by Lily King
The world dimmed, but I was still standing. ‘I am perfectly well,’ I said. Then, they told me later, I fell to the ground like a kapok tree.
12
2/21 Bankson returned then fainted dead away on the women’s road and now he lies burning with fever in our bed. We soak him with water then fan him with palm leaves until our joints ache. He trembles & shudders & sometimes slugs the fan across the room. Can’t find the thermometer anywhere but I think it’s a very high fever—or maybe it just seems so because of his Englishman’s skin. He has a flushed but plucked-goose look to him without his shirt on. His nipples look like a little boy’s after a cold swim, two hard tiny beads in his long torso. He sleeps & sleeps and when he opens his eyes I think he’s fully conscious but he’s not. He speaks in Kiona and sometimes in little phrases of French in quite a good accent. Fen grumbles about how Bankson avoided us all these weeks then shows up sick, how he didn’t want to be in our way but is now delirious in our bed. I can see that his complaining is worry. His sharp words, fierce looks—all concern, not anger. Sickness frightens him. It’s how he lost his mother after all. I’m seeing now from this vantage point that all the times he’s hovered over the bed, scolding me, hounding me to get up, it’s been fear, not fury. He doesn’t think I’m so weak. He’s just terrified I’ll die on him. I tell him B’s fever will break in a day or two and he lists all the people, whites & natives, we have known or heard about who have died from one of their malarial flare-ups. I’ve got him out of the house now, sent him off with Bani for water. It’s hard to get B to drink. He seems scared of the cup. He bats it away like the fan. I know he’s a bit scared of his mother so a few minutes ago I lifted his head and said in my best British battle-axe: “Andrew, this is your mother speaking. You will drink this water,” and I wedged the cup between his lips and he drank.
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.
13
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 da
rk 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.
‘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.’
I heard them on the mats they’d set up in the large mosquito room beside their desks. The mats creaked and snapped. Whispering. Breathing. The unmistakable rhythm of sex. A cry cut short. Laughing.
Daylight and he was yelling. I turned and saw him towering over Bani, who was crouched by the dining table. Fen smacked him on the ear and he fell over whimpering, curled in a ball.
‘Where’s Nell?’ It felt like days since she’d sat in the chair.
‘Out counting babies. She thinks I’m doing such a stellar job she’s promoted me to head nurse.’
He was shaving me again.
‘You’re like a bear,’ he said, though he was far furrier than I.
He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth. I didn’t need a shave, didn’t particularly want a shave, but I breathed in the smell of his hands and breath. He wiped me with a dry towel.
