Lily King: Euphoria

‘Let’s see about treating those battle wounds.’

I went to the back of the house to fetch the medicines I’d collected.

I heard Fen say, ‘Well, you gave him a right sheep-dipping, didn’t you?’

I didn’t hear Nell respond. When I came back, she was sitting beside him and her face had returned to its eerie yellow.

Fen made no move to do it himself, so I asked for her left hand first, the one with the gash across the palm. I couldn’t understand how they’d been so cavalier about these cuts. Sepsis was one of the greatest risks in the field.

Fen must have seen something in my face. ‘Our medicine disappears in a week,’ he said. ‘Every time we get a shipment Nell uses it up on the scrapes and sores of all her kiddies.’

I doused the cut in iodine, swabbed it with boracic ointment, and wrapped it in a cotton bandage. Her hand at first was weightless in mine but soon it gave in and grew heavy.

I confess, I worked slowly. After the hand I addressed the lesions, two on her arm, one on her neck, and — she rolled up her pant leg — another on her right shin. They seemed to me to be small tropical ulcers, not yaws. I suspected there were more, but I could hardly ask her to remove her clothing. I gave her aspirin for her fever. Beside her Fen watched until his eyes closed.

‘You must let me apologize for what I said earlier,’ she said, ‘about the leaves.’

‘Formal amends would require an oath that you two don’t run off to the Aborigines.’

She raised her bandaged hand. ‘I swear.’

‘Now, tell me what happened with the Mumbanyo. Unless you want to sleep.’

‘I got my rest in the canoe. Thank you for the tending. Everything feels better.’ She took her first sip of whiskey. ‘Do you know of them, the Mumbanyo?’

‘Never heard of them.’

‘Fen will give you a very different account than mine.’ Her wounds glistened with the ointment I had put on them.

‘Give me yours.’

She seemed daunted by the question, as if I’d asked her to write a monograph about them on the spot. Just when I thought she’d say she was too tired, she launched in. They were an affluent tribe, unlike the Anapa, who struggled to get enough to eat each day. The Mumbanyo’s tributary was full of fish, and they grew all the tobacco in the area. They were flush with food and shell money. But they were full of fear and aggression, bordering on paranoia, and terrified the region into submission with their impulsive threats.

‘I’ve never had an aversion to a people before. Almost a physical repulsion. I’m not a neophyte to the region. I’ve seen deaths, sacrifices, scarrings that end badly. I’m not—’ She looked at me wildly. ‘They kill their firstborn. They kill all their twins. Not in a ritual, not with emotion and ceremony. They just toss them in the river. Toss them in the bush. And the children they keep, they barely tend to. They carry them under their arm like a newspaper or plunk them in stiff baskets and close the lid, and when the baby cries they scratch the basket. That’s their most tender gesture, the scratching on the outside of the basket. When the girls are seven or eight, their fathers start to have sex with them. No surprise they grow up distrustful, vindictive, and murderous. And Fen—’

‘He was intrigued?’

‘Yes. Enamored. Utterly compelled. I had to get him out of there.’ She tried to laugh. ‘They kept telling us they were on their best behavior for us, but that it wouldn’t last forever. They were blaming everything that went wrong on the lack of bloodshed. We left seven months early. Maybe you noticed — there’s sort of a stench of failure about us.’

‘I hadn’t caught that, no.’ I would have liked to tell her about my own sense of failure, but it felt too vast to explain. Instead I looked at her shoes, leather schoolgirl lace-ups nearly as worn out as my own. I couldn’t be sure she had all her toes in there. Toes were the first things to get eaten away by those tropical ulcers.

‘You have a letter to your mother in the typewriter,’ she said.

‘I often do. Dear Mum, leave me alone. Love, Andrew.’

‘Andrew.’

‘Yes.’

‘No one ever calls you that.’

‘No one. Except my mum.’ I felt her waiting for more. ‘She would like me to be in a laboratory in Cambridge. Threatens to cut me off in every letter. And I can’t do this work without her support. We don’t have the kind of grants you have in America. Nor have I written a best-selling book, or any book for that matter.’ She’d ask next about the rest of the family, so I thought I should head her off. ‘Everyone else is dead so she seems to have a great deal of energy for me.’

‘Who is everybody else?’

‘My father and brothers.’

‘How?’

There was an American anthropologist for you. No delicate changing of the subject, no You have my deepest condolences or even How ghastly for you , but just a no-nonsense, straight-on How the heck did that happen?

‘John in the war. Martin in an accident six years later. And my father of heart failure, most likely due to the sad fact that runty old me was all that was left of his legacy.’

‘Hardly runty.’

‘Runty in the brain. My brothers were geniuses in their own ways.’

‘Everyone becomes a genius when they die young. What were they smart at?’

I told her about John and his boots and pail, the rare moth, the fossils in the trenches. And about Martin. ‘My father thought it showed inordinate hubris for Martin to try and write a poem.’

‘Fen told me your father coined the word genetics. ’

‘He didn’t mean to. He wanted to teach a course on Mendel and what was then called gene plasma. He felt it needed a more dignified word than plasma.’

‘Did he want you to continue where he left off?’

‘He wasn’t capable of imagining anything else for us. It was all that mattered to him. He believed it was our duty.’

‘When did he die?’

‘Nine years this winter.’

‘So he knew you’d transgressed.’

‘He knew I was reading ethnography with Haddon.’

‘He thought it was a soft science?’

‘It wasn’t science at all. Not to him.’ I could hear my father clearly. Pure nonsense.

‘And your mother is of the same persuasion?’

‘Stalin to his Lenin. I am nearly thirty but entirely in her thrall. My father left it that she hold the purse strings.’

‘Well, you’ve managed to build your jail cell at a good distance from her.’

I felt I should encourage her to sleep. You need rest, I should have said, but did not. ‘It wasn’t an accident. With Martin. He killed himself.’

‘Why?’

‘He was in love with a girl and she didn’t want him. He’d gone to her flat with a love poem he’d written and she wouldn’t read it. So he went and stood under the statue of Anteros in Piccadilly Circus and shot himself. I have the poem. It’s not his best. But the bloodstains give it a little dignity.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘I thought it was Eros in Piccadilly.’ She plucked at a pencil on my desk. For a second I thought she was going to start taking notes.

‘Many people do. But it’s his twin brother, the avenger of unrequited love. Poetic to the last.’

Most women like to fuss around a wound of your past, pick at the thin scab, comfort you after they’d made it sting. Not Nell.

‘Do you have a favorite part of all this?’ she asked.

‘All what?’ I said.

‘This work.’

Favorite part? There was little at this point that didn’t make me want to run with my stones straight back into the river. I shook my head. ‘You first.’

She looked surprised, as if she hadn’t expected the question to come back at her. She narrowed her grey eyes. ‘It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion — you’ve only been there eight weeks — and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.’