I think he was telling me about his time in London, and it happened just after that. All I can say is that everything that was big got small and everything that was small got big. A great sudden terrifying inverse. I remember not being able to shut my mouth. I remember nothing else after that, just waking up more or less in Fen’s arms on the floor. He was hollering things, ropes of saliva coming out of his mouth. A great many people came after that, Nell and Bani and others I didn’t know, and I was put back on the bed and when I opened my eyes it was just Fen and Nell and they looked so ghastly worried that I had to shut them again. The next thing I was aware of was Fen shaving my face.
‘You were scratching it so much,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d flaked out on us.’ He tilted my head up so he could get underneath my chin.
Through the netting I saw Nell holding him, hushing him, as he shook.
I heard:
‘You’re so good with him.’
‘Better than with you, eh?’
‘Methinks you’ll be a good papa.’
‘Youthinks, but you aren’t certain.’
‘You had a seizure,’ Fen said. ‘You stiffened up like a corpse then writhed like a whip snake then stiffened and this yellow shit came out of your mouth and your eyes were gone. Blank white balls like this.’ He made an awful face and inhuman noises and Nell told him to stop.
Every bit of me hurt. I felt as if my body had been flung from the top of a New York skyscraper.
My fever broke. That’s what they told me. They brought me plates of food and seemed to expect me to leap out of bed.
I woke and my eyes were already open and Fen was talking. We seemed to be in the middle of a conversation. I had become a receptacle for his whirring thoughts, and he didn’t particularly mind if I was awake or asleep, lucid or befuddled. ‘My brothers were trouble, every one of them. But I was the least favorite child. I was small and smart. I used words in ways that bothered my parents. I liked books. I wanted books. My teachers praised me. My parents walloped me. I hated farm work. I wanted to leave home before I had words for the thought. In some ways I would have been better off if I had just run away then, age three, just packed a little bag and troddled on out to the main road. Not sure things could have been much worse. We were raised to know nothing, to think nothing. Chew our cud like the cows. Say nothing. That’s what my mother did. Said nothing. I made myself as useless as possible in order to stay in school. I was the only one who did. I was lucky to have three brothers ahead of me, otherwise my father never would have allowed it.’
‘And a sister,’ I remembered.
‘She was younger. At school I received something somewhat close to affection. At home, even when I managed to beat my brothers at something, I got ridicule. Then my mother died and it got worse.’
‘How did she die?’
He paused, unused to my participation. ‘‘Flu. Gone in five days. Couldn’t breathe. The sound of it was terrible. The only thing I saw through the door before my aunt pulled me away was a bare foot sticking out the side of the bed. It was pale blue.’
In those hours or days it seemed I fell asleep and awoke to the sound of his voice.
‘I was pretty well out of my head when I got on that ship. Twenty-three months with the Dobu sorcerers and then a few days in Sydney where I proposed to a girl I thought had been my girlfriend and she turned me down. A Dobu witch had put a love hex on me before I left them, but so much for that, eh? I didn’t want anything to do with women or anthropology at that point. That first night on board I heard Nell holding forth at a big table at dinner and I figured she’d had this brilliant field trip and some stupid revelations about human nature and the universe, and it was the last thing I wanted to listen to. But I was virtually the only young man on the ship and some meddling old biddies arranged for me to dance with her. The first thing she said to me was ‘I’m having trouble breathing properly.’ I told her I was, too. We were both having some sort of claustrophobia being enclosed in those rooms. As soon as we could break away, we took a walk on deck, the first of many. I think we must have walked a hundred miles on that voyage. She had a fellow meeting her in Marseille. I wanted her to stay on with me to Southampton. She didn’t know what to do. She was the last off the boat and the fellow saw me and knew I’d got her. I saw it in his face.’
‘She had the body of a tart. Nothing like my mother’s. Full breasts, narrow waist, hips made for a man’s hands. I had the horrible suspicion that my brothers and I had created that body, that if we had not done what we had done she wouldn’t have developed the way she did.’ His voice was so low I could barely make the words. ‘Christ, that farm was out in the middle of fucking nowhere. No one had any idea what was going on. Except my mother. She knew. I know she knew.’ His voice split then and he looked up to the rafters and pinched off his tears. His face looked like that black bird was boring into him. Then he reached down and lit a cigarette and said, quite calmly, ‘Nothing in the primitive world shocks me, Bankson. Or I should say, what shocks me in the primitive world is any sense of order and ethics. All the rest — the cannibalism, infanticide, raids, mutilation — it’s all comprehensible, nearly reasonable, to me. I’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go. Even for you Pommies, I’ll bet.’
I heard them on the mats they’d set up in the large mosquito room beside their desks. The mats creaked and snapped. Whispering. Breathing. The unmistakable rhythm of sex. A cry cut short. Laughing.
Daylight and he was yelling. I turned and saw him towering over Bani, who was crouched by the dining table. Fen smacked him on the ear and he fell over whimpering, curled in a ball.
‘Where’s Nell?’ It felt like days since she’d sat in the chair.
‘Out counting babies. She thinks I’m doing such a stellar job she’s promoted me to head nurse.’
He was shaving me again.
‘You’re like a bear,’ he said, though he was far furrier than I.
He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth. I didn’t need a shave, didn’t particularly want a shave, but I breathed in the smell of his hands and breath. He wiped me with a dry towel.
‘You have three freckles, right below your lip.’ He was drunk, quite drunk, and I felt lucky I hadn’t been cut. He leaned in to touch the freckles and kept leaning until his mouth was on mine. I barely had to press a hand on his chest and he sprung back, wiping his lips as if I had initiated it.
Nell read from Light in August, which a friend had sent her a few months ago. Fen lay on the bed beside me and Nell read from the chair with a bit of hauteur, the same sort of pretension American actresses had when they spoke their lines. She was self-conscious, reading aloud, in a way she wasn’t at all in regular life, when the words were hers.
Fen and I caught eyes after the first sentence. He pulled a face and she caught me grinning.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s a good book.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’
‘It’s naïve tendentious American drivel,’ Fen said, ‘but go on.’
He was so much at ease with me that I began to wonder if I’d hallucinated the kiss. After Nell stopped reading she climbed on the bed too and we lay there the three of us watching the bugs try to claw their way into the net and talking about the book and about Western stories compared to the stories told here. Nell said she’d gotten so sick in the Solomons of hearing their pigman creation myths and their enormous-penis myths that she told them the whole story of Romeo and Juliet.