‘What was that? Crocs?’
She was squinting. I knew she had terrible eyesight, but I’d never wondered where her specs were, or once thought to offer her Martin’s glasses.
I left before sunrise the next day. The water was dull and unreflective, the shores silent. She sent me off with a mug of tea and a box of caramels. Usually she gave me a bottle of whiskey, and I felt the sweets were an insult, a downgrade of sorts, but I sucked them one after the other the whole way back.
16
I stayed away from Lake Tam for several weeks, during which time my work went well. I began inviting people to my house, not in the numbers that Nell did each morning, but in small groups. I had Teket’s whole family for a dinner of a wild pig we’d shot and pears from tins which Teket had to persuade them were safe and uncursed. His grandmother took a great liking to the pears and their sweet juice, and they carried home the empty cans as if I’d given them a hundred pounds apiece. I had Kaishu-Mwampa, the old woman who wouldn’t speak to me, and her grandniece in to tea. They didn’t like it, and I told them it was better with milk and they laughed when I tried to describe what milk was because they had never seen a cow. A few days later, Tiwantu announced there would be a full, traditional Wai for the accomplishments of his son after the next full moon. I was having my own small euphoria.
It might have gone on like this—my work in Nengai, a few short trips to Lake Tam—until July, when I planned to leave. But the day after Tiwantu made his announcement, Teket came back from trading with a note in Nell’s hand.
17
They awoke to one long scream, followed by a barrage of others. She had no idea what time it was. The sky was black, no edge of light.
In a crisis Fen became even quicker—and feline. He disappeared in one motion down the ladder. She hurried to catch up. The turmoil came from up the women’s road. Fen said something but she couldn’t hear him.
When they turned the corner, it was as she’d feared, a shrieking mass of bodies. They stopped twenty feet from the outside edge of the crowd, which was facing inward, toward Malun’s house. In the dark she could make out the long back of Sanjo and Yorba’s thick arms and the little head of Amun, but only briefly. They were all moving, churning, and shouting so loudly it affected her vision. Many had ripped the necklaces and bracelets and waistbands and armbands and hair wraps from their bodies and thrown them on the ground as they hugged and wept and hollered and pressed toward the center, toward whatever was happening through the thicket of bodies.
Fen took her hand and inched closer. He gripped her tighter and pushed into the crowd. ‘We have to—’ he said, but she lost the rest. Then she lost his hand. Everyone was pressing inward and she was pushed and shoved and poked along with them. She tried to push back, hold her ground, but it was no use. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see whatever was happening. But she was being forced toward it, a great muscle of Tam kneading her forward. She couldn’t understand why she recognized so few people, why no one recognized her. People were hysterical, and the breath and sweat of so many frenzied bodies was a sour buried-alive smell. She felt certain there would be a dead body in the centre. She hoped it was not a child. Please dear God no more dead children. She wasn’t sure if she was screaming this aloud. She tasted vomit and blood but didn’t think it was hers. Ahead firelight flickered. And then she saw them, Malun and a man in green trousers. They were standing but he was curled over her and she held him with great effort, his full cumbersome weight, keening as if over a dead body. But he was not dead. There were long deep scars across his bare back, fresher and far cruder than his initiation scarring, lashings without design, but he was not dead.
Come as soon as you get this, Nell’s note to me read. Xambun has returned.
18
On the fourth night of the celebration of Xambun’s return, Fen came home naked and slathered with an oil that smelled like rancid cheese, claiming he had danced with Jesus, his great-great-grandmother, and Billy Cadwallader.
Nell was at her typewriter, writing a letter to Helen. ‘Who’s Billy Cadwallader?’ she asked.
‘You see? That’s how I know it’s real. Couldn’t have made up a name like that. He was just a boy.’ He was looking out the door as if these dance partners just might have followed him home. His hair was full of painted clay beads and ash from the fires was caught in the oil on his skin. He planted his feet wide apart to stay upright, but he still swayed. He was pure muscle and bone, like a native. He would never refuse a hallucinogen; he would drink, eat, snort, or smoke whatever was offered to him. ‘You know, I think’—he jerked around, beads rattling, smiling at her as if he were just then noticing she was in the room—’I think my mum might, she might.’