‘I was pretty well out of my head when I got on that ship. Twenty-three months with the Dobu sorcerers and then a few days in Sydney where I proposed to a girl I thought had been my girlfriend and she turned me down. A Dobu witch had put a love hex on me before I left them, but so much for that, eh? I didn’t want anything to do with women or anthropology at that point. That first night on board I heard Nell holding forth at a big table at dinner and I figured she’d had this brilliant field trip and some stupid revelations about human nature and the universe, and it was the last thing I wanted to listen to. But I was virtually the only young man on the ship and some meddling old biddies arranged for me to dance with her. The first thing she said to me was ‘I’m having trouble breathing properly.’ I told her I was, too. We were both having some sort of claustrophobia being enclosed in those rooms. As soon as we could break away, we took a walk on deck, the first of many. I think we must have walked a hundred miles on that voyage. She had a fellow meeting her in Marseille. I wanted her to stay on with me to Southampton. She didn’t know what to do. She was the last off the boat and the fellow saw me and knew I’d got her. I saw it in his face.’
‘She had the body of a tart. Nothing like my mother’s. Full breasts, narrow waist, hips made for a man’s hands. I had the horrible suspicion that my brothers and I had created that body, that if we had not done what we had done she wouldn’t have developed the way she did.’ His voice was so low I could barely make the words. ‘Christ, that farm was out in the middle of fucking nowhere. No one had any idea what was going on. Except my mother. She knew. I know she knew.’ His voice split then and he looked up to the rafters and pinched off his tears. His face looked like that black bird was boring into him. Then he reached down and lit a cigarette and said, quite calmly, ‘Nothing in the primitive world shocks me, Bankson. Or I should say, what shocks me in the primitive world is any sense of order and ethics. All the rest—the cannibalism, infanticide, raids, mutilation—it’s all comprehensible, nearly reasonable, to me. I’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go. Even for you Pommies, I’ll bet.’
I heard them on the mats they’d set up in the large mosquito room beside their desks. The mats creaked and snapped. Whispering. Breathing. The unmistakable rhythm of sex. A cry cut short. Laughing.
Daylight and he was yelling. I turned and saw him towering over Bani, who was crouched by the dining table. Fen smacked him on the ear and he fell over whimpering, curled in a ball.
‘Where’s Nell?’ It felt like days since she’d sat in the chair.
‘Out counting babies. She thinks I’m doing such a stellar job she’s promoted me to head nurse.’
He was shaving me again.
‘You’re like a bear,’ he said, though he was far furrier than I.
He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth. I didn’t need a shave, didn’t particularly want a shave, but I breathed in the smell of his hands and breath. He wiped me with a dry towel.
‘You have three freckles, right below your lip.’ He was drunk, quite drunk, and I felt lucky I hadn’t been cut. He leaned in to touch the freckles and kept leaning until his mouth was on mine. I barely had to press a hand on his chest and he sprung back, wiping his lips as if I had initiated it.
Nell read from Light in August, which a friend had sent her a few months ago. Fen lay on the bed beside me and Nell read from the chair with a bit of hauteur, the same sort of pretension American actresses had when they spoke their lines. She was self-conscious, reading aloud, in a way she wasn’t at all in regular life, when the words were hers.
Fen and I caught eyes after the first sentence. He pulled a face and she caught me grinning.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s a good book.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’
‘It’s na?ve tendentious American drivel,’ Fen said, ‘but go on.’
He was so much at ease with me that I began to wonder if I’d hallucinated the kiss. After Nell stopped reading she climbed on the bed too and we lay there the three of us watching the bugs try to claw their way into the net and talking about the book and about Western stories compared to the stories told here. Nell said she’d gotten so sick in the Solomons of hearing their pigman creation myths and their enormous-penis myths that she told them the whole story of Romeo and Juliet.
‘I really dragged it out. I acted out the balcony scene, the stabbings. Of course I set it all in a village much like theirs, with two rival hamlets and a healer instead of a friar, and that sort of thing. It’s a tribal tale to begin with, so it wasn’t hard to make it familiar to them.’ She was on her side and I was on my side facing her and Fen was on his back between us so I could only see half her face. ‘So finally—and it took me well over an hour in that stinking language; six syllables a word!—I got to the end. She’s dead. And do you know what the Kirakira did? They laughed. They laughed and laughed and thought it was the funniest joke ever told.’
‘Maybe it is,’ Fen said. ‘I’d take a pigman story any day over that rubbish.’
‘I think it’s the irony they’re responding to,’ I said.
‘Oh, no doubt.’
Ignoring him, Nell said, ‘Funny how irony is never tragic to them, only comic.’
‘Because death is not tragic to them, not in the way it is to us,’ I said.
‘They mourn.’
‘They feel sorrow, great sorrow. But it isn’t tragic.’
‘No, it isn’t. They know their ancestors have a plan for them. There’s no sense that it was wrong. Tragedy is based on this sense that there’s been a terrible mistake, isn’t it?’
‘We’re sort of big dramatic babies in comparison,’ I said.
She laughed.
‘Well, this baby’s got to take a piddle.’ Fen got up and went down the ladder.
‘Please use the latrine, Fen,’ Nell called.