Days of storm, days and days of it. The rice is often watery because it rains into the lidless cooking pot. Rats huddle on the riverbank, shivering. In a backwash cove, with orgiastic fervor river eels slip amongst one another just below the surface of the water. Elphie wears a coat made of waterproof canvas cut from an unneeded old tent. She watches them, she watches everything.
Days of hot light, too, sun-glare that you can barely see through the multiple veils of vegetation. Mere chinks of sky, like the many pieces of a blue clay plate, shattered and irreparable.
And nights of long, drawn-out yowls—the jungle cats. A parade of stripey-tailed lemurs floods into camp, bold as you please, trying to steal Boozy’s cooking utensils to lick them. Jungle owls, with their high, haunted doxologies. Midges at dawn, flies at midday, mosquitoes at dusk, and at midnight, a persistent stinging insect like a microbial scorpion. By now the missionaries have taken to sleeping in white nets hung from a hook at the joist-pole of each tent. I’m in a cocoon, thinks Elphie, listening to the play of life and death that she can hear while lying in the dark with her eyes closed.
I’m in a cocoon, but I won’t always be.
In the dark all cats are grey, goes the saying. In the dark, no children are green.
Asleep, all children appear innocent. But Elphie is often awake.
On some anonymous night when she cannot sleep, damp with sweat in a white cone of muslin, she shuffles through her memories and collates them.
Which is to say that she begins to have a history, and it is always in the past. Writing about it in the present is merely a conceit. She will recall little of what has happened up in her life until now, only smudged impressions—an encounter by the river, the hexed night when her mother evaporated from her life. What she remembers from here slots more or less chronologically in the library of her mind. In the once upon a time, first this happened, then that. Melena has taught her that much: birth and death. Elphie is no longer immortal.
Whether this affords any relief it is not easy to know.