‘Precisely. I don’t think they think of me as entirely female. I don’t think rape or murder has ever crossed their minds.’
‘You can’t know that.’ Not think of her as female? I wished I could manage that. ‘And murder is one of the first natural impulses any creature has to the unknown.’
‘Is it? It’s certainly not mine.’
She had fashioned a walking stick for her ankle. It struck the ground beside my left toe with particular force.
‘You seem as interested in the women here as in the children, maybe more interested.’ I was remembering how quickly she had dismissed Amun.
She and her stick stopped abruptly. “Have you noticed anything about them? Has Teket said anything?’
‘Nothing. But I did notice that woman Tadi was free to hold my gaze, and that boy—’
‘Didn’t have the usual self-possession that you see in boys of that age?’
I laughed at the speed with which she finished my sentence. She was looking at me fiercely. What was I going to say about the boy? I could hardly remember. The sun seared the road, no shade, no wind. The curve of her breast through her thin shirt. ‘I suppose so, yes.’
She tapped her stick rapidly on the hard dry earth. ‘You saw this. In less than an hour you saw this.’
It had been two and a half at this point, but I didn’t quibble.
Someone shouted out to her from down the road.
‘Oh,’ she said, racing on. ‘You have to meet Yorba. She’s one of my favorites.’
Yorba was hurrying, too, pulling a female companion with her. When we all met up, Nell and Yorba spoke loudly, as if they were still separated by the length of the road. Yorba had the unadorned look of Tam women with her shaved head and one armband, but her friend wore shell and feather jewelry and a hairband of inlaid bright-green beetles. Yorba introduced her to Nell, and Nell introduced me to Yorba, and then the friend, whose name was Iri, and I were introduced, all of which required saying baya ban about eighty-seven times. The friend did not look up at me. Nell explained that this was Yorba’s daughter, who had married a Motu man and was visiting for a few days. We were still in the full sun and I assumed we would move on to find Fen, but Nell drilled them with questions. The daughter, who could not have been a real daughter as she looked several years older than Yorba, did not conceal her delight in Nell’s abuse of the language, her long pauses as she searched for words, then the cascade of them in her toneless accent. Nell was most interested in Iri’s perspective on the Tam now that she had lived outside the culture for many years. But both women were carrying large ceramic pots in bilum bags on their backs and pleasure soon gave way to impatience. Yorba pulled at Iri’s bracelets. Nell ignored their growing discomfort until Yorba raised both hands as if she were about to push Nell straight to the ground and shrieked what seemed like expletives at her. When she was finished, she took Iri’s arm and the two women slid away on their bare heels.
Nell pulled a notebook from a large homemade pocket stitched onto her skirt, and without even moving to a shady spot made four pages of her small hieroglyphs. ‘I’d like to get over to the Motu sometime,’ she said after she put the notebook away, completely unbothered by the way the conversation had ended. ‘I never knew Yorba had a daughter.’
‘That couldn’t possibly have been her child.’
‘It’s surprising, isn’t it? I had the same feeling.’
‘They must use the word indiscriminately, like the Kiona. Anyone can be a daughter: a niece, granddaughter, friend.’
‘This was her real daughter. I asked.’
‘You asked if she were a blood daughter?’ Even the words real or blood relation didn’t always have the same meaning for them.
‘I asked Yorba if Iri had come out of her vagina.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ I said finally. I had never heard the word vagina spoken aloud before, let alone by a woman in my presence.
‘I did. The words I make sure to learn on the first day anywhere are mother, father, son, daughter, and vagina. Very useful. There’s no other way to be certain.’
She began walking again, and we turned up a small path and she thrashed her stick through the brush, which I felt would anger the snakes more than scare them off. When I walked through the brush I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.
We came to a small clearing, the last piece of flat land before the jungle began. Fen was sitting up against a stump watching some men whitewash a freshly made canoe with seaweed juice. No notebook, knees bent, twisting and untwisting a stalk of elephant grass. The men sensed us first, and said something to Fen, who scrambled to his feet and bounded over.
‘Bankson.’ He’d grown a thick black beard. He hugged me as he had done in Angoram. ‘Finally, man. What happened to you?’
‘I’m sorry I’ve come unannounced.’
‘Footman’s got the day off anyway. You just get here?’