Lily King - Euphoria

‘Have a look here.’ He shuffled the pages. ‘Here’s a map I made that same day. Take us right to it. You took so bloody long to come back , we hardly have any time now. We need to go back there and get this thing.’

‘Get it?’

There was a creak on the stairs and he jumped up and hid the drawings away where he’d gotten them, in a black trunk on the other side of the bed. The creaking stopped and he looked out the window toward the ladder. A woman was looking for Nell-Nell, and Fen told her where she was, pointing up the road.

‘We can’t leave here without it. The next time we come, it’ll be in a different place. I know where it is now. We could sell it to the museum for a right heap of cash. And then there are books to be written about it. Books that would blow past Children of the Kirakira. It would fix us up for life , Bankson. We’d be like Carter and Carnarvon discovering Tut. We could do this together. We’re the perfect team for it.’

‘I don’t know anything about the Mumbanyo.’

‘You know the Kiona. You know the Sepik.’

My body felt like two hundred more pounds had been laid on top of it and a few poisoned arrows had been shot through my skull.

‘I know you’re sick, mate. We don’t have to talk about it further now. Get better, then we can plan it out.’

I dreamt of the flute, its gaping mouth and sinister bird. I dreamt of nicked ears and Fen’s wedgelike face.

Nell fed me from the supply of pills I’d given her. She made me drink. She offered me food but I couldn’t take it. The sight of it made my stomach clutch. She did not try to talk to me apart from these basic transactions of liquid and medicine. But she sat in the chair, not close to the bed like Fen but a few feet off my left foot, sometimes standing to place a damp cloth on my forehead, sometimes reading, sometimes using a great fan on me, sometimes looking up somewhere above my head. If I smiled at her she smiled back, and there were times I half pretended, half believed, she was my wife.

I shut my eyes and Nell disappeared, replaced by Fen who sat so much closer, the fan nearly swatting me, the wet cloths runny, water dripping in my ears.

I think he was telling me about his time in London, and it happened just after that. All I can say is that everything that was big got small and everything that was small got big. A great sudden terrifying inverse. I remember not being able to shut my mouth. I remember nothing else after that, just waking up more or less in Fen’s arms on the floor. He was hollering things, ropes of saliva coming out of his mouth. A great many people came after that, Nell and Bani and others I didn’t know, and I was put back on the bed and when I opened my eyes it was just Fen and Nell and they looked so ghastly worried that I had to shut them again. The next thing I was aware of was Fen shaving my face.

‘You were scratching it so much,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d flaked out on us.’ He tilted my head up so he could get underneath my chin.

Through the netting I saw Nell holding him, hushing him, as he shook.

I heard:

‘You’re so good with him.’

‘Better than with you, eh?’

‘Methinks you’ll be a good papa.’

‘Youthinks, but you aren’t certain.’

‘You had a seizure,’ Fen said. ‘You stiffened up like a corpse then writhed like a whip snake then stiffened and this yellow shit came out of your mouth and your eyes were gone. Blank white balls like this.’ He made an awful face and inhuman noises and Nell told him to stop.

Every bit of me hurt. I felt as if my body had been flung from the top of a New York skyscraper.

My fever broke. That’s what they told me. They brought me plates of food and seemed to expect me to leap out of bed.

I woke and my eyes were already open and Fen was talking. We seemed to be in the middle of a conversation. I had become a receptacle for his whirring thoughts, and he didn’t particularly mind if I was awake or asleep, lucid or befuddled. ‘My brothers were trouble, every one of them. But I was the least favorite child. I was small and smart. I used words in ways that bothered my parents. I liked books. I wanted books. My teachers praised me. My parents walloped me. I hated farm work. I wanted to leave home before I had words for the thought. In some ways I would have been better off if I had just run away then, age three, just packed a little bag and troddled on out to the main road. Not sure things could have been much worse. We were raised to know nothing, to think nothing. Chew our cud like the cows. Say nothing. That’s what my mother did. Said nothing. I made myself as useless as possible in order to stay in school. I was the only one who did. I was lucky to have three brothers ahead of me, otherwise my father never would have allowed it.’

‘And a sister,’ I remembered.

‘She was younger. At school I received something somewhat close to affection. At home, even when I managed to beat my brothers at something, I got ridicule. Then my mother died and it got worse.’

‘How did she die?’

He paused, unused to my participation. ‘‘Flu. Gone in five days. Couldn’t breathe. The sound of it was terrible. The only thing I saw through the door before my aunt pulled me away was a bare foot sticking out the side of the bed. It was pale blue.’

In those hours or days it seemed I fell asleep and awoke to the sound of his voice.

‘I was pretty well out of my head when I got on that ship. Twenty-three months with the Dobu sorcerers and then a few days in Sydney where I proposed to a girl I thought had been my girlfriend and she turned me down. A Dobu witch had put a love hex on me before I left them, but so much for that, eh? I didn’t want anything to do with women or anthropology at that point. That first night on board I heard Nell holding forth at a big table at dinner and I figured she’d had this brilliant field trip and some stupid revelations about human nature and the universe, and it was the last thing I wanted to listen to. But I was virtually the only young man on the ship and some meddling old biddies arranged for me to dance with her. The first thing she said to me was ‘I’m having trouble breathing properly.’ I told her I was, too. We were both having some sort of claustrophobia being enclosed in those rooms. As soon as we could break away, we took a walk on deck, the first of many. I think we must have walked a hundred miles on that voyage. She had a fellow meeting her in Marseille. I wanted her to stay on with me to Southampton. She didn’t know what to do. She was the last off the boat and the fellow saw me and knew I’d got her. I saw it in his face.’

‘She had the body of a tart. Nothing like my mother’s. Full breasts, narrow waist, hips made for a man’s hands. I had the horrible suspicion that my brothers and I had created that body, that if we had not done what we had done she wouldn’t have developed the way she did.’ His voice was so low I could barely make the words. ‘Christ, that farm was out in the middle of fucking nowhere. No one had any idea what was going on. Except my mother. She knew. I know she knew.’ His voice split then and he looked up to the rafters and pinched off his tears. His face looked like that black bird was boring into him. Then he reached down and lit a cigarette and said, quite calmly, ‘Nothing in the primitive world shocks me, Bankson. Or I should say, what shocks me in the primitive world is any sense of order and ethics. All the rest — the cannibalism, infanticide, raids, mutilation — it’s all comprehensible, nearly reasonable, to me. I’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go. Even for you Pommies, I’ll bet.’