‘They told me you’d left!’
‘Left?’
‘Yes. Chanta told me you’d gone off in a boat.’
‘I went fishing with Kanup.’
‘Oh, thank God.’ She grabbed me by my shirtsleeves. ‘I really thought you’d gone to find them.’
‘Bit late for that.’
Kanup had gone over to his canoe, but I did not follow to help him because Nell hadn’t let me go. She held on and examined the fabric of my plain white shirt. There was something different about her.
‘I thought you’d gone to Bett,’ she said.
‘Bett?’
‘Because she has a boat.’
I’d forgotten about Bett and her boat. And that I’d told Fen about her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said laughing, though she seemed to be crying, too. She let go of my shirtsleeves and brushed at her face quickly. ‘I’ve had a very strange day, Bankson.’
I could not take my eyes off her. It was as if she were performing some trick, some sort of unfolding. There was something raw and exposed about her, as if many things had already happened between us, as if time had leapt ahead and we were already lovers. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Let’s go up to the house.’
I gave Kanup an apologetic shrug, which I wasn’t sure he understood. But nothing could have separated me from Nell at that moment. I took one last fearful glance at the horizon. Empty. A bit more time. I followed her closely up the path.
We didn’t have tea. She poured us whiskey, and we sat across from each other at the kitchen table. ‘I don’t know if you’ll believe me.’
‘Of course I will.’
She stood up. ‘Sorry, I think I should write it all up first.’ She went to her desk and slid a piece of paper into her typewriter. I waited for the rush of keys. Nothing. She came back and sat down at the table. ‘I think maybe I do need to tell you.’ She took a long sip of her whiskey. She had a lovely throat, unmarred by the tropics. When she put the glass down she looked at me directly.
‘If I tried to tell Fen this, he wouldn’t believe me. He’d say I’d made it up, or mis—’
‘Tell me, Nell.’
‘As soon as I turned up the women’s road, I felt it, the same queer stillness as that one other time when they kept me out. I went straight to the last house, where smoke was coming out of all three chimneys and all the windows were sealed tight. I pushed through the curtain before anyone could stop me and was struck in the face by hot stinky wet air, like a smelly steam house. I gagged and tried to stick my nose out the doorway for some air but Malun pulled me in and took my basket and told me it was the minyana and they’d all decided I could stay.’
The minyana. She hadn’t heard this word before, she told me. When her eyes adapted to the dark room, she made out round black slabs of something cooking in small amounts of water on pans in the hearths. The room was full of women, many more than usual, and no one was mending a line or weaving a basket or nursing a baby. There were no children at all. Some of the women tended the pans on the fire and others were lying on mats along all sides of the room. All at once the black slabs were flipped over. They made a great clatter. They were stones, smooth round stones cooking in flat earthen pans. The women then left the stones and came away from the fire, carrying small pots they had been warming. Each woman on a mat was paired with a woman at the fire. An old woman named Yepe led Nell to a mat. ‘I tried to get my notebook from my basket but she stopped me and made me lie down.’ Yepe squatted next to her and unfastened her dress clumsily, inexperienced with buttons. Then she dipped her hands into the pot. They came out thick and dripping with oil and she placed them on Nell’s neck and began a slow massage, working her way down her back slowly, kneading, her hands moving easily in the thick oil. ‘It was happening like this all down the rows of mats, the massages deepening, quickening, and the women—you have to understand, these women are hardworking and unpampered; the Tam men are the ones who have much more leisure, who sit around painting their pots and their bodies and gossiping—these women started grunting and groaning.’
Nell got up for the whiskey bottle, and when she came back she took the seat sideways to mine, filled our glasses, and put her feet on the rungs of my chair. ‘You’re sure you want me to go on?’