A Victim of the Aurora

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘He is. His name is Paul Quincy.’

  ‘A good man, is he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Barry. ‘Very … very compassionate.’

  ‘Could you bring that parson … Quincy … here to me?’

  ‘I’m sure he’d be very pleased to meet you, Malcolm.’

  ‘Mind you, he should bring all his books with him and all his powers to bind and loose.’ Chalmers stood up and paced the length of the chamber, stooped but moving energetically, as if he often walked back and forth here, in this space two inches too short for him. His one good arm was held behind his back but its weak brother couldn’t clasp it. ‘I didn’t think I could ask in visitors or tell them things. I didn’t want to go near Holbrooke’s crowd because I didn’t want their questions, questions. You’re different, you fellows. I should have known. I should have come and met you earlier. Is it a happy expedition? Yours?’

  ‘It has been,’ I said, like a husband telling lies about a marriage.

  ‘I mean I could almost talk to you two. But you don’t have powers to bind and loose.’

  Inspired, Barry said, ‘No. I don’t think you should talk to us.’

  Chalmers had reached the end of the cell. He faced about, paused, took his good hand from behind his back, inspected his knuckles, chewed one for some reason, and said, ‘I ate John Forbes. John Forbes went to his sleeping bag one night. He was like me, still talking about living. But we didn’t have much food left. Two ounces of pemmican, two of biscuit, one of rice, a scoop of butter – that was our daily ration. It had to be. We didn’t know when the blizzard would end. Just the same, seven ounces of anything isn’t enough in this climate, when you’re eighty miles from home and no one knows where you are. So John went to bed talking of survival. In the morning he didn’t wake. A coma. He stayed that way for two days and then the blizzard ended but I couldn’t leave him. I didn’t even touch his rations – you can believe me or not. I thought he’d wake up. But he died. God knows what it was. God knows. So I started to get the tent down and pack the sled but before I’d even started it began blowing again. I put the tent up again, over John and myself. After a few hours I felt a wave of recklessness in me. I got out half the remaining supplies, about a pound and a half of food, and boiled up a wonderful hoosh. The next day the blizzard was still blowing so I brewed up the rest of the food. The next day the blizzard was still there and there was no food. I thought I’d fall asleep and die like John. The next day the blizzard was still there and there was no food. The next day the blizzard was still there and there was no food …’

  Chalmers repeated that sentence at least six or seven times. We were not sure whether his brain had stuck or whether each time he uttered the sentence signified a further day of hunger.

  ‘In the end,’ he said at last, speaking very quickly, ‘I had to eat John. If the position had been reversed I would have wanted the same behaviour from him. It’s not a crime to do it. I know that because I did it and I’m no criminal, you see. And I don’t think the legislative powers of Westminster have ever been applied to the problem of one eating a colleague. But once you’ve done it you can’t go back to the world of clubs and churches and railway stations and lecture halls. And puddings. You can’t go back to that world. I said to myself, Chalmers, you wanted to live but you can’t live in the old way. Any more than a man can who’s suddenly crippled or blinded. You see, it’s a … a … an unclean practice what I’ve done. It needs very special acts of purification.’ He looked at us narrowly, suspicious all at once. ‘He’s the sort of man who can perform acts of purification?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Barry assured him. ‘No risk.’

  Chalmers smiled and returned to his bunk. ‘I’d ask you to stay to tea, but I haven’t tasted tea for many years. Could you bring me some? When you bring the priest. Do you want to use my convenience? It’s that covered bucket by the far wall, or if you like, an outdoor one farther along past the meat store. Do you have cans of peaches, too, in that expedition? I could really make a meal of tea and peaches.’

  ‘We’ll bring them,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t delay,’ he told us. ‘Don’t delay. Time for you to run.’

  Both Barry and I were slow to rise. Having found him, we wondered if we should leave him so easily. But it seemed we could guarantee he’d be waiting here for us simply by promising tea and peaches and Quincy’s absolution. It was also possible to believe that he liked us, that by being there we had broken his hermetic seal.

  If I had still thought he was the killer, I wouldn’t easily have left him.

  ‘We’ll be back some time today,’ I told him.

  We walked home over the ice, the quicker way, and into a gusting wind. But the stars still shone in all quarters of the sky. Barry was joyful. He would sprint and jump and let out a whoop in mid air. As the wind cut at my face I felt an almost personal grudge against Chalmers. He was in existence, he was mad and if he’d but had two workable hands we could have believed he was the assassin.

  Of course Barry’s theory was unaffected by Chalmers’s withered arm. ‘A big bastard like that could’ve hit Victor a good one. Even with one arm he could have hit him a beauty.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said dazedly. ‘I don’t think it’s possible. I don’t think he’s so strong. His diet …’

  ‘I wonder why he said he was Chalmers?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I wonder why he said he was Chalmers. He wasn’t Chalmers. He was Forbes.’

  I stopped walking. I fumbled with the mental negatives I had taken from a study of Holbrooke’s journal. I thought of throats and head shapes.

  Barry said, ‘He claims to be Chalmers. He claims he ate Forbes. But he’s Forbes and if he ate anyone it was Chalmers. I mean, he’s more than twenty-eight years old. I know if your hair turns grey and your teeth rot you can look old at twenty-eight. But not as old or ageless as he does. He’s John Forbes and yet he says he’s Malcolm Chalmers. Is he just mucking us round?’

  ‘I think perhaps he really believes it,’ I said.

  ‘A man becomes his meal,’ Barry muttered flippantly.

  I stared at him. I didn’t like him for remarks like that.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You don’t have a bloody monopoly on good taste. I can imagine the bloody torment that would make a man believe he was someone else.’

  Ambling behind him, I didn’t particularly want to get home. As Forbes-Chalmers would have said, ‘I didn’t quite trust its carpentry.’

  When we arrived at Cape Frye our different moods dictated different ways of telling our story. Barry went inside yelling and telling the population of the hut indiscriminately that he had found Forbes-Chalmers. That Forbes-Chalmers was misinformed or cunning on the question of who he was, that he lived in an ice embankment and wanted canned peaches.

  I went to Stewart and beckoned Alec across from his desk and told them the news that, for me, was all bitterness. By the time I had finished my sober account, the main area beyond the alcove was full of laughter and questions and excitement at Barry’s triumphant story.

  ‘We’re left with that,’ Sir Eugene said against a background of celebration. ‘It’s our house … ours … in disorder.’

  ‘Of course,’ Alec said, as if he’d always believed as much.

  For some reason of temperament, the Leader smiled. ‘Let’s join the others.’

  Sir Eugene and Alec stood about anonymously, listening to Barry and Troy argue about tea and peaches and Quincy, while Waldo made peripheral statements about the weather, falling barometric pressure and other signs of blizzard. Waldo was not inhibited in Sir Eugene’s presence. In Waldo’s view, a crime confessed was a crime expiated.

  ‘They should go back to him,’ Sir Eugene said, intervening without warning. ‘We have the problem of his possibly outrageous behaviour. Perhaps in the end we should supply him with comforts and let him stay in his ice-hutch until the McMurdo returns. But in the meantime …’

  John Troy said,
‘Does this mean, sir, you want a three-man pack and a tent and sled?’ A stranger might have thought Troy had been asked to give away a daughter.

  ‘And all accoutrements. Exactly,’ said Sir Eugene.

  So the excursion to bring Forbes-Chalmers back was hastily arranged. A little more than an hour later Quincy and Barry in double harness dragged the sled down Cape Frye over the tide crack and on to the ice while I followed, steadying the load if necessary. I had won this easier task by toss of the coin, yet I would have enjoyed the mindless job of hauling.

  It was a fast journey. When Forbes-Chalmers’s cape was in sight, I looked behind me. The wind was blowing more wildly now, which had helped Fields and Quincy on this part of the journey but would slow us on the way back. To the south the night was smudged as it would be if a great thumb had smeared the stars out. If that smudge enveloped us we would camp with Forbes-Chalmers, pitching our tent on his doorstep.

  My colleagues snorted in harness, savouring the brute labour, as we slid around the far side of the small cape. Where the frozen sound and frozen shore met, slabs of ice lay upheaved and cluttered like marble in a mason’s yard. To land on the cape we had to nurse the sled over this ice-ridge. Once that had been done, Barry stood still in his traces and pointed to Forbes-Chalmers’s ice embankment.

  ‘There,’ he said. His pride was like that of a landlord pointing out desirable properties. ‘And listen. Call him Malcolm.’

  I could see Quincy frowning, and understood his ambiguous feeling. How could he know what Forbes-Chalmers might ask of him?

  Barry found the entry first. He dropped on his knees and stuck his head into it.

  ‘There’s no light in there,’ he reported after a while.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not looking in the meat store?’

  ‘No. The meat store’s farther down.’

  As it was. Deprived of Forbes-Chalmers’s clear invitation, Barry became as irresolute as I had been on the first visit. He stood upright again. ‘This is serious. He might be going to harpoon us or something. In the dark. One by one.’

  ‘Here,’ Quincy said. He handed Barry a torch. In those days torches were nearly, but not quite, still in their experimental era. ‘Or else I can go,’ Quincy offered.

  Barry considered handing him back the torch. ‘You’re supposed to be always ready to meet your God,’ he suggested.

  ‘Supposed to be,’ said Quincy.

  At last Barry wiped his nose on the icy skin of his glove and asked us to pull him out with all speed should he scream.

  I bent to do that. He passed without damage however right through into Forbes-Chalmers’s living space. I could see torchlight bouncing around in there.

  ‘He might be out for a while,’ I called woodenly.

  ‘Oh yes. Probably dashed down to the corner pub.’

  It didn’t seem the right thing for us to invade Forbes-Chalmers’s house when he wasn’t at home. Barry emerged from the hole and we mounted the spur of the cape and looked inland and out across the sea. But there was nothing to be seen except the moonscape of Ross Island now turning dark and indefinite as the blizzard murk touched the moon.

  ‘We can always come back another day,’ said Quincy when we met back on the high ground after an hour of searching and calling.

  Barry had been biting his lips and snorting. ‘I’m not going to leave this place without him.’

  Quincy merely nodded at the blizzard murk in the south. Barry came to my side. ‘We’re supposed to be the sane ones,’ he said. ‘He talked us into leaving him. We wouldn’t know enough to scratch ourselves in a flea market. And that’s the bloody truth.’

  ‘Is everything inside?’ I asked. ‘His bunk? His stove?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then we can expect him back. Can’t we?’

  While I spoke to him, Barry looked around frantically to all points of the compass. ‘You two are free to go home. Take the tent and the supplies. I insist on that. I can eat with the man himself.’

  Quincy shrugged. I walked to the top of the cape. Every few paces the wind blew me backwards one step. I could see nothing to the south. As I stood there that peculiar blizzard screech, made by a great blast of air on the fluted sides of glaciers and the contours of the coast, rose so loudly that I had to turn and call to them. ‘It’s too late!’

  We were lucky to have a hollow to pitch the tent in. By the time we had it up I could no longer see the façade of Forbes-Chalmers’s ice hole. Inside the bell of canvas we sat disgruntled, hunched on our sleeping bags. The wind drummed so strenuously on the canvas that, from the aspect of noise, we might as well have camped in the path of oncoming locomotives.

  Quincy was the most active of the three of us. He took his outer gloves off and lit the storm lantern, lifting it to the peak of the tent pole by the palm, clumsily, in case his fingers stuck to the frozen metal. Next he lit the heater, slipped it under the frame of the cooker and, still avoiding contact with fingers, lifted two pans of snow on to the frame. Watching him, we knew that tonight we could not have been so awkwardly deft.

  As he opened our pemmican bag and mixed the brownish lumps of dried meat into the melting snow on the stove, as he handed out our hardtack and our few ounces of raisins and our four lumps of sugar, Barry went on mourning the loss of Forbes-Chalmers.

  ‘I can’t understand it. He wanted a priest. He wanted peaches and so on. I would have sworn he’d wait.’

  ‘Perhaps he changed his mind,’ I muttered. I meant about contact. Perhaps, having had his meeting with the race, he never wanted to meet any of us again.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Barry justifiably. ‘The great mind speaks and it manages perspicaciously to announce that since the man isn’t here he must have changed his bloody mind.’

  ‘Please, Barry!’ Quincy begged him.

  I said, ‘We should have known he wouldn’t wait for us. We would have said to him, no, you’re not Malcolm Chalmers. You’re John Forbes. And for some reason he doesn’t want us saying it.’

  ‘Perhaps because,’ said Quincy, ‘Forbes is a cannibal. Which this man doesn’t want to be.’

  If we had come from an age in which Freudian principles were the commonplaces of conversation and people presumed unconscious motives for all strange behaviour, we might have been able to explain the man’s disappearance, to our satisfaction at least. For Edwardians, there was no key for interpreting madness.

  The hoosh we ate was full of fur fibres from our coats, gloves, finnesköe and sleeping bags. That was the way meals always came out when you were sledding. But the hairiness of the stew seemed twice as annoying that night. Over all of us, even Quincy, lay the suspicion that we had lost Forbes-Chalmers because of a moral or mental failure of our own.

  Later that evening Barry took the risk and groped out to the ice embankment. It was as far as we could hope to go in our search for Forbes-Chalmers. The hermit’s bunk was still made up quite neatly with its blankets and furs, Barry said on his return. When he had crawled back into his sleeping bag, I think he was weeping, whether for the cold or the hermit I do not know.

  We slept badly. If one of us dozed the others would begin a conversation about survival. Did Forbes-Chalmers have a second hole? A den for emergencies?

  ‘If not, can a man survive by digging himself into the snow and sleeping the blizzard out?’

  ‘The dogs do it that way.’

  ‘We know the dogs do it that way.’

  We would refer to the lore of earlier expeditions. ‘I knew a man,’ said Barry. ‘Hoar was his name. Or Hare. Or O’Hare.’ His uncertainly about the name didn’t say much for the exactness of the story. ‘A fellow countryman of mine.’

  ‘A socialist?’ I asked ironically, but the irony was ignored.

  ‘He was lost for a day and a half during a blizzard down on Hut Point during Scott’s expedition some years ago. He did that, dug himself in. Now he’s back in Queensland growing pineapples. But that was midsummer. This is midwinter.’

>   Quincy spoke of the shepherds of Yorkshire who wrapped themselves in a blanket, then in canvas, and slept well in the rain.

  By way of epitaph, Barry said, ‘He may have stank, but the room was tidy.’ And then, ‘They say at first it’s fierce, freezing and then it becomes a pleasure. I believe drowning’s something like that.’

  Soon after, I fell asleep and the pummelling of the blizzard on the tent surface became a narcotic throb in my brain. I did not wake for seven hours. When I sat up and had checked the time, I noticed that both Quincy’s sleeping bag and Barry’s were empty. In such circumstances, when there is infinite blackness beyond the double walls of canvas and only the fragile nimbus of lantern-light for company, the feeling of being the last man on earth becomes a morbid conviction.

  At once I needed to know if the others were close by. Yet first I had to beat my frozen finnesköe until they were malleable enough for going on my feet. Once I had them on, I loosened the lanyard at the mouth of the tent. As I crouched, half-in, half-out, it seemed to me that visibility had improved to a full handspan.

  However metaphysically isolated I felt, I staggered to my left a little, overcome by the necessity to urinate. After a step or two I could not see the cone of the tent, but very nearly collided with a shape. I could make out the stance of the shape, or rather by the outline of its shoulder, that it too was relieving its bladder.

  ‘Barry?’ I roared. ‘Brian!’

  The prosaic names, from the world of trains and town-clerks and daily newspapers, were erased by the wind. But further individualities of the shape before me convinced me that it was Quincy.

  ‘Tony?’ he called, but stepped one foot farther north. It was an unconscious gesture of clerical modesty that made him turn his back to me like that, for I could barely see him in the first place. Now I could not sight him at all. I hoped his old-fashioned personal reticence did not carry him too far north and lose him in the storm.

  I shrugged and began attending to myself. Once I had dinner with Admiral Byrd, the Antarctic hero of the 30s. He told me when the dessert wine had been served that he considered the greatest problem of Antarctic exploration was how to extract half an inch of frozen organ from three inches of protective clothing. I dealt with the problem and idly considered the ridiculousness of natural functions in the open in this place and then again the shyness of the Rev. Quincy. And it was while my mind idled in this way that I deduced, without fully knowing I had done it, who had broken Victor’s skull and throttled him, how it had been achieved to the confusion of all parties, and when and where.