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.’
‘Know who the little boy was?’
She didn’t like the look in his eye.
‘Yes.’ He came up close to her and the smell was unbreathable. He seemed to be struggling for the right word, or any word. ‘Sex,’ he said finally. ‘I like sex, Nell. Real sex.’
Fortunately his penis wasn’t listening.
‘Nothing to do with—’ He strained for the word and could not find it. Children, she supposed he meant.
He turned away as if she were the one with the putrid smell. Then he whipped back around, noticing her all over again.
‘Working, Nell Stone? Typing typing typing, so much to type, so much to say. It must be exhausting being Nell Stone all the time.’ He seemed to have struck a vein of words. ‘The sound of that fucking machine is the sound of your fucking brain.’ He slammed his fist onto the keys. The letters flew up and twisted together. Before she could assess the damage he shoved the typewriter off the desk. It fell on its side. The silver arm snapped off.
He spun and left the house, his movements not his own as he went down the ladder jerkily, as if someone were pulling him with strings. Once in their first month together in the field an Anapa elder had come to her and told her it was not safe for her to be alone with just her husband, and he offered to be her brother. At the time she and Fen had laughed about this. But she had needed a brother, it turned out. She had needed one with the Mumbanyo. She might still have her baby if she’d had a brother there.
She turned off the lamp and tried to sleep. Her heart was beating too fast. She took long breaths but it wouldn’t slow. She was scared he’d come back.
She got up and pulled on her filthy clothes. Wanji had not done the laundry since three days before Xambun arrived. There were fewer people on the beach than she had thought, only about fifty, some twenty people dancing and another thirty sprawled out around them. All the dancers were men, beads in their hair like Fen’s and special, ceremonial, elaborately curved penis gourds strapped on. The dance was all about these gourds, about making them leap and turn and thrust at the women, who lay about in groups half watching, bemused but sated, like men who’d been in a strip club too long. And there was Fen, in full costume, gyrating, clacking his gourd against his partner’s, his movements lacking the fluidity of the others. All the flute players had gone to bed, and the one man with a drum was listing to one side and slapping it only occasionally. A few women chanted or kept time with stones or sticks. Most lay with their heads close together talking, barely watching. Xambun was not there anywhere in the crowd.
The mood Fen had brought up to the house was magnified here. The celebration had turned. The men were tense, doped, some barely upright, others flinging themselves around as if trying to escape their own bodies. There seemed a muted desperation, not the building fury of a Mumbanyo ceremony when she feared they were seconds away from stabbing each other, not homicidal like that but suicidal, as if the women’s lack of interest and Xambun’s disappearance and the lack of rain were all their fault.
She sat beside a woman named Halana who passed her some kava and taro. She opened her notebook. It was the fifth night. She’d seen it all by now. There was nothing more to add. She heard Boas scolding her: Everything is material, even your own boredom; you never see anything twice — never think you’ve seen it before because you have not. I am working, she told herself, one of her tricks to re-see, see better, see beyond. Halana stared at her. She imitated Nell holding the pencil, chewing on its end, then pretended to eat the whole thing, which sent her friends into gales of laughter.