Lily King - Euphoria

2/23 Fever has not broken. We are trying everything. Malun comes with soups & elixirs. She shows me the plants they are made from but they aren’t familiar to me. Bankson would be able to identify them. But I trust Malun. I feel calmer the minute she walks in. She holds my hand and feeds me her steamed lily stems which she knows I love. I have never had a mothering friend in the field before. I am so often the mother, in all my relationships, really. Even with Helen. Today Malun brought the medicine man Gunat who placed charms — little bits of leaves and twigs — in the corners of the house and sang a song through his nose. The Loud Painful Nasal Song, Fen called it. If it doesn’t kill you, nothing will. Gunat worried that the mosquito netting is trapping the evil spirits but Fen got him out before he started tearing it down.

I haven’t managed to feed B more than 2 spoonfuls of the broth Malun brought. Fen hasn’t either. But he has stuck with it. Hasn’t run away on an expedition. He’s been right here, insisting that I continue with my rounds in the afternoon, changing B’s sheets and placing wet cloths on his forehead and helping him to the chamber pot (a big calabash gourd). All this nurturing has erased doubt and reassures me that he will be a good father — if ever that day comes.

2/24 Fen found a Kiona navigational chart in B’s boat. It is such an intriguing thing, a crisscross of thin bamboo slats with small snail shells tied on in certain places. You hold it up to the night sky and align the shells with the stars to locate your position. It is the most exquisite instrument. I’ve not seen another like it. I wish the three of us could paddle out tonight and get all turned around and use it to find our way back.

2/26 B was quite lucid this morning, apologizing profusely and trying to get out of bed, insisting he should leave us be. But we settled him back down and he’s been asleep or delirious ever since.

2/27 Bankson had some sort of seizure while I was out. Fen is shaken & exhausted but won’t let me relieve him, won’t leave his bedside, keeps talking and talking, a sort of reverse Scheherazade, as if his words will keep B alive.

Time stretched like a hair being pulled from each end, every second closer to the snap. Taut. Tauter. Tauterer. Everything was orange. My fingers played in the fringe of a pillow on my grandmother’s bed. Orange pillow. England. I was a little boy. A little boy with a little stiffie. It tented the sheet if I didn’t press it down. A sluglike insect the size of a toy automobile rolled over me, leaving wet tyre treads. It was hot it was cold it was hot. Huge orange faces bent toward me, flickered away. I couldn’t always reach them. Tears leaked from my eyes. My penis ached and ached. I rolled over and it slid into a frozen yam, tight and cold, and I fell asleep, or into another sleep. I dreamt of my bucket behind Dottie’s house: wooden, streaked with green mold, wire handle that bit into your skin when it got heavy. I dreamt I had hands with missing fingers. There were people hovering about I knew I should recognize but did not. My eyeballs weighed ten stone each. When I shut my eyes I saw whorls of an ear, a giant ear, and I had to force the lids up again to get away.

There’s a worm in my winky, I thought.

‘Is that so?’ a lady replied. She sounded like she was smiling. I didn’t think I’d said it out loud. Even though I was certain my eyes were open to avoid the giant ear, I couldn’t see if it was Nanny putting on a funny accent.

John was in France, not Belgium, naked on a country road. Martin came out from behind the shrubbery and covered him up with my father’s linen jacket. I called out to them but they did not turn. I screamed and screamed for them. I tried to run but a bearded man pinned me down, took out a knife, and delicately scraped the blowfly larvae from sores on my stomach.

Whatever you do, Andrew, my mother told me once, do not go around boring people with your dreams.

I do not know if it was hours or days before I was able to identify where I was. It was nighttime, and I was aware of cigarette smoke and the sound of a typewriter. My room was dim but I could see down the long house and into the other mosquito net where a woman with a braid down her back, a dark braid against a white shirt, was typing. A man stood beside her, smoking. Then he leaned down, his hand with the cigarette at the back of her chair, to see her words. Nell. Fen. I felt such a relief upon recognizing them, like a child identifying Mother, Father.

‘Jesus, Bankson, you febrile wanker.’ He shoved me one way then the other, tossed someone the mess, and found another set. ‘Can you sit up?’

‘Yes,’ I said, but I couldn’t.

‘Never mind.’ He pushed me around again and there were fresh sheets below and above me. His face shimmered with sweat. There was a chair by the bed and he sat in it. He held a cup of water out to me. I tried to bring my lips to it but I couldn’t reach. He nudged a hand under my head and lifted my head toward the cup and held it there as I drank. ‘Good. Good,’ he said, and lowered me back down.

‘Do you want to sleep some more?’

Had I been sleeping? ‘No.’

‘Hungry?’

‘No.’

The cloth window shade was rolled up and through it came voices, mostly children’s voices, and a hot wind. A young man was walking down to the water with a twisted white bundle. Wanji.

‘Let’s talk,’ I said. I propped my head up at a sharper angle.

‘What do you want to talk about?’ He seemed amused by the idea.

‘Tell me about your mother,’ I said. I was thinking of my mother, the way she was in my youth, and of her kitchen apron and her wide cool hand on my forehead and the powdery orange smell that came up from her underarms.

‘No. I don’t want to talk about that.’

My head began to hurt and I could not think of another subject. Tell me anything. But before I could say it, sleep pulled me back under. Perhaps I’d left my eyes open, perhaps he didn’t care if they’d drooped shut. When I woke up he was talking about the Mumbanyo. ‘I saw it again, after they took it back. The day before we left. It was Abapenamo’s turn to feed it and he let me follow him.’ He had brought the chair even closer to the bed. He was speaking quietly. Two years in the Territories had made us all thin, but Fen’s collarbone rose up far too high, curling over the dark hollows at the base of his neck, his face a narrow wedge. His breath turned my stomach and I had to shift away from its stream.

‘I thought it would just be in some hut a half-mile away but it was at least an hour’s hike away, mostly running.’ His voice dropped to a scrape. ‘I memorized the route. I swear I could get back there. I go through it in my mind every day so I won’t forget.’ He got up and peered out the window, looking in both directions, then sat back down again. ‘There’s nothing else like this thing in this whole region. It’s hundreds of years old. Big, six feet at least. And it’s got symbols, Bankson, logograms carved all the way down the bottom half that tell their stories. But only a few men every generation are taught to read them.’

Even in my head-throbbing stupor, I recognized this as thrilling and impossible. No system of writing had been discovered among any tribe in New Guinea.

‘You don’t believe me. But I know what I saw. It was daylight. I held it. I touched it. I made drawings afterward.’ His chair squeaked and then he was back with pages. He’d used Nell’s crayons. ‘I swear this is how it looked. See these?’ He pointed to a band of what looked like circles, dots, and chevrons. It hurt to move my eyes so much. ‘Look at this. Two dots in the circle. Means woman. One dot, man. This V here, with the two dots, crocodile. Abapenamo explained them all to me. Grandfather, war, time. All logograms. This means to run. They have verbs , Bankson.’ He was a good artist. The flute was fashioned in the shape of a man, with a large angry painted face and a black bird perched on its shoulders whose long beak curled over his head and was boring into his chest. Down below was an erect unsheathed penis. And below that, according to Fen, were verticle rows of writing.