Lily King - Euphoria

‘Written by a true deviant,’ Fen said, tossing the last page down. ‘A true paranoid deviant. She gets a little hysterical at the end there, as if the whole world’s just about to go down the gurgler.’

Nell caught me looking at her. ‘What?’

‘You look like you are trying to follow about nine different strands of thought.’

‘More like forty-three. We should go to bed before our heads explode.’ She went down the ladder to drape a banana leaf across the bottom rung, which discouraged visitors. ‘All right. We are closed for business until further notice.’

Fen drained the last of the rubber wine into his mouth. It dribbled down his chin and he wiped it with the back of his hand. He took off his shirt, scrubbed his armpits with it, and tossed it in a pile for Wanji.

‘To Bedfordshire, my lady,’ he said in my accent, taking her arm as they moved to their room. ‘Nighty-nighty.’

I went off to my mat in their study feeling a bit like the family pet who’d been put outside for the night. I lay awake as the animals woke up first, snapping branches and blundering through leaves and hollering out and the greeet greeet greeet of the monkeys, then the humans, coughing, grunting, whining, shouting. Cackles from the women going down to their canoes and their paddling and their songs that carried across the water. Gongs and scoldings and laughter, the thunk of gulls into the water and flying foxes smashing into trees. Finally, I fell asleep. I dreamt I was on an ice floe, squatting like a native, carving a large symbol into the ice. But it was melting, and though I carved deeply — something with two lines crossed in the middle, a glyph representative of whole paragraphs of thought — the ice was turning to slush, and my feet slipped into the sea.

I woke up to the sound of writing, the scrape of the pencil and the softer susurrations of the hand following along. I rolled over, expecting to see Nell at the kitchen table, but it was Fen. He didn’t stop. He didn’t see me watching. He bent close to the paper and his face was contorted in concentration, and he held his breath for far too long then released it through his nose loudly. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said he was sitting on the loo. When there was stirring in the bedroom, he stopped, gathered his pages, and left the house with them.

Nell came out wearing what she must have slept in, large cotton pants and a light green shirt. She fixed us tall mugs of coffee with evaporated milk, and sat where Fen had been. I didn’t know if it was ten in the morning or four in the afternoon. Light came through in slits and spackles from no particular direction. I felt like a boy on holiday from school. She sat with both feet up on her seat, her mug on one knee. I sat across from her, Helen’s transcript between us.

She bent one corner of the pages with her thumb then let them tick slowly back into place. ‘She was always writing a book, but after a while, I began to assume she’d never finish it. I thought I’d moved past her in that way. And now — this makes mine look like a child’s scrapbook of souvenirs from a trip to Cincinnati. She’s done some head-splitting thinking here. While I’ve been collecting pretty little stones, she’s built a whole cathedral.’

I still felt the tension of the dream in my body, the symbol I was trying to etch in the softening ice. It struck me as funny that she aspired to create a cathedral and I had struggled to carve out one symbol.

‘You’re laughing at me and my pity party.’

‘No.’ I thought of the story she told me about running out of spit in the closet. I could see that four-year-old so clearly now.

‘Yes, you are.’

‘No, I’m not,’ but I couldn’t stop smiling. ‘I feel the same way.’

‘No you don’t. Look at you. You’re all rangy and relaxed, with a big grin on your face.’

‘I think Fen might have begun his cathedral this morning.’

‘Writing?’

‘Pages and pages.’

She seemed surprised, but unimpressed. ‘He chases down these things that are nothing in the end. And now Xambun is here and he won’t help me with him. I can’t enter a men’s house. The more fuss I make about it, the more he resists, and we could leave here in five months without ever having interviewed him.’

‘I could try to have a word—’

‘No, please don’t. He’d know we’d spoken and it would make it worse.’

I wanted to help her, offer her something. I told her about the second entryway of the men’s house I’d seen the day before, as delicately as I could.

‘You’re saying you walk through her labia ?’ she said, already reaching for her notebook. ‘This is the kind of thing he’s deliberately keeping from me.’

‘Perhaps he’s respecting their taboos.’

‘Fen doesn’t give a damn about taboos. Nor should he. We’re trying to piece this culture together, and I’ve got a partner who withholds information.’

She sharpened a pencil and made me tell her again, in greater detail. She asked many, many questions, which led to a discussion about the vulva and the way various tribes on the Sepik used the image. In the end I did feel I’d given her if not a conversation with Xambun, then something she could use. It turned her mood around, and I felt how exhilarating it would be to work in the field with this woman. Our conversation veered back to the manuscript on the table. We read through the first chapter again, making notes in the margins. We rewrote the opening and went into the study, where she could type it up. The desks were side by side and I read what we’d written aloud as she typed. We moved onto the next chapter, both of us reading along silently now, stopping at certain passages, often the same passages, and making a note for Helen. Several children had ignored the big banana leaf over the ladder and climbed up into the house anyway. They sat outside the mosquito netting watching us, occasionally attempting to imitate the strange sounds we made.

Fen returned in time for the Dobu chapter. He didn’t like what he saw, the two of us alone together, working on Helen’s book, and he sulked until Nell got him to tell the story about the Dobu man who was convinced his invisibility charm was working perfectly and snuck into women’s houses only to be struck with a digging stick at the door every time. Then he described the love hex a healer had put on him the day before he left. There was no question that he believed it to be wholly responsible for how quickly he fell in love with Nell on the boat home.

Nell went off on her rounds and Fen and I caught the last bit of a scarification in a ceremonial house. The initiate, a boy of no more than twelve, was wailing and a group of older boys were holding him down on a log while a few men cut into him, making hundreds of small slits on his back and shoulders. They dropped a citrus mixture into each wound so that the skin would puff up and the scars would be raised and textured to look like crocodile skin. His blood had soaked the log in dark striations. When they were done they painted him with oil and turmeric and smeared him with white clay and carried him off weeping and half conscious into seclusion until he healed.

Fen and I walked down to the beach. I’d seen dozens of scarifications but it didn’t get easier to watch. My legs felt spongy and my chest burned. We sat in the sand and I don’t know that we exchanged a word.

That evening we gathered for the blessing of the food storage huts, which were nearly empty after all the festivities for Xambun. We were all crowded into the small area around the food sheds, but no one stood within five feet of me or Fen, whereas Nell had a little girl in her arms, another child on her back, and several children encircling her legs. Adults wore the totemic plants of their clan. A pair of yams were carried into each shed and blessed and urged to procreate. Ancestors were invoked in long songs and prayers. I was hot and tired of standing and still queasy from the scarification. Somewhere in the bush was that boy in a small hut alone, weeping and blind with pain.