‘I don’t know.’
She looked exasperated with me. ‘You can’t afford to have someone so set against you. Everyone will know it and measure their response to you against it. She’s skewing all your results.’
Fen cackled behind us. ‘Didn’t take you long this time. I think that might be a record. Shall we make a pyre of all his notes?’
All her face could muster was a pale peach flush. ‘I’m sorry, I—’ She put her hand out halfway to me.
‘I’m sure you’re right. I should find out how to make amends.’
She didn’t seem to believe my tone of voice or the expression on my face, and apologized again. But I wasn’t put out by what she’d said. Quite the opposite. I was eager, desperate for more. Ideas, suggestions, criticism of my approach. Fen might have had too much of it, but I had had too little.
‘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.’