I headed toward the water. I bit hard on the muscle of my tongue. Harder. I could not feel it, though the blood came, metal, inhuman. I walked straight into the river. Yes, it had probably been all one gesture, out of the pocket and to the ear and bang. The water was warm and the linen jacket did not float up. It hung heavy and tight against me. I heard movement behind me. A crocodile perhaps. For the first time I felt no fear of them. Eaten by a croc. Tops blowing your head off in Piccadilly Circus. Crocodiles were sacred to the Kiona. Perhaps I would become part of their mythology, the unhappy white man who became a crocodile. I went under. My mind was not still but I was not unhappy. Unfortunately I’d always been able to hold my breath. We used to compete, Martin, John, and I. They thought it was funny that the youngest had the biggest lungs, that I passed out before giving up. You’re part fainting goat, Andy, my father often said.
They grabbed me so hard and fast I took in water and, though I was in the air again, I couldn’t breathe. Each man had hooked an arm around my shoulder. They dragged me to shore, flipped me over, pounded me like a sago pancake, and pulled me back up to standing, all the while lecturing me in their language. They found the stones in my pocket. They grabbed them, the two men, their bodies nearly dry already for they wore nothing but rope around their waists while I sagged with the weight of all my clothes. They made a pile of the stones from my pockets on the beach and shifted language to a Kiona worse than mine, explaining that they knew I was Teket’s man from Nengai. The stones are beautiful, they said, but dangerous. You can collect them, but leave them on land before you swim. And do not swim in clothes. This is also dangerous. And do not swim alone. Being alone you will only come to harm. They asked me if I knew the way back. They were stern and curt. Grown-ups who didn’t have patience for an oversized child.
‘Yes,’ I told them, ‘I am fine.’
‘We cannot go further.’
‘That is fine.’
I began walking back. I heard them behind me, returning upriver. They were speaking quickly, loudly, in Pabei. I heard a word I knew, taiku, the Kiona word for stones. One said it then the other said it, louder. Then loud belly-shaking guffaws of laughter. They laughed like people in England used to laugh before the war, when I was a boy.
I was going to be alive for Christmas after all, so I packed a bag and went to spend it with the drunks at the Government Station in Angoram.
3
‘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 get 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.