'Bankson. Christ. Good to lay eyes on you, man.'
I remembered Schuyler Fenwick as a chippy, tightly wound suck-arse who didn't like me much. But when I put out my hand he pushed it aside and wrapped his arms around me. I hugged him in return and this display got a good laugh from the sloshed kiaps nearby. My throat burned with the unexpected emotion of it, and I didn't have time to recover before he introduced me to his wife.
'It's Bankson,' he said, as if I were all they talked of, night and day.
'Nell Stone,' she said.
Nell Stone? Fen had married Nell Stone? He was one for tricks, but this seemed to be in earnest.
No one had ever mentioned, in all the talk of Nell Stone, that she was so slight, or sickly. She offered me a hand with a thinly healed gash across the palm. To take it would mean causing her discomfort. Her smile bloomed naturally but the rest of her face was sallow and her eyes seemed coated over by pain. She had a small face and large smoke-colored eyes like a cuscus, the small marsupial Kiona children kept as pets.
'You're hurt.' I nearly said ill. I touched her hand loosely, briefly.
'Wounded but not slain.' She managed something close to a laugh. Lovely lips in a devastatingly tired face.
I will lay me down for to bleed awhile, the ballad went on in my head. Then I'll rise and fight with you again.
'How fantastic that you're still here,' Fen said. 'We thought you might have left by now.'
'I should have done. I think my Kiona would celebrate for a week straight if I pissed off. But there's always that one last piece to shove in place, even if it's the wrong shape entirely.'
They laughed heavily, a sort of deeply sympathetic agreement that was like a salve on my shredded nerves.
'It always feels like that in the field, doesn't it?' Nell said. 'Then you get back and it all fits.'
'Does it?' I said.
'If you've done the work it will.'
'Will it?' I needed to get the barmy edge out of my voice. 'Let's have more drinks. And food. Do you want food? Of course you must. Shall we sit?' My heart whapped in my throat and all I could think was how to keep them, how to keep them. I felt my loneliness bulge out of me like a goiter, and I wasn't sure how to hide it from them.
There were a few empty tables at the back of the room. We headed for the one in the corner through a cloud of tobacco smoke, squeezed between a group of white patrol officers and gold prospectors drinking fast and shouting at each other. The band started up with 'Lady of Spain' but no one danced. I stopped a waiter, pointed to the table, and asked him to bring us dinner. They walked ahead of me, Fen first, far in front, for Nell was slowed by a limp in her left ankle. I walked close behind her. The back of her blue cotton dress was bent with wrinkles.
Nell Stone, to my mind, was older, matronly. I hadn't read the book that had recently made her famous, the book that made the mention of her name conjure up visions of salacious behavior on tropical beaches, but I'd pictured an American hausfrau amid the sexual escapades of the Solomons. This Nell Stone, however, was nearly a girl, with thin arms and a thick plait down her back.
We settled in at the little table. A sorry portrait of the King loomed above us.
'Where have you come from?' I said.
'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 tack, 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.'
Fen looked at Nell to explain.
'We couldn't stay any longer,' she said. 'I couldn't at any rate. And we had the idea that maybe in Australia we could find a region that has not been claimed.'
The word claimed helped me to understand. I suspect she knew it would. 'Do not under any circumstances leave the Sepik because of me. I do not own it, nor do I want to. There are eighty anthropologists for every bloody Navajo, yet they give me a seven-hundred-mile river. No one dares come near. They think it's "mine." I don't want it!' I was aware of the whinge in my voice. I didn't care. I'd get on my knees if I had to. 'Please stay. I will find you a tribe tomorrow-there are hundreds of them-far far away from me if you like.'
They agreed so quickly, and without even glancing at each other, that I wondered afterward if they'd been playing me rather handily all along. It didn't matter. They might have needed me. But I needed them far more.
As I waited for them to collect their things from their upstairs room, I tried to recall every tribe I'd heard of up and down the river. The first that came to mind was the Tam. My informant, Teket, had a cousin who'd married a Tam and he always used the word peaceful when he described his time there. I'd seen a few Tam women trading their fish at market and I'd noted their laconic business savvy, the way they held their ground against the hard-bargaining Kiona where other tribes capitulated. But Lake Tam was too far. I needed to think of a people much closer.
They came down with their bags.
'That can't be all you've got.'
Fen grinned. 'No, not quite.'
'We sent the rest on to Port Moresby,' Nell said. She had changed into a man's white shirt and tan trousers, as if she expected to be back at work by morning.
'I can send word to have it brought back up. That is, if you stay.' I picked up two of their duffels and headed out before they could change their mind.
My ears rung in the sudden quiet. With the electric light pouring out of the government house and the music tapering to a thin strain and the shorn grass underfoot, we could have been walking out of a dance at Cambridge on a warm night. I turned back and Fen had taken her hand.
I led them across the road, past the docks, through the break in a thicket, and onto the small beach where I'd stashed my canoe. Even in the dark I could see their faces droop. I think they'd imagined a proper boat, with seats and cushions.
'I won this. It's a war canoe. I got it for shooting a boar.' I made up for their disappointment with great energy, tossing their bags in then running back up the beach for the engine, which I had hidden behind a fat fig tree.
They brightened up considerably when they saw it. They'd thought I was going to paddle them to my village, which would have taken all night and most of the next morning.
'Now this is something I haven't seen,' Fen said as I bolted the motor into place.
I rearranged the duffels at the front, making a bed of sorts so Nell could sleep. I directed her toward it, put Fen in the middle, and pushed us out a few yards. After I hopped in I pulled the cord and hit the throttle hard. If they had any last doubts I didn't hear them over the wail of the engine, which slid us quickly across the dark crimped water toward Nengai.
