Lily King: Euphoria

After the war I’d memorized most of Brooke and Owen and Sassoon, and half convinced myself that they’d been written by John. Or Martin, who actually did write poetry. The war poets were all tangled up with my brothers and my youth and I thought I would cry when I got to the end of ‘Hardness of Heart’ and the bit about tears not being endless, but I didn’t. Nell did the crying for both of us.

I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake. Time for you and time for me, though I never did warm to Eliot. She was married. She was pregnant. And what would it have mattered in the end? What would it have altered to have kissed her then, that night? Everything. Nothing. Impossible to know.

We fell asleep reciting. Who was speaking or what poem I am not certain. We woke to little Sema and Amini poking us in the leg.

The morning began as the one before, with children scrambling in and out of her lap, and hand games and explosions of laughter. Bani brought me coffee and I worked at her typewriter. A few boys peered in through the netting. Chanta didn’t come but I thought more about my conversation with him and jotted down some questions for Teket when I returned.

All at once, far too early, Nell scooted everyone out of the house.

‘What’s going on?’ I called to her.

‘No mothers,’ she said. ‘No adult women today.’ She began packing her visiting bag. She was wearing the blue dress I’d first seen her in. ‘Something is going on. It happened last month and they wouldn’t let me in. I’m not going to be brushed off this time. I’ll be back at teatime.’ And she was gone.

By teatime Fen might be back, too.

I spent a few hours at their bookshelves and the piles of books around them. They had brought so many books, American novels I’d never heard of, ethnographies that had won prizes I didn’t know about, books by sociologists and psychologists with strange names from places like California and Texas. It was a whole universe I barely knew existed. They had a mound of magazines, too. I read about Roosevelt’s election and something called the Cyclotron, an atom-smasher that forced particles around in circles to accelerations of over a million electron volts, at which point they broke and formed a new kind of radium. I would have stayed in reading all day, but Kanup came round to ask if I wanted to go fishing.

I followed him down to the water. The sky was clear and the sun beat down, but the ground was pocked and shredded from the storm, littered with huge fronds and leaves, nuts and hard unripe fruits. We crunched through piles of debris to get to his boat on the beach. Many canoes were already on the water, paddled by men. I asked him why the men were fishing today, and not the women.

He smiled and said the women were busy. He seemed to want to imply more, but not say it. ‘The women are crazy today,’ he said.

We checked our nets and headed out. The Tam men were born and bred to be artisans: potters, painters, and mask makers. They were, I learned that afternoon, staggeringly poor fishermen. They argued and insulted one another. Their fingers ripped holes in the fragile fiber nets. They didn’t seem to understand how the traps worked. Their loud voices scared the fish. I had a good chuckle watching them, but all the while I was aware of the far side of the lake, dimly shimmering, from where at any moment my canoe would reappear.

I was glad when we got back to shore, eager for tea with Nell and what little time alone with her remained. But Kanup wanted to wash out the canoe, which he thought smelled of fish though he hadn’t caught anything, and plug up a small leak, so we went to get some gum sap from his house. I called up to Nell as we went by, but there was no answer.

When we returned to the beach she was standing ankle-deep in the water, both hands shielding her eyes, scouring the surface of the lake. Kanup was talking and she turned about and saw us. Her arms dropped to her sides.

‘They told me you’d left!’

‘Left?’

‘Yes. Chanta told me you’d gone off in a boat.’

‘I went fishing with Kanup.’

‘Oh, thank God.’ She grabbed me by my shirtsleeves. ‘I really thought you’d gone to find them.’

‘Bit late for that.’

Kanup had gone over to his canoe, but I did not follow to help him because Nell hadn’t let me go. She held on and examined the fabric of my plain white shirt. There was something different about her.

‘I thought you’d gone to Bett,’ she said.

‘Bett?’

‘Because she has a boat.’

I’d forgotten about Bett and her boat. And that I’d told Fen about her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said laughing, though she seemed to be crying, too. She let go of my shirtsleeves and brushed at her face quickly. ‘I’ve had a very strange day, Bankson.’

I could not take my eyes off her. It was as if she were performing some trick, some sort of unfolding. There was something raw and exposed about her, as if many things had already happened between us, as if time had leapt ahead and we were already lovers. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Let’s go up to the house.’

I gave Kanup an apologetic shrug, which I wasn’t sure he understood. But nothing could have separated me from Nell at that moment. I took one last fearful glance at the horizon. Empty. A bit more time. I followed her closely up the path.

We didn’t have tea. She poured us whiskey, and we sat across from each other at the kitchen table. ‘I don’t know if you’ll believe me.’

‘Of course I will.’

She stood up. ‘Sorry, I think I should write it all up first.’ She went to her desk and slid a piece of paper into her typewriter. I waited for the rush of keys. Nothing. She came back and sat down at the table. ‘I think maybe I do need to tell you.’ She took a long sip of her whiskey. She had a lovely throat, unmarred by the tropics. When she put the glass down she looked at me directly.

‘If I tried to tell Fen this, he wouldn’t believe me. He’d say I’d made it up, or mis—’

‘Tell me, Nell.’

‘As soon as I turned up the women’s road, I felt it, the same queer stillness as that one other time when they kept me out. I went straight to the last house, where smoke was coming out of all three chimneys and all the windows were sealed tight. I pushed through the curtain before anyone could stop me and was struck in the face by hot stinky wet air, like a smelly steam house. I gagged and tried to stick my nose out the doorway for some air but Malun pulled me in and took my basket and told me it was the minyana and they’d all decided I could stay.’

The minyana. She hadn’t heard this word before, she told me. When her eyes adapted to the dark room, she made out round black slabs of something cooking in small amounts of water on pans in the hearths. The room was full of women, many more than usual, and no one was mending a line or weaving a basket or nursing a baby. There were no children at all. Some of the women tended the pans on the fire and others were lying on mats along all sides of the room. All at once the black slabs were flipped over. They made a great clatter. They were stones, smooth round stones cooking in flat earthen pans. The women then left the stones and came away from the fire, carrying small pots they had been warming. Each woman on a mat was paired with a woman at the fire. An old woman named Yepe led Nell to a mat. ‘I tried to get my notebook from my basket but she stopped me and made me lie down.’ Yepe squatted next to her and unfastened her dress clumsily, inexperienced with buttons. Then she dipped her hands into the pot. They came out thick and dripping with oil and she placed them on Nell’s neck and began a slow massage, working her way down her back slowly, kneading, her hands moving easily in the thick oil. ‘It was happening like this all down the rows of mats, the massages deepening, quickening, and the women — you have to understand, these women are hardworking and unpampered; the Tam men are the ones who have much more leisure, who sit around painting their pots and their bodies and gossiping — these women started grunting and groaning.’