Euphoria (18 page)

Fen squatted in the shallows beside Nell. His face was narrower than I remembered, a blade slicing the air, his forehead white but the rest stained with blood. His shirtfront was caked with it as well.

‘Fua nengaina fil,’ he cried out to them, as if he were still in the boat and they were hundreds of yards away. He spoke directly to Malun and tears cut pale lines through the dried blood on his face. Malun, when she registered him, screeched like an animal that had been bitten. With her two arms she shoved him away from her son’s body.

‘It wasn’t my fault, Nell. They ambushed us. Kolekamban ambushed us.’

I could see the arrow wounds: one in the temple, one in the chest. Clean, precise shots.

More and more people were coming onto the beach, encircling us, pressing in to see Xambun. I could barely breathe. From somewhere behind us a slit drum started up, awful, powerful, drawn-out knells loud enough for every person and spirit on the lake to hear. The sound shook through me.

I crouched next to Fen. ‘Did they see it was you?’ I said.

He lifted his mess of a face to me and seemed to break into a smile. ‘No! No one saw me. I was invisible.’ He turned to Nell. ‘I used the spell and I was invisible.’

But Nell was still trying to hold Malun, trying to reach her and comfort her in her hysteria.

‘Did they see you leave with the flute?’ I asked Fen.

‘They couldn’t see me. Only Xambun.’

‘If they saw you, they’ll come after you.’

‘They didn’t see me, Bankson. Nellie.’ He grabbed Nell’s face and turned it to his. ‘Nellie, I’m sorry.’ His head lurched and fell against her chest and he heaved up sobs that no one could hear in the chaos.

I broke out of the circle and fetched my boat, which had drifted downshore. I pulled it back toward the path that led to their house. The flute was wrapped in towels and tied up with the twine from Helen’s manuscript. It was as thick as a man’s thigh. I took it out then flipped the boat. Blood and water funneled out into the sand. I set it to rights, and as I straightened up I felt light-headed and sat down. All around me people had given over to grief, weeping and keening and singing in groups in the sand, the women’s skin still glistening with oil from the day before.

Several men I didn’t recognize, older men who had already covered themselves with funereal mud, approached the canoe. One examined the engine without touching it, keeping his distance in case it roared to life, but the other two went straight for the flute and began plucking at the twine.

Fen called out something and came running.

‘Jesus, Bankson, don’t let them touch it.’ He reached out for the tall bundle but the two men pulled it away. Fen lunged for it, seized it with one arm and shoved off the men with the other.

‘Be careful, Fen. Be very careful right now,’ I said quietly.

The largest man began asking questions, one after the other, urgent but precise. Fen answered solemnly. At one point he broke down, and seemed to be offering a long apology. The large man had no patience for this. He held up his hand then pointed to the flute. Fen told him no. He asked again and Fen said no more sharply, which put an end to the conversation.

After they walked away Fen said, ‘They want to bury the flute with Xambun.’

‘Seems the least you could do for them, given—’

‘Stick it in the ground to rot? After everything I went through?’

‘Now is not the time to upset them.’

‘Oh, is now not the time?’ he mimicked bitterly. ‘Are you an expert on my tribe, too?’

‘A man has been murdered, Fen.’

‘Just stay out of it, Bankson, all right? Will you do that for once?’ He lifted the flute and carried it awkwardly away.

The three men had moved down the beach to where a larger group of men gathered around the slit drum. But the
drumming had stopped as the players listened to what the mud-painted men had to say.

I knew what was happening. They were all realizing that it had not been a hunt but a raid Fen had taken Xambun on, and that now Fen was unwilling to share the spoils with Xambun’s spirit. Without the flute, Xambun would be restless, would make trouble for them all. They had to get it. I could see it in their eyes. It was perhaps just the beginning of what they would need to avenge Xambun’s death.

I pushed my way back in to Nell.

Her eyes were shut. Malun was calmer and letting Nell stroke her back.

‘We need to go. We need to leave here now.’ I pressed my cheek to her temple, her hair against my lips. ‘We do. We need to go.’

Without opening her eyes, she said, ‘We can’t. Not now. Not like this.’

‘Listen to me.’ I took both her arms. ‘We need to get in my boat and go.’

She yanked herself out of my grip. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving her.’

‘It’s not safe, Nell. No one is safe.’

‘I know them. They won’t hurt us. They’re not like your Kiona.’

‘They want the flute.’

‘Let them have the flute.’

‘He’ll never give it to them, Nell. He’ll die before he does.’

‘We can’t go. These are my people.’ Her voice broke. She understood. She understood about their gods and amends—and Fen’s brutal possessiveness.

Her small face was smeared with blood and sand and she looked as if she’d never resented someone more than she resented me and my good sense. She resisted a little while longer then I guided her out and up the beach.

People were still streaming onto the sand from the road. I saw Chanta and Kanup and little Luquo, who was screaming for his brother. But no one stopped us. The men by the drums watched us move away but they did not come after us.

Fen was in a chair, the flute leaning up beside him. Nell went straight to her bedroom. He jumped up and followed her.

‘Don’t come in here.’

‘Nell, I need to tell you something.’

‘No.’

‘I talked to Abapenamo. They did give it to me. The flute was a gift. It’s rightfully mine.’

‘You think I care who owns it now? You got a man killed for it, Fen. Xambun is
dead.
’

‘I know, Nellie. I know.’ He slid to the ground and wrapped his arms around her legs.

A raw loathing coursed through me. ‘Get up, Fen,’ I said through the netting. ‘Pack your bags. We’re leaving.’

I got the canoe and brought it around to a smaller beach where they met me. We loaded it up with my suitcases, their duffels, and the small trunk. I’d found her specs by my mat and handed them to her when Fen wasn’t looking. She put
them on without acknowledgment of anything else and turned back to the other beach, the entire village gathered there now.

‘Don’t call attention to anything,’ I said quietly. ‘Just get in the boat.’

Fen and his flute got in. ‘It’s out of petrol, you know,’ he said, as if that were my fault. ‘I had to paddle most of the way back.’

Good, I thought. Gave me more time with your wife.

‘I’ve another jug right here,’ I said. ‘You left it when you stole my boat.’

I affixed the petrol line to the new jug and gave it a pump. The motor turned over on the first try. A few small heads lifted and turned. Only the children playing in the water heard the sound of the engine.

‘Baya ban!’ little Amini hollered from the shallows.

Nell raised herself up and in a low cracked voice called out, ‘Baya ban!’

‘Baya ban!’

‘Baya ban!’ Nell called. I wanted to tell her to stop, but the men by the drums on the far side of the beach seemed not to hear her in the tumult.

Nell warbled out every long name of each child waving to her, complete with clan and maternal and paternal ancestor names, until her words gave out and her wailing became incoherent. The children waded deeper into the water as we pulled away and splashed madly at our boat, screaming out things I couldn’t understand.

Go. Go to your beautiful dances, your beautiful ceremonies. And we will bury our dead.

The sky seemed so low, so bleak. For a moment I lost my bearings entirely, and I wasn’t even sure where to point the boat, how to get back to the river. Then I remembered the canal between the hills and I pushed up the throttle and the motor drowned out all their voices. The canoe lifted, lurched, then skimmed fast across the black lake.

We flagged down a pinnace almost as soon as we reached the Sepik proper. It was a boat full of missionaries from Glasgow who planned to sprinkle themselves and their faith all over the region. I could see their hearty confidence falter as soon as they saw us.

‘Been through the wars, have ye?’ one of them managed, but they shrunk from us as soon as we climbed on board. Nor did we give them much opportunity for conversation, though one of them bought my canoe and engine for far more than they were worth. Nell tried to persuade me not to sell, to go directly back to the Kiona. But I was determined to go with them to Sydney, and I needed the money. While Fen was up talking to the driver about getting the rest of their stuff picked up, I told her I’d go as far as New York with her if she’d let me. She shut her eyes and Fen came back to his seat beside her before she had answered.

W
e took rooms in Sydney at the Black Opal in George Street. Nell insisted on having her own. The clerk wrote down in his ledger Nell Stone, Andrew Bankson, Schuyler Fenwick, and it pleased me to see their names separated and to see Nell receive her own key, 319, a flight above the rooms Fen and I were given.

Without bathing, we walked to the Commonwealth Bank then down to the White Star booking office where Nell and Fen secured two passages to New York. I’d hoped they’d have to wait weeks for space on a ship, but because of the crook economy, the man in the office said, most liners were half empty. The SS
Calgaric
would sail in four days. The paper money they slid across the counter looked fake. An electric fan spun bland air at us, though the day was cool and Nell wore a sweater over her blouse that made her look like a girl at university. Everything felt wrong: the fan, the hard floor, the man’s combed hair and bow tie, the smells of cured leather and mint candy. I wanted my own ticket on that liner. I wanted to tear up hers and take her back to the Kiona with me.

Unable to return to the heavy walls of the Black Opal, unable to sit at a restaurant, we walked. I tried to inure myself to the noise, the foot and road traffic, the hundreds of bloated pink faces barking in Australian English, which had become
a loathsome sound. Even the shop signs and billboards overwhelmed me. Y
OUR
G
AS
R
EFRIGERATOR
, M
ADAM
, I
S
H
ERE
. T
HE
B
EST
T
HINGS IN
L
IFE
C
OME IN
C
ELLOPHANE
. Nevertheless, I was compelled to read every one.

This sensation of the familiar feeling new and jarring was something I had relished when I’d returned from my first field trip. This time it felt wretched. I had never seen more clearly how streets like these were made for and by amoral cowards, men who made money in rubber or sugar or copper or steel in remote places then returned here where no one questioned their practices, their treatment of others, their greed. Like them, the three of us would face no recriminations. No one would ever ask us here how we had got a man killed.

Before Fen had seen the numbers, I had chosen Room 219, the one directly below Nell’s. Next morning, when I heard her door open and shut, I dressed quickly and went down to the breakfast room. They hadn’t started serving yet and the room was empty save Nell in the corner holding a teacup with two hands as if it were a coconut gourd. I took the seat across from her. Neither of us had slept.

‘The only thing worse than being out of that room is being in that room,’ she said.

I wanted to say so much. I wanted to acknowledge with her what had happened, how we had let it happen, why we had let it happen. I wanted to tell her Fen had made it clear to me from the start that this flute was what he was after and that I had done nothing to stop him, only taken full advantage of
his absence. But I wanted to say it all lying down again with her, holding her in my arms. ‘I should have gone after him straightaway, as soon as I saw the note.’

‘You couldn’t have caught up with him.’ She ran her finger along the edge of the teacup. ‘And you certainly wouldn’t have persuaded him otherwise.’ She was wearing the sweater again. She hadn’t looked up at me yet.

‘I wanted that time with you,’ I said. ‘I wanted it more than I’ve wanted anything in my life.’ These last words surprised me. The truth of them made me start to shake. When she didn’t respond, I said, ‘I can’t regret that. It was perfect.’

‘Worth a man’s life?’

‘Was what worth a man’s life?’ Fen said. He’d come in a side door behind me.

‘Your flute,’ Nell said.

He frowned, as if she were a child who’d been cheeky, and told an approaching waiter to fetch him a chair. He’d bathed and shaved and smelled like the West.

Again we wandered. We walked through the Art Gallery of New South Wales. We looked at the watercolors by Julian Ashton and a new exhibit of Aboriginal bark paintings. We sat at a café with tables outdoors, like in the
New Yorker
drawing. We ordered things we hadn’t seen in years: veal, Welsh rarebit, spaghetti. But none of us ate more than a few bites of any of it.

On the way back to the Black Opal I saw that Nell’s limp was worse.

‘It’s not my ankle,’ she said. ‘It’s these shoes I haven’t worn for two years.’

When we passed a chemist’s I stayed back and slipped inside. The girl behind the counter looked part Aboriginal, rare for a shopkeeper in Sydney then. She passed me the box without speaking.

‘I think I can pay for my wife’s plasters,’ Fen said, pushing me aside to give her the money.

At the hotel the clerk handed us a note from Claire Iynes, an anthropologist at the University of Sydney, inviting us to dinner.

‘How’d she know we were here?’ Nell said.

‘I rang her up yesterday,’ Fen said.

He wanted to tell her about the flute.

‘Dinner? How are we to go to a dinner, Fen?’

‘There’s a dress shop two doors down, miss,’ the clerk said. ‘Hair and beauty across the street. Fix you up smart.’

A cab took us up to Double Bay, where Claire and her husband lived, just above Redleaf Pool.

‘Poshy posh,’ Fen said out the window to the large houses on the water. He brought his head back in. ‘Claire has moved up in the world. What did she marry into?’

‘Mining, I think. Silver or copper,’ Nell said, the first sentences she’d uttered since we’d gotten the invitation.

Fen smirked at me. ‘Bankson doesn’t like it when the colonists talk about where money comes from.’

It wasn’t a large dinner, nine of us around a small table in what seemed to be a drawing room. The vast dining room
was on the other side of the house, too big, we were told, for four couples and the English hanger-on. No one knew quite what to make of my presence. I wasn’t headed home; I wasn’t finished with my fieldwork. We hadn’t thought this through. It highlighted even for us the fact that I’d followed them all the way here with no good reason. I think I had been waiting all along for Fen to say ‘Why
are
you here, Bankson? Why don’t you leave us the hell alone?’ Because my only reason, the reason he knew as well as I, was that I was in love with his wife. He could have called me out anytime, and he could have done it right there with witnesses in the Iyneses’ house, but instead he said, ‘He’s been ill. Seizures. We thought he should see a doctor.’

There was a long discussion about doctors in Sydney and who would be the best for mysterious tropical diseases. Eventually Fen rerouted them with talk of our ‘breakthrough,’ he called it, our grid, and we spent most of the evening mapping out the guests and mutual acquaintances, of which there were many. One man with a great heavy moustache knew Bett from a project he’d done in Rabaul; another had read zoology with my father at Cambridge. Claire seemed to know every anthropologist we could name, and caught us up on the department gossip in three different countries.

Fen flourished in fresh company, bringing out all the Mumbanyo stories with which he once entertained me. I watched him twirl his wineglass, eat prawns with a sterling silver oyster fork, accept a light from an engraved lighter—this man I’d seen shit off the side of a bark canoe, covered in another man’s blood. I saw then that any remorse he’d shown us had been an act. He was exuberant, a man who was just
about to seize hold of the best stretch of his life. He fed off of Nell’s and my disorientation.

I’d been put beside Mrs. Isabel Swale. Her husband, Arthur, already sozzled when we’d arrived, had drunk himself into an aphasic stupor and followed the conversation stupidly, as a dog follows the ball during a game of tennis. Mrs. Swale badgered me with questions about the Kiona without listening to the answers, so that her inquiry was disjointed and did not create anything resembling a conversation. Her left leg, bare through a slit in her gown, came closer and closer to me and by dessert was pressed alongside my own. All of her gestures—the way she leaned her lips to my ear, knocked her head back in a sudden and inexplicable laugh, examined the black beneath my fingernails—would have indicated to others at the table that we had struck a sudden, intimate connection. Nell shot me a few direct and withering looks, and I found I was pleased to see any emotion for me at all cross her face. At the far end of the table, Fen talked quietly to Claire Iynes.

After dinner, Colonel Iynes invited the men to have a look at his collection of antique weapons, and Claire led the women off through the house for
digestifs
on the back patio. I lagged behind the men, heard Fen drop his voice and tell the Colonel he was in possession of a rare artifact himself, then I turned around. In a narrow passageway before the kitchen, I took Nell’s wrist and held her back.

‘You do quite well in civilization, particularly with the ladies,’ she said. ‘Much better than you have let on.’

‘Please, let’s not play at anything.’

Her face was as pale and hollowed out as when I first met her.

‘Stay with me,’ I said. ‘Stay with me and come back to the Kiona. Stay with me and come to England. Stay with me and we’ll go anywhere you like. Fiji,’ I said desperately. ‘Bali.’

‘I keep thinking of how when we first arrived we thought Xambun was a god, a spirit. Some powerful dead man. And now he is.’ She started to say something else but it got caught and she leaned against me.

I held her as she wept. I stroked her hair, loose and slightly matted. ‘Stay here with me. Or let me come with you.’

She pulled me down to kiss her. Warm. Briny.

‘I love you,’ she said, her lips still against mine. But it meant no.

She was silent on the way back down to the city, and went directly to her room without a word to either of us.

Fen held up a bottle of cognac the Colonel had given him. ‘Quick drink? Help us sleep.’

I doubted he had trouble sleeping, but I followed him to his room. I didn’t want to go, but there was some part of me that felt we could work this out. In this situation a Kiona man would offer the other fellow a few spears, an axe, and some betel nut, and then the wife was his.

Fen’s room was identical to mine but at the other end of the hallway. Same green walls and knitted white counterpane on the single bed. He poured the brandy into two glasses on a tray by the bed and handed me one.

His bags were splayed open by the window but the flute was not among them. There were no closets or wardrobes and it wouldn’t have fit in the small chest of drawers by the door.

‘It’s under the bed.’ He set his glass back on the tray and rolled the flute out a few feet. It was still wrapped in towels and tied with twine, but loosely now, as if he’d gotten tired of all the wrapping and unwrapping.

‘It’s magnificent, Bankson. Better than I remembered. Glyphs carved all over it.’ He bent down to untie the string.

‘No. Don’t. I don’t want to see it.’

‘Yes, you do.’

He was right. I did. I wanted to prove him a liar. The isolated, alienating Mumbanyo with a logographic system of writing? No. Much as I wanted to prove him wrong, I would not give him the pleasure of unveiling it to me. ‘I don’t, Fen.’

‘Suit yourself. You’ll have to wait until it’s under glass then. Claire and the Colonel think I’ll have my pick of museums, when I’m ready.’ He sat on the bed and pointed to a black chair against the wall. ‘Pull up a seat.’

The swaddled flute lay on the floor between us. I drank my cognac fast, in two sips. I planned to stand up and leave, but Fen refilled my glass before I had moved.

‘I did not steal it,’ he said. ‘It was given to me in a ceremony two nights before we left. They taught me how to care for it and feed it and it was when I was spooning a bit of dried fish to its mouth that I saw the writing etched into the wood. Abapenamo said only great men could be taught it. I asked if I was a great man and he said I was. Then Kolekamban busted in with his three brothers. He said the flute had always belonged to their clan, not Abapenamo’s, and they grabbed it. A few of Abapenamo’s men wanted to go after him but I knew it would end badly. So I stopped them. I kept the peace. Abapenamo’s son told me where they would take it and I figured I could come
back. I knew I couldn’t leave the region without it. You can’t walk away from a piece of the human puzzle. But I wanted to get it back peaceably, without anyone getting hurt.’

I let the miserable failure of that plan hang in the room. I thought of how initially he’d asked me to be his partner on this mission, asked me to risk my life for his delusions. I could have been the corpse in the canoe.

‘Why didn’t they shoot at you, Fen?’

‘I told you. I used the Dobu spell.’

‘Fen.’

I could tell he wanted to convince me of this, but he also wanted to keep my attention. He was like a little boy who didn’t want to be left alone in the dark. ‘I think Xambun wanted to die,’ he said. ‘I think he tried to die.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘The first night we slept a few hours in the bush outside the village. I woke up and found him holding my revolver.’

‘Pointing it at something?’

‘No, just holding it in his hands. I don’t think he wanted to kill me. He might have been working up the courage to shoot
himself.
I took it away and he never reached for it again. We sorted out our route and waited till sunset. He was stealthy and quiet, probably an excellent hunter, but once we got the flute he got careless, like he wanted someone to know we were there. We were far away from the village but some dogs heard us first. I knew we could still make it to the canoe and we did, but he wouldn’t lie down. He started screaming a bunch of nonsense and I would have shoved him down but I had to start the engine and steer us out of there. I don’t get it. I promised him a quarter of the cash from this thing.’

It was hard to know how much to believe. I wasn’t sure it mattered anyway. Xambun was dead. The S S
Calgaric
would leave the next day at noon.