‘We started in the mountains,’ Nell said.
‘The highlands?’
‘No, the Torricelli.’
‘A year with a tribe that had no name for themselves.’
‘We named them after their little mountain,’ Nell said. ‘Anapa.’
‘If they had been dead they would have been less boring,’ Fen said.
‘They were very sweet and gentle, but malnourished and weak.’
‘Asphyxiatingly dull, you mean,’ Fen said.
‘Fen was basically out on hunts for a year.’
‘It was the only way to stay awake.’
‘I spent my days with the women and children in the gardens, growing just barely enough for the village.’
‘And you’ve just come from there?’ I was trying to piece together where and how she’d got in such rough shape.
‘No, no. We left them in—?’ Fen turned to her.
‘July.’
‘Came down and crept a little closer to you. Found a tribe down the Yuat.’
‘Which?’
‘The Mumbanyo.’
I hadn’t heard of them.
‘Fearsome warriors,’ Fen said. ‘Give your Kiona a run for it, I’d bet. Terrorized every other tribe up and down the Yuat. And each other.’
‘And us,’ Nell said.
‘Just you, Nellie.’ Fen said.
The waiter brought our food: beef, mash, and thick yellow English wax beans—the type I’d hoped never in my life to see again. We gorged on the meat and conversation all at once, not bothering to cover our mouths or wait our turn. We interrupted and interjected. We pummeled each other, though perhaps they, being two, did more of the pummeling. From the nature of their questions—Fen’s about religion and religious totems, ceremonies, warfare, and genealogy; Nell’s about economics, food, government, social structure, and child-rearing—I could tell they’d divided their areas neatly, and I felt a stab of envy. In every letter I’d written to my department at Cambridge, I’d asked for a partner, some young fellow just starting out in need of a little guidance. But everyone wanted to stake out his own territory. Or perhaps, though I took great pains to conceal it, they’d sensed in my letters the mire of my thoughts, the stagnation of my work, and stayed away.
‘What have you done to your foot?’ I asked her.
‘I sprained it going up the Anapa.’
‘What, seventeen months ago?’
‘They had to carry her up on a pole,’ Fen said, amused by the memory.
‘They wrapped me in banana leaves so I looked like a trussed-up pig they were planning to have for dinner.’ She and Fen laughed, sudden and hard, as if they’d never laughed about it before.
‘A good part of the time I was upside down,’ she said. ‘Fen went on ahead and got there a day earlier and never sent so much as a note back to me. It took them over two hundred porters to get all our equipment up there.’
‘I was the only one with a gun,’ Fen said. ‘They warned us that ambushes were not uncommon. Those tribes are starving up there, and we were carrying all our food.’
‘It must be broken,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Your ankle.’
‘Yes’—she looked at Fen, cautiously I thought—’I suppose so.’
I saw then she hadn’t eaten as he and I had done. The food had just been pushed around her plate.
A chair fell over behind me. Two kiaps gripped each other by their government uniforms, red-faced and staggering like drunken dance partners, until one of them pulled his arm out and swung back a fist fast and hard against the other man’s mouth. By the time they were pulled apart their faces looked as if they’d been dug up with a garden claw and their hands were covered with each other’s blood. Voices swelled, and the leader of the band encouraged everyone to dance, striking up a quick loud tune. But no one paid any attention. Another fight broke out on the other side of the room.
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
‘Go? Where to?’ Fen said.
‘I’ll take you upriver. Plenty of room at my place.’
‘We have a room upstairs,’ Nell said.
‘You won’t sleep. And if they burn the place down, you won’t have a bed. This lot have been drinking steadily for five days now.’ I pointed to her hand and the lesions I’d just noticed on her left arm. ‘And I have medicine for those cuts. They don’t look like they’ve been treated at all.’
I was standing now, hovering, waiting for them to agree. Whap whap. I need you. I need you. I changed tacks, said to Fen, ‘You said you’d like to see the Kiona.’
‘I would, very much. But we’re leaving for Melbourne in the morning.’
‘How’s that?’ There had been no mention of leaving New Guinea in the several hours we’d been together.
‘We’re going to try and steal a tribe from Elkin.’
‘No.’ I didn’t mean to say it, not in such a petulant tone. ‘Why?’ The Aborigines? They couldn’t go to the Aborigines. ‘What about the Mumbanyo? You’ve only been there five months.’