The Surfacing

by Cormac James

  Let me ask you a simple question, Morgan said. Why, if you think life aboard so perilous, did you encourage Miss Rink to come along?

  MacDonald said nothing.

  He thought it would force us to turn back, DeHaven said. He wasn’t thinking of you, or her, or even the child. He was thinking of himself.

  27th February

  He watched her lick her forefinger. It flicked the charts back and forth. The latitudes were marked in red. Afterwards they stared at a map of Denmark. She trailed her finger across the page, pronouncing the names. For no reason he could think of, he showed her a drawing he’d done of his father’s house.

  You’re disappointed, he said. You expected something bigger. Something more substantial.

  Let’s say, had it been bigger, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  That doesn’t say much for how I present myself, does it?

  Quite the contrary.

  That afternoon there had been a light fall of snow. The ice was stuttering dryly against the hull. She’d thought he was out of her range, was what she meant.

  At the dinner-table she produced his picture again. MacDonald and Brooks leaned in for a closer look, and he made no effort to parry their insults.

  Nice little stables, DeHaven said. But where’s the main house?

  He remembered the summers there. August. Parties in the garden. Sunsets. Bonfires blazing on top of the maple trees. The swallows shooting overhead, their shadows dripping down the white walls like molten lead. The years had passed. He’d never before felt much attached to the old place. Now he found he was no longer prepared to run it down as he always had. Since his father’s death, it was now his own.

  Some days the thing was no more than a rumour, that in a week or two or four there would be a child aboard. He had to force himself, consciously, to remember who that child was. Who would one day look to him for attention and affection. Considering the matter as coldly as he could, he did not think he had any to give. Were the choice his alone, he decided, he would not entrust a child to his own care. Taking care of himself already felt an endless chore. It would be sheer presumption to take on another charge. These were sane, measured considerations, he thought. A showcase of self-knowledge and humility. He would muster something, he supposed, to meet the need. All his life, he’d watched other men at it – uncles, cousins, friends. He’d seen his own father try. He might have the measure of the role, as much as they. The child might not be quite so wise as he feared. In certain roles, Morgan knew, he was more convincing than he expected to be. In spite of everything he might find himself adored.

  28th February

  She was standing up in the bath. The water slid off her like oil. The wet hair was plotted carelessly. She dried herself off. They went together to her room, but as they were going through the doorway she seemed to stumble, propped herself against the jamb. She stood with her eyes closed, looking inwards. Something was wrong, something new. Her entire body had somehow tightened, as though preparing to be hit. Eventually she opened her eyes and found him. He helped her onto the bed. She lay in the heat, in her underthings, and stiffened and softened and stiffened again. There was a new urgency in it now. He locked the door. A minute later she let out a sigh, a little moan, not unlike the protests of pleasure he’d heard so long ago. It had passed.

  She hoisted her nightdress. By now the skin seemed dangerously tight, ready to rip. But it had not ripped, it had continued to stretch, week after week. It had a near-transparent quality now. Week after week, he said, as though he had some sense of progress, which he did not. The thing was as new as it had ever been.

  Look! she said. Hiccups!

  The skin was moving, blatantly. Times he had stared baffled at the artery pulsing happily in his own neck, beating time to a tune he would never hear. This was not the same. The thing was not merely repeating its lessons by rote. Something was in there, trying to get out.

  Touch it, she said. Quick!

  So far he had always refused. He wanted to take her aside and spell it out brutally – that they were each on their own in this thing. She would disagree. She had the perfect contradiction right under her hands, answering her constantly. She seemed to think he could have it too, had only to do as she did – place the flat of his hand against the warm, tight flesh.

  Are you afraid? she said.

  He had refused so often that a refusal now could add no offence. But she had accused him of cowardice, and for once he let the notion in. It was his way out. If he accepted the challenge, the threat of a slight, he could surmount it. And so, with a boy’s bravery, he reached out his hand.

  It had always looked tight and hard, as though there were a solid object underneath. But under his hand now it felt far more generous. He’d often seen sharks hooked and hauled aboard, thumping about the deck, and that was the only thing he could think of that felt similar. The underbelly, tight and heavy and hard. That same sense of bulk, of history.

  The thing was definitely warm, like freshly-baked bread. That meant his hand was cold, he supposed. He wondered could whatever was inside feel the chill. The cold spot. The hint of an alien presence.

  Then, under his hand, the world jumped.

  Lord Jesus, he said, loud and clear.

  He had whipped his hand away, as though from a scorching hot plate. He would not have been more surprised had something started under his own shirt. He took her shoulders and turned her into the light. There was something animal, alive, on just the other side of the skin. It was jerking now, to a monstrous pulse. Hiccups, she said, but he looked at her sceptically. The thing was far too frivolous for a baby in the womb under its father’s hand. The kick had answered his touch. He was sure of it.

  Afterwards, alone in his cabin, he faced the mirror. His beard was as rowdy as a castaway’s. His carbine stood in the corner. The shock came slowly, dragging its feet. He could feel his face straining, not to smile. It was going to happen, and here was the first flush of joy. It was a complicated happiness, with so much residue to flush away, that had been building so long. He wondered would there always be so much resistance, so much noise, so much protest from the pipes. He did not know. He could not think.

  He read DeHaven’s books, most of them. He studied the pictures. He studied his own mind as best he knew how. What he decided was, he was going to be taken by surprise.

  When I think of it, he said, I think of the smell. The linen. The soap. The shit. I can never get much farther than that.

  Me, DeHaven said, I think of the geography. Think of the American continents, he said. North and south, and the narrow strip of land linking the two. Think of an hourglass, he said. Think of your wineglass, if you prefer.

  Morgan turned the thing in his hands, suddenly delicate.

  You have the bell, DeHaven said. That’s where the baby is for the moment, suspended in a class of soup. It’s obviously not as stiff as a wineglass, of course, more like a pigskin, let’s say, to maintain the drinking metaphor. You’ve seen them drinking from wineskins à la Bayonnaise, squirting it straight into their mouths? That squeezing, those are the contractions.

  Morgan looked into the glass. The wine looked darker. It no longer looked like something he wanted to put in his mouth.<
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  The finger was pointing to the junction of bell and stem. Of course, it’s quite a squeeze, DeHaven said. Yet, what’s up here – he flicked a fingernail against the bell, with a nice, clean note – somehow has to make its way down here. He tapped the same nail against the foot. The sound was blunt, dead.

  Easier said than done, I suppose, Morgan said.

  From the pictures he’d seen, DeHaven’s model was not quite right. The stem was too long. Impossibly narrow but mercifully short, one book said. Morgan had already considered the question, with her laid out on the bed. It was a matter of inches at most. But these were real inches, unfortunately – the ones used by surgeons and dentists, on people in great pain. They were not the inches of an Ordnance Survey map.

  5th March

  She was holding a single finger up in the air, as though performing some complex calculation and warding off distraction. It was what she did, sometimes, when waiting for a contraction to pass.

  Finally he dared ask: Should I get DeHaven?

  She nodded mutely, severe. This time she was afraid of having gone too far. She was afraid of being forced to give birth now, as punishment.

  He found DeHaven in the officers’ cabin, found him sitting at the table, cradling the cat. On the table was a tin of their precious preserved milk, that should have been kept to go next door, later, if need be.

  I thought we were saving that for the baby, Morgan said. In case.

  Dick, we only have the one case of the stuff. It would only be dragging it out.

  DeHaven got his bag to go, but stopped at the door and turned back.

  She has a doctor at hand, and a very distinguished one at that, he said. She should count herself lucky. In many ways she’s better off having it here than at Disko.

  Still Morgan looked unhappy, unconvinced.

  Everything’s ready. Everything’s clean, DeHaven said, but it sounded like pleading.

  Morgan pushed the saucer of milk under the cat’s nose. She sniffed at it suspiciously. Torture, he reminded himself deliberately. From the inside out. With those attending her doing nothing to relieve or refine the agony, only goading her on. Spectators. Il faut tenir, the French said. Simply face into the pain, and bear it, rather than try to get out of its way.

  What if she doesn’t survive, but it does? he said. His was an ever-ambitious anxiety.

  DeHaven was looking at him curiously. For godsake, Dick, he said. What are you worrying about? No mother, no milk. No milk, no baby. It’s as simple as that.

  Afterwards he lay down on the bunk to wait and brought the cat with him. Just as she liked it, his fingers caressed the cat’s throat, felt it throb. Satisfied, the eyes began to close. The Beast, he boasted, bitterly. The name had been spoiled. Kitty had heard and taken to using it, for the thing squirming inside her. Somewhere in the depths he felt a definite deflation – the soft flag and slump of surrender. The last of the barricades had collapsed. The grand, brassy thoughts could now come marching down the boulevard.

  Later, he wrapped himself up well and climbed aloft, all the way up, the ropes shattering under his feet. It was midday. He was trying to steal a glimpse round the corner, to bring back news of the sun. A small red light sat neatly on the horizon. He felt his face tighten, then felt it relax. The hope had lasted a second, no more. In any other sea it would have been a beacon. Here it was merely the Dog Star, on a new round. Sirius, that makes men wane, and women pine, said the Greeks.

  Crates flung over the side in the last crush still lay all about the ship, as though nothing had changed since then. Beyond lay the vast, virgin plain. They were cast out and encircled. The stars wheeled loosely overhead.

  As long as he could bear the cold, he stayed aloft. There was a new world waiting for him below. Even when he went down he lingered awhile on the deck. About the ship it was now freezing so hard the ice was sizzling, like meat on a spit. It was a full week since the last fall of snow. From the distant floes came a sound that brought him back to his army days, in the East. It was the ice exploding. It was a firing squad, in the quiet dawn.

  11th March

  March. The last days. The sky was not brightening but being washed clean. The sheet stretched to dry. They were idle, according to a strict routine. He marked nothing in the log but what they read on their instruments. For five days there was wind from the east, steady and strong, one long breath. The Liberator, he called it, when any of the Irish were near. What we need is wind from the north, he wrote.

  What we need is wind from the north, DeHaven announced to the dinner-table that night, to usher us to a more genial part of the globe. He had rooted out and been reading Morgan’s journal again. Genial, meaning that which contributes to propagation, DeHaven explained.

  Out of boredom Morgan wrote to his wife – a letter to the wife he would like to have, from the man he wanted to be. He wrote: When last I felt something warm and yielding, or when last I felt warm myself, I would be at pains to say. It was not true. It was another empty appeal. He spent the best part of every morning away from the ship, hoping to fortify himself. It was now not ten degrees below the freezing point. On paper, in black and white, it sounded cold. In the flesh, it was not. Rounding the ship, at a stroll, I tingle, he wrote. Farther or faster, over uneven ground, I begin to sweat.

  He went to see her. They went up for her daily stroll. It was strangely calm and strangely mild, and for the first time that year she did not stay under the housing, but came out onto the ice. He bent and drove a finger into the surface, to show how it gave. The finger left a dent, like the neat patter of footprints now scattered all over the floe. His little mark would not last long, of course. Someone would stand on it. Later, it would all melt.

  It’s like putty, he said. It was a kind of promise. Try it, he said, but she could not bend.

  It was almost noon. The sky was like a dirty glass bowl. The glass began to blush. The reddened bar began to glow. Nearby, as they often did now at this time of the day, the men gathered to stare at the same horizon. Slowly, gracelessly, their idol was rising, like some luminous sea creature lifting itself off the ocean floor. Morgan and Kitty stood side by side. Each lifted their veil and let their faces soak up the light.

  They turned a slow circuit about the ship. He watched the way she shuffled along, as though managing a deep wound, something any untoward movement might tear open again. She moved like one of those characters in their plays – the wounded soldier, the beggar, the blind king. Every movement a signpost towards the past, saying I was well, I am sick, I was young, I am old.

  They talked and he listened. Today she was like someone slightly drunk, with a happiness she was determined to share. Every now and then she stopped to breathe. Waiting, he scanned the ice with the glass. Eventually he found something of interest. Bear. A mother and two cubs.

  Now they were ambling along far behind her. Now they were sprinting to catch up. She bent and licked them all over, lavishly. He handed Kitty the glass, let her find them, listened as she let out a wounded groan. She watched them waddling over the ice, skating splay-legged down the hummocks. She turned to him with begging eyes.

  I want one, she said.

  I think you’re going to have your plate quite full as it is.

&n
bsp; Please, she said, with the old pain in her voice.

  You really think you’ll have enough milk? He sounded anxious, sceptical.

  You jest, she said. Haven’t you noticed? She was puffing out her chest. Even now, she said, I could feed the entire ship.

  Once he’d put her to bed, he made the mistake of telling DeHaven, and DeHaven insisted on going out for them, immediately. Fresh meat, he said. For the hospital.

  Morgan watched his friend take aim. She sprinted forward a few yards, seemed to trip over, did not get up again. The cubs ran forward, pawed at her impatiently. This was a new game, that they wanted to learn how to play. Afterwards the men stood around grinning and panting, each in a halo of steam. Twenty yards off, the dogs slobbered and scoffed over the steaming entrails. Under a sky that shone like slate, the shadow puppets slid left and right. The night was quiet now but for the sound of Cabot sharpening his knives.

  12th March

  He wondered what time it was. He hadn’t heard the last watch. It didn’t matter. It was still the middle of the night. He’d been sleeping but in his sleep had heard her scratching on the wall.

  How go you? he whispered to the taut face.

  I lost, said a voice ragged and dry. She did not finish the sentence. She was searching for the right words. It was like fumbling in a trunk in the dark. It would have to feel right. Had she lost her waters? Was that what she wanted to say? That it had started at last, and so soon?

  The plug, she said. It was not the right word. No such word existed, for her, for this.

  The jelly thing, she said. That blocks the . . .

  I understand, he said. He turned up the lamp. When?

  Just now.