Euphoria

by Lily King

What would it have altered to have kissed her then, that night? Everything. Nothing. Impossible to know.

But nothing could have separated me from Nell at that moment.

‘I don’t know if you’ll believe me.’ ‘Of course I will.’

I wanted every part of her pressed against me.

I kissed her. Or, as Nell later claimed, I leapt at her. I could not touch enough of her at once.

and when she reached down and felt me she smiled and said it wasn’t quite a stone, but it would do.

The night of the minyana they need to be reassured that their women still want them.’ ‘Reassure away.’

We did not sleep that night.

she stopped and kissed me, and I felt, stupidly, that it would all be okay.

He’d tried to sneak up on us, I suspected.

I wanted to go back to bed with her and resented this standing and waiting I had to do before he took her back.

I wrapped her in my arms and told her quietly in her ear.

She understood. She understood about their gods and amends—and Fen’s brutal possessiveness.

The flute was a gift. It’s rightfully mine.’ ‘You think I care who owns it now? You got a man killed for it, Fen. Xambun is dead.’

‘It’s out of petrol, you know,’ he said, as if that were my fault. ‘I had to paddle most of the way back.’ Good, I thought. Gave me more time with your wife.

I told her I’d go as far as New York with her if she’d let me. She shut her eyes and Fen came back to his seat beside her before she had answered.

I wanted my own ticket on that liner. I wanted to tear up hers and take her back to the Kiona with me.

I had never seen more clearly how streets like these were made for and by amoral cowards, men who made money in rubber or sugar or copper or steel in remote places then returned here where no one questioned their practices, their treatment of others, their greed.

Like them, the three of us would face no recriminations. No one would ever ask us here how we had got a man killed.

‘I wanted that time with you,’ I said. ‘I wanted it more than I’ve wanted anything in my life.’ These last words surprised me. The truth of them made me start to shake. When she didn’t respond, I said, ‘I can’t regret that. It was perfect.’ ‘Worth a man’s life?’

Because my only reason, the reason he knew as well as I, was that I was in love with his wife.

I saw then that any remorse he’d shown us had been an act.

I held her as she wept. I stroked her hair, loose and slightly matted. ‘Stay here with me. Or let me come with you.’ She pulled me down to kiss her. Warm. Briny. ‘I love you,’ she said, her lips still against mine. But it meant no.

asked me to risk my life for his delusions. I could have been the corpse in the canoe.

She says she’s Southern but she’s not on the Grid. She’s a different type altogether.

‘I had to get that flute,’ he said. ‘Don’t you understand? There has to be a balance. A man can’t be without power—it doesn’t work like that. What was I going to do, write little books behind hers like a fucking echo? I needed something big. And this is big. Books on this thing will write themselves.’ ‘In blood-red ink, Fen.’

Please let me go. Don’t say anything more or it will make it worse. I am going to try and fix what I can.

We hugged. I held her close and too long. ‘I don’t want to let you go,’ I breathed in her ear. But I did. I let her go.

he scoffed at the idea of a white man thinking he could be invisible.

With the English Nell had taught him he said, ‘ Fen is bad man.’

‘He break her.’ It was true, then. I did the tally, too late, of all the broken things: her ankle, her glasses, her typewriter.

I’d wire my mother for more money, I decided, and go directly to New York from Sydney. I would not wait.

Strange how a ship was our doing and now our undoing.

Let him rage. Let him rage across the oceans. But he will rage alone.

He is wine and bread and deep in...

‘I was so sorry to hear about your friend’s wife.’ ‘What do you mean?’ My lips went all rubbery in an instant. In fact my whole body seemed to be pulling away from me.

Just before they reached Aden.

Fen insisted on a sea burial. Her parents are apoplectic. Think he’s hiding something.

She was out there. I did not know where. Fen had dumped her in the sea. She couldn’t even swim. Facts I still only half believed.

It was the work of madness, the oily crumpled pages covered in three different scrawls, but I was mad still, and set to work.

So much, in the end, for all my attempts at amends.

I kept us moving swiftly. It was the only way to get through it.

I forced myself on to the next display. It was only a button. It was only a bit of thread. From a wrinkled blue dress I had once undone.