Euphoria

15

Upon my return to Nengai, Teket greeted me on the beach with a note. I knew by the shape of it, the three sideways folds, that it was from Bett. He handed it to me with great relief, as if he had been standing near the water for the entire week I’d been gone. Responsibility weighed heavily on Teket. It wasn’t hard to imagine him at Charterhouse, an earnest prefect, a stellar student. He asked me a great number of questions and, because the Kiona elders pass down their knowledge as secret family heirlooms, he treated the information I shared with great care. When an argument broke out between his clan and another about the nature of night, he’d asked my opinion. I told him what I believed about the earth’s diurnal rotation and its orbit around the sun. Afterward he coyly referred to it as ‘that matter we both know about,’ and whenever the sun or the moon came up in conversation among others, he always shot me a special look.

I took the note, but much to Teket’s disappointment I put it in my pocket without reading it. From its swollen edges I could tell the page had been folded and unfolded many times and it amused me to think of him studying Bett’s small Scottish scratches.

I asked for news, and he told me that Tagwa-Ndemi’s baby was a girl so little she fit in a coconut shell, and that a thief greased in palm oil so no one could get hold of him ran through Teket’s aunt’s house in the middle of the night, stealing three necklaces and a Turbo shell. Both Niani’s sons were ill, but Niani sat up all night negotiating with their ancestors and now they are better. I headed toward my house, but Teket was not finished. The night after I left, he said, Winjun-Mali tried to enter the mosquito bag of his brother’s wife, Koulavwan, but her mother heard him and shouted and Winjun-Mali tried to hide among the pots in the house but the mother caught him. He was brought to a ceremonial house where he argued his case. He claimed that he had seen Koulavwan give a betel leaf to her sister’s husband and that he was just making sure she was remaining faithful while his brother was away. He said that Koulavwan’s vulva was too wide for his taste. When he said this, all of the women who were listening under the house began shouting and Winjun-Mali picked up his spear and jammed it through the floorboards, nicking his own mother’s ear and disrupting the proceedings. Then Winjun-Mali’s father got in an argument with Koulavwan’s father about her extravagant bride price. Koulavwan’s father reminded him that when they were boys Winjun-Mali’s father had taken the glory for the killing of a man Koulavwan’s father had killed for him. He pointed to the tassels on Winjun-Mali’s father’s lime stick and asked if any of them were for real murders. Before it turned violent, Teket’s father cried out that their blood had made the baby in Koulavwan’s belly and they must not fight. So, Teket said, we all exchanged areca nuts and went back to bed.

A few months ago I would have been dismayed to miss all this and would have hurried to write it all down, but now I let it wash over and past me, without even trying to catch a drop. He took in a breath to say more but I pointed my fingers to the ground, a signal mothers gave their children to quiet down, and told him he’d have to save the rest for later, that I was too tired. Teket was unable to hide his disappointment, and lingered to show it to me, then finally turned away.

Teket would have liked to have someone like Nell. In her he would have found a kindred spirit, a tireless fellow prefect. They could have spent hours together, Nell cross-examining him about who came from whose vagina, relishing all the details that Teket had saved up for her return.

Alone in my house I lit the fire, placed a pot of water on top, steeped the tea, sat down, and opened the note from Bett.

Back on the boat. Rabaul insane. Missed you. Where are you? No one can tell me. Should I be worried? Come find me, sweet.

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.

‘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.