‘He did,’ Nell said. ‘Bani is making us a nice lunch. We’ve come to fetch you.’
‘That’s a first.’ He turned back to me. ‘Where have you been? You said you’d be back in a week.’
Had I? ‘I thought I should give you some time to settle in. I didn’t want to—’
‘Listen, we’re the ones in your territory, Bankson, not the other way round,’ he said.
This business of the Sepik being mine infuriated me. ‘We need to put an end to this right now, an end to this nonsense.’ I was aware that my voice was coming much harsher than I meant, but I couldn’t manage to modulate it. ‘I have no more right to the Kiona or the Tam or the Sepik River than any other anthropologist or the man on the moon. I do not subscribe to this chopping up of the primitive world and parceling it out to people who may then possess it to the exclusion of all others. A biologist would never claim a species or a wood to himself. If you haven’t noticed, I have been desperately lonely here for twenty-seven months. I did not want to stay away from you. But nearly as soon as I left here I felt that my use to you had been exhausted and that you did not need me lurking around. My height can be disturbing to certain tribes. And I am bad luck in the field, utterly ineffective. I couldn’t even manage to kill myself properly. I stayed away as long as could, and it is only now I see I have been rude by not coming sooner. Forgive me.’
The spangles returned at that moment from all sides, and my eyeballs ached suddenly and painfully.
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.