‘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 dark 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.