman have been re-invented by the current mayor for ‘progress’ and reconciliation. The river is now a tourist attraction for sports fishing and viewing fireflies. Now father and daughter wait for the flying lights. Adora Estrella stands at the edge of the river, like many who stood there years ago, looking into the water, their collective pool of grief—but searching only for their own disappeared beloved. After a while, the little girl is enveloped in light! ‘Like Christmas, daddy … ’ His heart leaps—yes, there is also a pool of joy. It is hers, it is mine, it is ours.