Euphoria (19 page)

I made to get up from my black chair.

‘I saw you on the beach with her,’ he said. ‘I knew what would happen. I’m not stupid. You knew I’d go and I knew you wouldn’t stop me. But you can’t have Nell like you can have other girls. She says she’s Southern but she’s not on the Grid. She’s a different type altogether. Trust me on that one.’

He refilled my glass. We’d nearly drunk the bottle.

‘What type is she?’

‘Damned if I ever let you find out.’

This time I did get up. He stood, too.

‘I had to get that flute,’ he said. ‘Don’t you understand? There has to be a balance. A man can’t be without power—it doesn’t work like that. What was I going to do, write little books behind hers like a fucking echo? I needed something big. And this is big. Books on this thing will write themselves.’

‘In blood-red ink, Fen.’

On the way back down the hallway were the stairs to the third floor. I hesitated, and then continued to my room. I opened the door as quietly as I could, in case she could hear my movements as I could hear hers. I didn’t want to wake her and I didn’t want her to know I’d been drinking with Fen. I lay on the bed in my clothes and stared up at the white swirled plaster. It was silent. I hoped she’d managed to fall asleep. My bed felt more comfortable than it had the previous nights and despite the slight spinning, Fen had been right: the cognac was going to allow me to sleep. I drifted down into it.

I awoke to pounding. Louder, and louder still. Then her door opening. All I could hear were footsteps and the low buzz of voices, first in the doorway then all over the small room. As their voices grew stronger their feet moved faster, back and forth above me. Something hit the floor hard. My body was on the stairs then pounding on her door before my mind caught up.

‘Your boyfriend’s here,’ I heard Fen say.

‘Let me in.’

A man across the hall said, ‘Belt up, will you?”

The door opened.

Nell was in her nightgown at the end of the bed.

‘Are you hurt?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Please, let’s not get thrown out of here.’

‘Nellie wants to go to the police. Get me thrown in the calaboose. Maybe make you her next houseboy. But you can bloody well forget that.’ He bent over to light a cigarette. ‘Natives kill natives. No one’s going to put
me
behind bars for that. And the flute—it’s not exactly the frieze of the fucking Parthenon and nobody cared how Elgin got that except for a few sentimental Greeks.’

‘I want the governor of the station to know there could be trouble between the Mumbanyo and the Tam, that’s all.’ Her voice was thin, alien to me.

‘Nell,’ I said.

She shook her head fiercely at my tone. ‘Please, go to bed, Bankson. Take Fen and go.’

Without a fight Fen followed me out of the room.

When we got down to the second floor I said, ‘What happened up there?’

‘Nothing. Marital argy-bargy.’

I grabbed him and shoved him against the wall. His body was completely relaxed, as if this were something he was used to. ‘What was that noise I heard up there? What hit the ground?’

‘Her duffel. It was on the bed and I chucked it to the floor. Christ.’ He waited for me to let him go then opened his door.

I returned to my room and stood for a long time in the center of it, watching the ceiling, but I heard nothing the rest of the night.

Outside my room next morning was a hotel laundry bag, half full. I brought it to my bed and took out the items one by one: a pair of leather shoes, a tortoiseshell comb, a silver bracelet, her wrinkled blue dress. At the bottom, a note for me.

At the quai, the ship hovered over everything. I helped with their bags, chased down a porter.

‘Last time to tie her shoes,’ Fen said. His flute was wrapped and tied tight, and he set it down gently to shake my hand.

I turned to her. Her face looked small and rigid and miserable. We hugged. I held her close and too long. ‘I don’t want to let you go,’ I breathed in her ear.

But I did. I let her go. And they boarded their ship.

I
returned to the Kiona. Teket punished me for my long disappearance by not talking to me for the first two days. A few of the old women harangued me on his behalf, but no one else seemed bothered, and the children resumed their habit of following me around, begging to try on my pig’s tusk and waiting for me to discard something—an empty tin, an old typewriter ribbon, a used tube of toothpaste—for their amusement. The rains had finally come and the river was high but hadn’t flooded over yet. The women went out to their gardens in pointy leaf ponchos and the children made what looked like cities in the mud.

They held the Wai they had promised me. Despite all my interviews, my hundreds of questions to hundreds of Kiona about this ceremony, I had got it all wrong. I had missed the complexity of it. Part bawdy, part historical, and part tragic, the ceremony elicited a greater range of emotions than I had realized the first time round. There was a reenactment of their crocodile origins and their cannibal past. Ancestors were brought back to life briefly as their clay death masks were worn by their descendants. Women in war paint and penis gourds chased men in reed skirts till they got them pinned down, then they scraped their bare buttocks on the men’s legs—the ultimate Kiona insult—which made the audience cry with laughter. I sat with Teket and his family and took as many
notes on their reactions as I did on the ceremony itself. That night I stayed up late, leaning against my gum tree and writing Nell a fifteen-page letter she wouldn’t receive until summer.

Two days later, I left.

I’d arranged for Minton to pick me up, take me to Lake Tam, then drop me in Angoram, from where I would make arrangements to get back to Sydney. Teket agreed to come with me to the lake and stay on with his cousin for a visit.

Minton arrived early and in good spirits, until Teket climbed into the boat after we’d loaded it up with my bags.

‘Ho there,’ he said. ‘None of them on my boat.’

I was glad I hadn’t paid him yet. ‘I’ll get Robby then.’ Robby was the more expensive driver. I began hoisting my belongings off the pinnace.

‘He can’t sit back there where the ladies sit.’

‘He’ll sit where he bloody likes.’

Most likely Teket had understood exactly how the conversation had gone, but he didn’t let on. We sat where the ladies sat, the Black Opal laundry bag of gifts between us.

It had been difficult to tell Teket what had happened. He’d known Xambun from visits to his cousin. I told him Fen’s explanations for why Xambun was shot and not him. Teket said he’d never heard of anyone trying to get killed—they did not have a word for suicide in Kiona—and he scoffed at the idea of a white man thinking he could be invisible. If the Mumbanyo had shot at Fen, Teket said, the whole village
would have been rounded up and put in jail. Of course they had aimed for Xambun.

Minton had never been to Lake Tam. We guided him through the canals. I’d worried that he’d balk at pushing his boat through them but he kept saying, ‘This is fucking loony, mate,’ with a tremendous grin on his face. Then we were out on the lake and his boat sped us across the black water much faster than my canoe ever had, and I wasn’t prepared to arrive so quickly.

The lake was high, the beach only a thin strip near the grasses. The mosquitoes were much worse now. Clouds of them swarmed the minute the boat slowed. I could see the tip of their house. It seemed impossible that Nell would not be behind the blue-and-white cloth door.

The sound of the boat had attracted attention. I helped Minton tie up while Teket was greeted warmly by his cousin and her family. She was not someone who had come to Nell in the mornings and Nell had said she was shy, conscious of her foreignness, and avoided being interviewed. I became aware of a line of older men on the road above, looking down at us. They were not armed with spears or bows, I noted with relief. Teket saw them, too. We exchanged glances, then he sent his cousin to find Malun and the others.

It was understood that I was not welcome in the village, and Teket waited with me on the beach. After a long time, they came. They walked close together, Malun in the middle, her face stiff and grim. She and Sali were covered in mourning mud.

We all squatted in the sand as I gave out Nell’s gifts.

Bani pushed the silver bracelet up tight on his arm above his elbow, and Wanji ran off with his comb, screaming out to
his friends as he tore up the path. Sali gasped when I pulled the dress out of the bag, as if I were pulling out Nell herself. She put it in the sand beside her, but laid a hand on top, as if it might walk away. She and Malun each had a crusted scab at the top of a finger stub, cut off at the middle knuckle for Xambun.

I handed Malun the bag that held the shoes. After a long while she tipped her head in to see but did not bring them out. Her gaze remained hard. I was glad Nell was not here to see it. I asked Teket’s cousin to tell them that Nell was so very sorry, that she wanted to make amends in any way she could. I told Malun she was tight in Nell-Nell’s stomach. At this Malun’s face gave way but she remained still and did not wipe away her tears that cut dark lines through the dry mud.

Bani asked to speak with me privately. We walked a few yards down the beach. With the English Nell had taught him he said, ‘Fen is bad man.’ Then, in case I didn’t understand, he said it in pidgin, which I didn’t know he knew: ‘Em nogut man.’

I nodded but he wasn’t satisfied so he switched back to English. ‘He break her.’

It was true, then. I did the tally, too late, of all the broken things: her ankle, her glasses, her typewriter.

When I left, Malun was standing in her brown shoes and Sali was wearing her dress like a scarf, and the men were still standing on the bluff above.

Teket gave us a push out. We called our last farewells to each other. Neither of us felt like it was a real goodbye, and it wasn’t. I would return to the Kiona many times.

Minton put the boat in reverse and we turned slowly away from the beach. I’d wire my mother for more money, I decided, and go directly to New York from Sydney. I would not wait. The boat gained speed and skimmed fast to the canals.

‘Not the most hospitable tribe, are they?’ Minton said. ‘Those boongs up on the embankment looked like they’d cark you given half a chance.’

3/? I have done it. Full fathom five it lies. Hiding out here in the 3rd class library for the time being. Strange how a ship was our doing and now our undoing. Let him rage. Let him rage across the oceans. But he will rage alone. I am getting off tomorrow at Aden. Doubling back to Sydney. He is wine and bread and deep in my stomach.

W
hen I reached Sydney, I found there was no boat coming in for a fortnight, so I kicked around there impatiently, setting up an office of sorts at the Black Opal, but getting no work done. I frequented a pub called the Cat and Fiddle far too early and too often. My mother cabled more money, though I didn’t tell her that I would see her only for the two days the boat was docked at Liverpool, that I was going to go on to America.

The day before I sailed, I worked up the courage to go back and see the bark paintings at the Art Gallery. I simply wanted to walk where we had walked, stand where we had stood. She would have nearly reached the Continent by now, I calculated. On the way I passed the shop where I’d gotten the plasters, and the
New Yorker
restaurant. Across the lobby of the museum I heard my name.

‘My, my, someone’s taken a bath.’

It was Mrs. Swale, my dinner partner at the Iyneses’. She took my arm and never looked back at the group she’d come in with. I was aware of the scent of her, not the humid root smell of Kiona women or Nell by the time I met her, but an inorganic smell meant to cover it all up.

We went up the stairs to the exhibit. She began her questioning: How long had I been here, when would I leave, not tomorrow, couldn’t I change my ticket? And then just before
we entered the hall, she looked at me quite gravely, more gravely than I expected her face to be able to look. ‘I was so sorry to hear about your friend’s wife.’

‘What do you mean?’ My lips went all rubbery in an instant. In fact my whole body seemed to be pulling away from me.

She covered her mouth and shook her head and with an intake of breath she said she was sorry, she thought for sure I’d know.

‘Know what?’ I said loudly into the vast room.

Hemorrhaging. Just before they reached Aden. Mrs. Swale put her hand over mine and I wanted to swat it away.

‘Did you know she was pregnant?’

‘Twins,’ I said before I turned away from her. ‘She thought it might be twins.’

I went to see Claire directly from the museum. She wasn’t home and I waited for several hours in her enormous house, listening to clocks chime and dogs bark and servants hustle about as if the world were on fire. When she did arrive and saw my face she dropped her parcels and called out for whiskey. I’d held out a faint hope that Isabel Swale, with her poor aptitude, had gotten it all wrong, but Claire doused it within seconds. They couldn’t stop the bleeding.’ She paused, guessing how much more I could handle. I held her gaze and took in a steady breath. ‘The ghastly thing is, Fen insisted on a sea burial. Her parents are apoplectic. Think he’s hiding something. They’ve started proceedings against him and the ship’s captain. It’s all been such a drama.’ She sounded quite bored by Nell’s death.

She poured me another drink and in the light breeze of her movements I smelled again the manufactured smell of these women. Her husband, she told me quite pointedly, was away for several days.

All I wanted was to call a cab and be delivered to my room. But I could not seem to ask for that, and sat in silence, willing my glass to stop shaking as I lifted it to my lips. I couldn’t seem to pull air into my lungs. I thought of Fen and Nell meeting on the boat: I’m having trouble breathing, she’d said. And then I broke down. No Southerner, Claire did her best to comfort me with palaver and awkward pats on the arm, but as soon as I could stand, she put me in a car that took me back down to the city.