Lily King - Euphoria

‘Worse than that, I hear.’

We were outside by then, on the road heading away from the lake. The nausea had passed but I was still not quite myself. The sweat that had covered my body a few minutes ago was now ice cold. ‘A white woman is confusing to them,’ I said.

‘Precisely. I don’t think they think of me as entirely female. I don’t think rape or murder has ever crossed their minds.’

‘You can’t know that.’ Not think of her as female? I wished I could manage that. ‘And murder is one of the first natural impulses any creature has to the unknown.’

‘Is it? It’s certainly not mine.’

She had fashioned a walking stick for her ankle. It struck the ground beside my left toe with particular force.

‘You seem as interested in the women here as in the children, maybe more interested.’ I was remembering how quickly she had dismissed Amun.

She and her stick stopped abruptly. “Have you noticed anything about them? Has Teket said anything?’

‘Nothing. But I did notice that woman Tadi was free to hold my gaze, and that boy—’

‘Didn’t have the usual self-possession that you see in boys of that age?’

I laughed at the speed with which she finished my sentence. She was looking at me fiercely. What was I going to say about the boy? I could hardly remember. The sun seared the road, no shade, no wind. The curve of her breast through her thin shirt. ‘I suppose so, yes.’

She tapped her stick rapidly on the hard dry earth. ‘You saw this. In less than an hour you saw this.’

It had been two and a half at this point, but I didn’t quibble.

Someone shouted out to her from down the road.

‘Oh,’ she said, racing on. ‘You have to meet Yorba. She’s one of my favorites.’

Yorba was hurrying, too, pulling a female companion with her. When we all met up, Nell and Yorba spoke loudly, as if they were still separated by the length of the road. Yorba had the unadorned look of Tam women with her shaved head and one armband, but her friend wore shell and feather jewelry and a hairband of inlaid bright-green beetles. Yorba introduced her to Nell, and Nell introduced me to Yorba, and then the friend, whose name was Iri, and I were introduced, all of which required saying baya ban about eighty-seven times. The friend did not look up at me. Nell explained that this was Yorba’s daughter, who had married a Motu man and was visiting for a few days. We were still in the full sun and I assumed we would move on to find Fen, but Nell drilled them with questions. The daughter, who could not have been a real daughter as she looked several years older than Yorba, did not conceal her delight in Nell’s abuse of the language, her long pauses as she searched for words, then the cascade of them in her toneless accent. Nell was most interested in Iri’s perspective on the Tam now that she had lived outside the culture for many years. But both women were carrying large ceramic pots in bilum bags on their backs and pleasure soon gave way to impatience. Yorba pulled at Iri’s bracelets. Nell ignored their growing discomfort until Yorba raised both hands as if she were about to push Nell straight to the ground and shrieked what seemed like expletives at her. When she was finished, she took Iri’s arm and the two women slid away on their bare heels.

Nell pulled a notebook from a large homemade pocket stitched onto her skirt, and without even moving to a shady spot made four pages of her small hieroglyphs. ‘I’d like to get over to the Motu sometime,’ she said after she put the notebook away, completely unbothered by the way the conversation had ended. ‘I never knew Yorba had a daughter.’

‘That couldn’t possibly have been her child.’

‘It’s surprising, isn’t it? I had the same feeling.’

‘They must use the word indiscriminately, like the Kiona. Anyone can be a daughter: a niece, granddaughter, friend.’

‘This was her real daughter. I asked.’

‘You asked if she were a blood daughter?’ Even the words real or blood relation didn’t always have the same meaning for them.

‘I asked Yorba if Iri had come out of her vagina.’

‘No, you didn’t,’ I said finally. I had never heard the word vagina spoken aloud before, let alone by a woman in my presence.

‘I did. The words I make sure to learn on the first day anywhere are mother, father, son, daughter, and vagina. Very useful. There’s no other way to be certain.’

She began walking again, and we turned up a small path and she thrashed her stick through the brush, which I felt would anger the snakes more than scare them off. When I walked through the brush I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.

We came to a small clearing, the last piece of flat land before the jungle began. Fen was sitting up against a stump watching some men whitewash a freshly made canoe with seaweed juice. No notebook, knees bent, twisting and untwisting a stalk of elephant grass. The men sensed us first, and said something to Fen, who scrambled to his feet and bounded over.

‘Bankson.’ He’d grown a thick black beard. He hugged me as he had done in Angoram. ‘Finally, man. What happened to you?’

‘I’m sorry I’ve come unannounced.’

‘Footman’s got the day off anyway. You just get here?’

‘He did,’ Nell said. ‘Bani is making us a nice lunch. We’ve come to fetch you.’

‘That’s a first.’ He turned back to me. ‘Where have you been? You said you’d be back in a week.’

Had I? ‘I thought I should give you some time to settle in. I didn’t want to—’

‘Listen, we’re the ones in your territory, Bankson, not the other way round,’ he said.

This business of the Sepik being mine infuriated me. ‘We need to put an end to this right now, an end to this nonsense.’ I was aware that my voice was coming much harsher than I meant, but I couldn’t manage to modulate it. ‘I have no more right to the Kiona or the Tam or the Sepik River than any other anthropologist or the man on the moon. I do not subscribe to this chopping up of the primitive world and parceling it out to people who may then possess it to the exclusion of all others. A biologist would never claim a species or a wood to himself. If you haven’t noticed, I have been desperately lonely here for twenty-seven months. I did not want to stay away from you. But nearly as soon as I left here I felt that my use to you had been exhausted and that you did not need me lurking around. My height can be disturbing to certain tribes. And I am bad luck in the field, utterly ineffective. I couldn’t even manage to kill myself properly. I stayed away as long as could, and it is only now I see I have been rude by not coming sooner. Forgive me.’

The spangles returned at that moment from all sides, and my eyeballs ached suddenly and painfully.

The world dimmed, but I was still standing. ‘I am perfectly well,’ I said. Then, they told me later, I fell to the ground like a kapok tree.

2/21 Bankson returned then fainted dead away on the women’s road and now he lies burning with fever in our bed. We soak him with water then fan him with palm leaves until our joints ache. He trembles & shudders & sometimes slugs the fan across the room. Can’t find the thermometer anywhere but I think it’s a very high fever — or maybe it just seems so because of his Englishman’s skin. He has a flushed but plucked-goose look to him without his shirt on. His nipples look like a little boy’s after a cold swim, two hard tiny beads in his long torso. He sleeps & sleeps and when he opens his eyes I think he’s fully conscious but he’s not. He speaks in Kiona and sometimes in little phrases of French in quite a good accent. Fen grumbles about how Bankson avoided us all these weeks then shows up sick, how he didn’t want to be in our way but is now delirious in our bed. I can see that his complaining is worry. His sharp words, fierce looks — all concern, not anger. Sickness frightens him. It’s how he lost his mother after all. I’m seeing now from this vantage point that all the times he’s hovered over the bed, scolding me, hounding me to get up, it’s been fear, not fury. He doesn’t think I’m so weak. He’s just terrified I’ll die on him. I tell him B’s fever will break in a day or two and he lists all the people, whites & natives, we have known or heard about who have died from one of their malarial flare-ups. I’ve got him out of the house now, sent him off with Bani for water. It’s hard to get B to drink. He seems scared of the cup. He bats it away like the fan. I know he’s a bit scared of his mother so a few minutes ago I lifted his head and said in my best British battle-axe: “Andrew, this is your mother speaking. You will drink this water,” and I wedged the cup between his lips and he drank.