She tapped the upturned bucket and laughed. Dad came back with the drinks, passed one casually to May Anna and gave Vinny hers a bit more formally. He hadn’t asked May Anna what sort she wanted, either. And earlier he’d twice started to tell Vinny about something or someone special on this expedition, and then stopped himself and said she’d see. She didn’t say anything now, but sipped her Coke. It was just what she wanted.
‘How did you get it cold?’ she said. ‘Have you got a fridge?’
‘Any fool can be uncomfortable in camp,’ said Dad.
‘And any camp with Sam in it is as good as a Hilton,’ said May Anna. ‘It’s a big deal when we run out of canned crabmeat. He’s down in the books as our taphonomist, but that’s just an excuse. We have him to run the camp.’
‘Too true to be funny,’ said Dad. ‘Let’s go and unpack your stuff and I’ll show you the layout. Then it should be supper time.’
Supper was beef curry and rice with fresh vegetables and fruit which Dad had bought at a market near the airport last evening. They ate at trestle tables. Dr Hamiska made a fuss of introducing Vinny all round, too many names to remember. Vinny sat with Dad and May Anna and Fred, Dr Wessler, the one who knew about pigs. The talk was all about the skull, and how much Plasticine May Anna ought to take out to give it the right-sized brain. Vinny couldn’t understand the detail but she could hear their excitement, though Dad was trying to be cautious and Dr Wessler kept telling May Anna – only half as a joke and half, Vinny guessed, because he was the kind of person who actually gets a kick out of things going wrong – that she’d got bits of baboon-skull muddled up with her hominid fragments. Vinny was dropping with sleep by the time the meal ended, but she couldn’t go to bed because Dad had said she mustn’t go to the loos alone in the dark, in case of leopards or something.
At last May Anna said, ‘Looks like you’d better take Vinny to bed, Sam,’ and he remembered he’d got a daughter.
On their way back from the loos he said, ‘I’m sure I needn’t tell you, but just in case. What I was saying about Joe, in the truck after lunch – you won’t say anything about that to anyone, will you?’
‘No, of course not . . . What about May Anna?’
‘Oh, she’s all right.’
‘I think she’s lovely.’
‘I’m glad you like her.’
THEN
LI WOKE IN the night. There were no caves at this other bay, but good roosting-ledges where the tribe could huddle for warmth. She turned on her back and watched the stars, at first in a thoughtless dreamy wonder, but then, as they vanished one by one behind the black lip of the cliff above, in wakeful amazement. They were moving, in just the same way the sun moved through the sky by day. The whole vast heavens moved all together, like the march of rollers towards the shore. She gazed, rapt, waiting for each prick of light to blank out, until she heard Ma-ma mutter a call in her sleep: Careful, little one.
Ma-ma must be dreaming. At once Li fell into a new wonder that someone could dream, as she herself dreamed, inside her own head as she slept, seeing and knowing things that nobody else would ever see or know. Ma-ma, who lay so close, was utterly other. Utterly not-Li. All of them, all the tribe. Other. Before the last rains a stranger had joined the tribe, a female with a dying baby. Where had she come from? Somewhere beyond the tribe’s territory, which ended at a crocodile-infested river to the north. How had she come? Why? There were no answers. These things were the stranger’s, as other as Ma-ma’s dreams.
The stranger had hung around on the fringes of the tribe for a few days and then they’d accepted her, but her baby had died. Where had it gone? Not the body – the stranger had carried that back into the dunes and left it – but the little sick person who’d looked out of the weary eyes? That too was other, never-to-be-known, like dreams. The stranger seemed to have forgotten her baby and her grief, but Li hadn’t.
Li didn’t sleep again. She watched the stars fade and vanish and before the rest of the tribe began to stir, climbed down and made her way out to the rock spit that half-enclosed the bay. From here she could see the central volcano of the island already bright with the rising sun, but her mind didn’t take it in except as part of the whole strange marvellous world whose hugeness and otherness she was learning to recognize. At first she was shuddering with cold, then the sun rose, warming her through, tingling her skin with animal pleasures, but she barely noticed either the cold or the comfort. She felt she was close to something enormous, some knowledge – not a piece of knowledge like how to bash a mussel open on a rock or the way the stars moved – but a whole knowledge. The knowledge had the shape of a question. It seemed to fill her world like the light of the rising sun, to send tremors of its presence through her like the warming sun-rays. Other questions, the ones about using and seeing, she was outside of. She could study them and think and find their answers. This one she was inside of, part of. In fact she was herself the question. To answer it she would need to become somehow other, as other as Ma-ma’s dreams or the stranger’s lost baby. Perhaps she would need to go where the baby had gone.
Ma-ma rose with a slither and slop beside the rocks and broke in on Li’s trance by making disapproval-clicks and sluicing water over her, the way mothers did until their children were old enough to know that as the sun rose they had to stay in the water or in shadow, or at least keep their bodies wet through the heat of the day. The skins of the tribe were a very dark purply brown and almost as thick as pig-skin, but an hour in the unveiled noon sun could still make them burn.
In fact it was not yet that hot, but Ma-ma was fussing partly because she was heavily pregnant and partly because she was puzzled by Li’s behaviour. The others took it for granted, in the same way that they took for granted Bola’s passion for scooping holes in the sand for no purpose at all. They didn’t consider that Li’s lonely trances or her rapt experiments in any way affected them, though some of them were already becoming expert with the minnow-nets she’d invented.
On the northward journey from the shrimping beach, Li had noticed a mat of gourd-vine draped down a cliff. It was a common plant of that coast, but the tribe ignored it as the gourds were inedible, but now Li had made the connection with the fragments she’d used for shrimping, and had found that fallen gourds in the right state of decay contained intact and stronger nets which could be washed free of the pulp and then used to trap small prey. Carefully treated, such a net might last a whole day.
Li herself was not satisfied with the discovery. She’d seen the spider make its trap. She wanted to make something too, and experimented with grass stems, with seaweed fronds, with vine-strands, with the long coarse reeds that grew by the northern river. Most of her trials ended in failure. The materials were so weak and hard to fasten, her fingers so clumsy. It took her three journeys to the shrimping beach and back before she achieved her first knot. But failure didn’t matter. The real excitement lay in thinking. Her days were electric with thought. It was better than food, better than warmth, better than sleep. At dusk she would lie down and fight off sleep so that she could think a little longer, and wake with a rush of joy that she could begin again.
But Ma-ma felt that children should be like other children. There’d been a gap in her pregnancies, and Li was still the most important person in her life. Li understood this and was glad of it, so now she slid down into the water and hugged and kissed her as they dipped below the surface. Still holding each other they kicked gently away from the rocks, with the ripple-patterned sunlight wavering across their bodies. They kissed again as they rose for breath, and then Ma-ma swam off to look for food.