Four months ago I would already be back in the canoe, heading straight for her pinnace. I blew across my tea. I’d go, of course. I knew that, but I’d go for a different reason now. And Bett would feel it. I knew how it would play out, nothing spoken, everything clear.
I’d go in the morning. After my tea, I unzipped my bag. Wanji had washed my clothing. The shirts were folded perfectly, as if for a shelf in a shop. On the one hand I was disgusted by Nell and Fen’s employment of the natives, the way they came in like a corporation and hired up the locals, skewing the balance of power and wealth and thus their own results. But on the other, I saw how efficient it was, how much time it freed up if you weren’t making the meals and washing up and scrubbing clothing, all of which I had been doing for myself for the past two years. The night before the three of us had worked together in their office, typing up our notes, while Wanji fetched water and the shoot boy came in with two pigeons and Bani cooked them up in a lime sauce. The sauce was so spicy it made her cheeks glisten, and I had to clasp my hands together so that I did not reach out and touch her skin.
I zipped up the bag and went back down to the water.
Teket, still on the beach, was not surprised. He knew what a piece of this beige paper set in motion. He knew he could expect me back by sunset tomorrow, more blood in my skin and my limbs loose as a boy’s.
Bett was in the wheelhouse, eating something yellow from a tin. She looked blankly in my direction, hearing the motor, and when she finally recognized it as mine, she ducked through the small door and waved from the bow.
I shouldn’t have come. If there had been any decent way of wheeling my boat around and heading straight back, I would have done.
There had been a husband at one time. They’d been in engineering school together in London, come here to work on a bridge in Moresby, but by the time the bridge was finished, he’d fled to Adelaide with a girl and Bett signed a contract for a bridge in Angoram and bought this pinnace to get herself there. She’d lived on it ever since. I suspected she was close to forty, though we’d never discussed our age.
I cleated my canoe line to her stern and she gave me a hand up. She wore a clean white shirt and smelled like lilies. A new smell.
‘You took your time.’
‘I just got back this morning.’
‘From where?’
‘Lake Tam.’
‘Hunting?’
I was a horrible liar but said yes.
‘Good hunting up Lake Tam?’
She sensed something, perhaps that I hadn’t already taken off all her clothes. I lifted my hand halfheartedly to her blouse.
She watched me unbutton it without moving. I liked that. I didn’t want her to reach in and find me underenthusiastic. But as I opened up the shirt and touched her nipples with the tips of my thumbs and felt the weight of her breasts in my palms, my body made the shift to this woman, this body, and I felt my determined erection with relief.
She never, for this initial welcoming, led me down to her bed, but took me right there en plein air around the ropes and tools and storage boxes. She was warm and familiar and though I wasn’t quite myself, eventually I hollered over her shoulder toward the trees, which shook from animals running from the sound. We laughed at a loud frightened eeeeeeeoooooooooeeeeeee and our chests stuck and unstuck loudly.
I believed if I could do that twenty more times I might be able to flush Nell Stone entirely out of my system.
She slid down to the floor and we leaned against the box together. We brushed the bugs out of our crotches like monkeys and I asked about her trip to Rabaul and she told me she’d met Shaw’s nephew, who was a district officer down south, and we tried to imagine his uncle setting a play in the Territories. I said the week’s events in Nengai would be more than enough material, and told her about the oiled-up thief and Winjun-Mali and his visit to Koulavwan’s mosquito bag.
‘Why does no one visit me in the middle of the night?’ she said. ‘The natives just politely paddle past as if the boat were an unremarkable log.’
‘Barnaby has nearly the same boat.’
‘His is green.’
‘They aren’t going to approach what they think belongs to a government official. But if you sat out here like this you’d stir up some interest.’
‘You think so?’ She rolled her naked body onto mine. There was nothing more to say so I kissed her and opened her legs and we moved hard against each other and against the rough wood of the deck. Then she went inside and came out with cigarettes and bathrobes and we smoked until it was time for dinner.
She cooked a barramundi on the grill at the bow and we ate it with mustard and a bottle of champagne she’d gotten in Cooktown. Across the river there was a sudden thrashing and a great spray of water. I made out in the dusk two crocodiles fighting. I saw their snouts high out of the water, jaws open, and then the one on the left sunk its teeth into the tough skin of the other’s neck, and they both went below the water, which closed flat over them after a while.