Euphoria Page 12

  ‘You have three freckles, right below your lip.’ He was drunk, quite drunk, and I felt lucky I hadn’t been cut. He leaned in to touch the freckles and kept leaning until his mouth was on mine. I barely had to press a hand on his chest and he sprung back, wiping his lips as if I had initiated it.

  Nell read from Light in August, which a friend had sent her a few months ago. Fen lay on the bed beside me and Nell read from the chair with a bit of hauteur, the same sort of pretension American actresses had when they spoke their lines. She was self-conscious, reading aloud, in a way she wasn’t at all in regular life, when the words were hers.

  Fen and I caught eyes after the first sentence. He pulled a face and she caught me grinning.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s a good book.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s naïve tendentious American drivel,’ Fen said, ‘but go on.’

  He was so much at ease with me that I began to wonder if I’d hallucinated the kiss. After Nell stopped reading she climbed on the bed too and we lay there the three of us watching the bugs try to claw their way into the net and talking about the book and about Western stories compared to the stories told here. Nell said she’d gotten so sick in the Solomons of hearing their pigman creation myths and their enormous-penis myths that she told them the whole story of Romeo and Juliet.

  ‘I really dragged it out. I acted out the balcony scene, the stabbings. Of course I set it all in a village much like theirs, with two rival hamlets and a healer instead of a friar, and that sort of thing. It’s a tribal tale to begin with, so it wasn’t hard to make it familiar to them.’ She was on her side and I was on my side facing her and Fen was on his back between us so I could only see half her face. ‘So finally—and it took me well over an hour in that stinking language; six syllables a word!—I got to the end. She’s dead. And do you know what the Kirakira did? They laughed. They laughed and laughed and thought it was the funniest joke ever told.’

  ‘Maybe it is,’ Fen said. ‘I’d take a pigman story any day over that rubbish.’

  ‘I think it’s the irony they’re responding to,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, no doubt.’

  Ignoring him, Nell said, ‘Funny how irony is never tragic to them, only comic.’

  ‘Because death is not tragic to them, not in the way it is to us,’ I said.

  ‘They mourn.’

  ‘They feel sorrow, great sorrow. But it isn’t tragic.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. They know their ancestors have a plan for them. There’s no sense that it was wrong. Tragedy is based on this sense that there’s been a terrible mistake, isn’t it?’

  ‘We’re sort of big dramatic babies in comparison,’ I said.

  She laughed.

  ‘Well, this baby’s got to take a piddle.’ Fen got up and went down the ladder.

  ‘Please use the latrine, Fen,’ Nell called.

  But he must not have moved more than a foot from the house before his stream hit the ground with great force.

  ‘This will go on for a while,’ she said.

  It did. We were facing each other on the bed.

  ‘And then there’s going to be—’

  Fen broke wind.

  ‘That.’

  ‘Togate,’ Fen said quietly, which was Tam for excuse me.

  We laughed. My head felt clear. Our hands were a few inches apart on the warm spot where Fen’s body had been.

  14

  3/3 Bankson went back today so we had 2 days with him in decent health. We took him to the other Tam hamlets—or he took us in his boat that zips around to the astonishment of all the fisherwomen wading in the water. In the hamlets we were able to cover a lot of ground. Bankson’s Kiona is understood by many. He is trying to adopt our ethnographic ways but they don’t come naturally to him. You get the sense he would have a hard time asking for a light in a pub. But he’s an excellent theorist. We talk & talk. Topics that are sure to cause tension between Fen & me become productive discussions with B there. Fen is more reasonable around him, and maybe I am too. Bankson agrees with my assessment of where the power is accruing—with the Tam women—and we are able to have useful conversations about it, all 3 of us. B is intuitive about F’s possessive nature so that I haven’t had to say a word, like last night when we were talking about sex roles in the West and B & I fell perfectly in step and I could sense how much further we could take our thoughts, but B rerouted it back to Fen’s Dobu at just the right moment. He navigates it as if I had given him a bamboo & shell chart to hold up to us.

  Last night he pushed us out the door for a hike. The moon was nearly full and everything lit up silver and the stars at the edges of the sky were whirling & dropping so fast and even the bugs looked like chips of meteorites falling through the air at us. A few people were out and followed us down the road but when we veered up the path into the hills they whispered a warning to us and turned back. The Kirakira weren’t scared of the night but the Anapa, Mumb., and Tam are all wary of the spirits in the bush who will steal your soul if you give them half a chance. Bankson collected some rotten branches covered with something he called hiri, a fluorescent fungus that cast a pale light on the ground as we climbed. F & B got into a little male one-upmanship and we went higher and higher until we discovered a small nearly perfectly round lake and the moon bathing right in the center of it. F and B plunged in. I felt I should hide my inability to swim from Bankson—he’d be shocked and want to teach me on the spot and somehow F would take it both as a criticism and a threat—so I splashed around in the shallows and we looked at the stars and talked about death and named all the dead people we knew and tried to make a song out of all their names.

  Bankson told us what he has learned about the old Kiona raids, how the killer at the end of a battle stood in his canoe and held up the head of his enemy and said, ‘I am going to my beautiful dances, to my beautiful ceremonies. Call his name,’ and the vanquished on the beach called the name of their dead man then cried out to all the victors as they pulled away, ‘Go. Go to your beautiful dances, to your beautiful ceremonies.’ Bankson said he once tried to explain the war and the 18 million dead to Teket, who could not comprehend it, the number alone, let alone that many killed in one conflict. B said they never found the whole of his brother’s body in Belgium. He said surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions. We were standing very still in the water then and I would have liked to hold him.

  It is a bit of a dance we three are in. But there is a better balance when B is here, too. Fen’s demanding, rigid, determined nature weighs heavily on one side of the scale and Bankson’s and my more pliant & adjustable natures on the other, equaling things out. I can’t help but think I can use this inchoate theory in my work, that there is something about finding the balance to one’s nature—perhaps a culture that flourishes is a culture that has found a similar balance among its people. I don’t know. Too tired to think it through any further. Maybe it’s just we’re both a little in love with Andrew Bankson.

  15

  Upon my return to Nengai, Teket greeted me on the beach with a note. I knew by the shape of it, the three sideways folds, that it was from Bett. He handed it to me with great relief, as if he had been standing near the water for the entire week I’d been gone. Responsibility weighed heavily on Teket. It wasn’t hard to imagine him at Charterhouse, an earnest prefect, a stellar student. He asked me a great number of questions and, because the Kiona elders pass down their knowledge as secret family heirlooms, he treated the information I shared with great care. When an argument broke out between his clan and another about the nature of night, he’d asked my opinion. I told him what I believed about the earth’s diurnal rotation and its orbit around the sun. Afterward he coyly referred to it as ‘that matter we both know about,’ and whenever the sun or the moon came up in conversation amon
g others, he always shot me a special look.

  I took the note, but much to Teket’s disappointment I put it in my pocket without reading it. From its swollen edges I could tell the page had been folded and unfolded many times and it amused me to think of him studying Bett’s small Scottish scratches.

  I asked for news, and he told me that Tagwa-Ndemi’s baby was a girl so little she fit in a coconut shell, and that a thief greased in palm oil so no one could get hold of him ran through Teket’s aunt’s house in the middle of the night, stealing three necklaces and a Turbo shell. Both Niani’s sons were ill, but Niani sat up all night negotiating with their ancestors and now they are better. I headed toward my house, but Teket was not finished. The night after I left, he said, Winjun-Mali tried to enter the mosquito bag of his brother’s wife, Koulavwan, but her mother heard him and shouted and Winjun-Mali tried to hide among the pots in the house but the mother caught him. He was brought to a ceremonial house where he argued his case. He claimed that he had seen Koulavwan give a betel leaf to her sister’s husband and that he was just making sure she was remaining faithful while his brother was away. He said that Koulavwan’s vulva was too wide for his taste. When he said this, all of the women who were listening under the house began shouting and Winjun-Mali picked up his spear and jammed it through the floorboards, nicking his own mother’s ear and disrupting the proceedings. Then Winjun-Mali’s father got in an argument with Koulavwan’s father about her extravagant bride price. Koulavwan’s father reminded him that when they were boys Winjun-Mali’s father had taken the glory for the killing of a man Koulavwan’s father had killed for him. He pointed to the tassels on Winjun-Mali’s father’s lime stick and asked if any of them were for real murders. Before it turned violent, Teket’s father cried out that their blood had made the baby in Koulavwan’s belly and they must not fight. So, Teket said, we all exchanged areca nuts and went back to bed.

  A few months ago I would have been dismayed to miss all this and would have hurried to write it all down, but now I let it wash over and past me, without even trying to catch a drop. He took in a breath to say more but I pointed my fingers to the ground, a signal mothers gave their children to quiet down, and told him he’d have to save the rest for later, that I was too tired. Teket was unable to hide his disappointment, and lingered to show it to me, then finally turned away.

  Teket would have liked to have someone like Nell. In her he would have found a kindred spirit, a tireless fellow prefect. They could have spent hours together, Nell cross-examining him about who came from whose vagina, relishing all the details that Teket had saved up for her return.

  Alone in my house I lit the fire, placed a pot of water on top, steeped the tea, sat down, and opened the note from Bett.

  Back on the boat. Rabaul insane. Missed you. Where are you? No one can tell me. Should I be worried? Come find me, sweet.

  Four months ago I would already be back in the canoe, heading straight for her pinnace. I blew across my tea. I’d go, of course. I knew that, but I’d go for a different reason now. And Bett would feel it. I knew how it would play out, nothing spoken, everything clear.

  I’d go in the morning. After my tea, I unzipped my bag. Wanji had washed my clothing. The shirts were folded perfectly, as if for a shelf in a shop. On the one hand I was disgusted by Nell and Fen’s employment of the natives, the way they came in like a corporation and hired up the locals, skewing the balance of power and wealth and thus their own results. But on the other, I saw how efficient it was, how much time it freed up if you weren’t making the meals and washing up and scrubbing clothing, all of which I had been doing for myself for the past two years. The night before the three of us had worked together in their office, typing up our notes, while Wanji fetched water and the shoot boy came in with two pigeons and Bani cooked them up in a lime sauce. The sauce was so spicy it made her cheeks glisten, and I had to clasp my hands together so that I did not reach out and touch her skin.

  I zipped up the bag and went back down to the water.

  Teket, still on the beach, was not surprised. He knew what a piece of this beige paper set in motion. He knew he could expect me back by sunset tomorrow, more blood in my skin and my limbs loose as a boy’s.

  Bett was in the wheelhouse, eating something yellow from a tin. She looked blankly in my direction, hearing the motor, and when she finally recognized it as mine, she ducked through the small door and waved from the bow.

  I shouldn’t have come. If there had been any decent way of wheeling my boat around and heading straight back, I would have done.

  There had been a husband at one time. They’d been in engineering school together in London, come here to work on a bridge in Moresby, but by the time the bridge was finished, he’d fled to Adelaide with a girl and Bett signed a contract for a bridge in Angoram and bought this pinnace to get herself there. She’d lived on it ever since. I suspected she was close to forty, though we’d never discussed our age.

  I cleated my canoe line to her stern and she gave me a hand up. She wore a clean white shirt and smelled like lilies. A new smell.

  ‘You took your time.’

  ‘I just got back this morning.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Lake Tam.’

  ‘Hunting?’

  I was a horrible liar but said yes.

  ‘Good hunting up Lake Tam?’

  She sensed something, perhaps that I hadn’t already taken off all her clothes. I lifted my hand halfheartedly to her blouse.

  She watched me unbutton it without moving. I liked that. I didn’t want her to reach in and find me underenthusiastic. But as I opened up the shirt and touched her nipples with the tips of my thumbs and felt the weight of her breasts in my palms, my body made the shift to this woman, this body, and I felt my determined erection with relief.

  She never, for this initial welcoming, led me down to her bed, but took me right there en plein air around the ropes and tools and storage boxes. She was warm and familiar and though I wasn’t quite myself, eventually I hollered over her shoulder toward the trees, which shook from animals running from the sound. We laughed at a loud frightened eeeeeeeoooooooooeeeeeee and our chests stuck and unstuck loudly.

  I believed if I could do that twenty more times I might be able to flush Nell Stone entirely out of my system.

  She slid down to the floor and we leaned against the box together. We brushed the bugs out of our crotches like monkeys and I asked about her trip to Rabaul and she told me she’d met Shaw’s nephew, who was a district officer down south, and we tried to imagine his uncle setting a play in the Territories. I said the week’s events in Nengai would be more than enough material, and told her about the oiled-up thief and Winjun-Mali and his visit to Koulavwan’s mosquito bag.

  ‘Why does no one visit me in the middle of the night?’ she said. ‘The natives just politely paddle past as if the boat were an unremarkable log.’

  ‘Barnaby has nearly the same boat.’

  ‘His is green.’

  ‘They aren’t going to approach what they think belongs to a government official. But if you sat out here like this you’d stir up some interest.’

  ‘You think so?’ She rolled her naked body onto mine. There was nothing more to say so I kissed her and opened her legs and we moved hard against each other and against the rough wood of the deck. Then she went inside and came out with cigarettes and bathrobes and we smoked until it was time for dinner.

  She cooked a barramundi on the grill at the bow and we ate it with mustard and a bottle of champagne she’d gotten in Cooktown. Across the river there was a sudden thrashing and a great spray of water. I made out in the dusk two crocodiles fighting. I saw their snouts high out of the water, jaws open, and then the one on the left sunk its teeth into the tough skin of the other’s neck, and they both went below the water, which closed flat over them after a while.

  ‘What was that? Crocs?’

  She was squinting. I knew she had terrible eyesight, but I’d ne
ver wondered where her specs were, or once thought to offer her Martin’s glasses.

  I left before sunrise the next day. The water was dull and unreflective, the shores silent. She sent me off with a mug of tea and a box of caramels. Usually she gave me a bottle of whiskey, and I felt the sweets were an insult, a downgrade of sorts, but I sucked them one after the other the whole way back.

  16

  I stayed away from Lake Tam for several weeks, during which time my work went well. I began inviting people to my house, not in the numbers that Nell did each morning, but in small groups. I had Teket’s whole family for a dinner of a wild pig we’d shot and pears from tins which Teket had to persuade them were safe and uncursed. His grandmother took a great liking to the pears and their sweet juice, and they carried home the empty cans as if I’d given them a hundred pounds apiece. I had Kaishu-Mwampa, the old woman who wouldn’t speak to me, and her grandniece in to tea. They didn’t like it, and I told them it was better with milk and they laughed when I tried to describe what milk was because they had never seen a cow. A few days later, Tiwantu announced there would be a full, traditional Wai for the accomplishments of his son after the next full moon. I was having my own small euphoria.

  It might have gone on like this—my work in Nengai, a few short trips to Lake Tam—until July, when I planned to leave. But the day after Tiwantu made his announcement, Teket came back from trading with a note in Nell’s hand.

  17

  They awoke to one long scream, followed by a barrage of others. She had no idea what time it was. The sky was black, no edge of light.

  In a crisis Fen became even quicker—and feline. He disappeared in one motion down the ladder. She hurried to catch up. The turmoil came from up the women’s road. Fen said something but she couldn’t hear him.

  When they turned the corner, it was as she’d feared, a shrieking mass of bodies. They stopped twenty feet from the outside edge of the crowd, which was facing inward, toward Malun’s house. In the dark she could make out the long back of Sanjo and Yorba’s thick arms and the little head of Amun, but only briefly. They were all moving, churning, and shouting so loudly it affected her vision. Many had ripped the necklaces and bracelets and waistbands and armbands and hair wraps from their bodies and thrown them on the ground as they hugged and wept and hollered and pressed toward the center, toward whatever was happening through the thicket of bodies.