by Ian Whates
“Don’t hold your breath,” he said.
We spent some hours every day on the project. The rest of the time we ate, drank, lay about and killed time. We had a VHS player, and copies of Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, The Neverending Story and The Karate Kid. We played cards. We read books. As it happens, I was working my way through Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy. Roy was reading Immanuel Kant. That fact, right there, tells you all you need to know about the two of us. “I figured eight months isolation was the perfect time really to get to grips with the Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” he would say. “Of course,” he would add, with a little self-deprecating snigger, “I’m not reading it in the original German. My German is good – but not that good.” He used to leave the book lying around: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Meiklejohn. It had a red cover. Pretentious fool.
“We put too much trust in modern technology,” he said one day. “The solution to the Fermi Paradox? It’s all in here.” And he stoked the cover of the Critique, as if it were his white cat and he Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
“Whatever, dude,” I told him.
Once a week a plane dropped off our supplies. Sometimes the pilot, Diamondo, would land his crate on the ice-runway, maybe even get out to stretch his legs and chat to us. I’ve no idea why he was called “Diamondo”, or what his real name was. He was Peruvian I believe. More often, if the weather was bad, or if D. was in a hurry, he would swoop low and drop our supplies, leaving us to fight through the burly snowstorm and drag the package in. Inside would be necessaries, scientific equipment, copies of relevant journals – paper copies, it was back then, of course – and so on. The drops also contained correspondence. For me that meant: letters from family, friends and above all from my girlfriend Lezlie.
Two weeks before all this started I had written to Lezlie, asking her for a paperback copy of Children of Dune. I told her, in what I hope was a witty manner, that I had been disappointed by the slimness of Dune Messiah. I need the big books, I had said, to fill up the time, the long aching time, the (I think I used the phrase) terrible absence-of-Lezlie-thighs-and-tits time that characterised life in the Antarctic. I mention this because, in the weeks that followed, I found myself going back over my letter to her – my memory of it, I mean; I didn’t keep a copy – trying to work out if I had perhaps offended her with a careless choice of words. If she might, for whatever reason, have decided not to write to me this week in protest at my vulgarity, or sexism. Or to register her disapproval by not paying postage to send a fat paperback edition of Dune III to the bottom of the world. Or maybe she had written.
You’ll see what I mean in a moment.
Roy never got letters. I always did: some weeks as many as half a dozen. He: none. “Don’t you have a girlfriend?” I asked him, once. “Or any friends?”
“Philosophy is my girlfriend,” he replied, looking smugly over the top of his copy of the Critique of Pure Reason. “The solution to the Fermi Paradox is the friend I have yet to meet. Between them, they are all the company I desire.”
“If you say so, mate,” I replied, thinking inwardly weirdo! and loser and billy-no-mates and other such things. I didn’t say any of that aloud, of course. And each week it would go on: we’d unpack the delivery parcel, and from amongst all the other necessaries and equipment I’d pull out a rubberband-clenched stash of letters, all of which would be for me and none of which were ever for Roy. And he would smile his smarmy smile and look aloof; or sometimes he would peer in a half-hope, as if thinking that maybe this week would be different. Once or twice I saw him writing a letter, with his authentic Waverley fountain pen, shielding his page with his arm when he thought I wanted to nosy into his private affairs – as if I had the slightest interest in fan mail to Professor Huffington Puffington of the University of Kant Studies.
He used to do a number of bonkers things, Roy: like drawing piano keys onto his left arm, spending ages shading the black ones, and then practising – or, for all I know, only pretending to practise – the right-hand part of Beethoven sonatas on it. “I requested an actual piano,” he told me. “They said no.” He used to do vocal exercises in the shower, really loud. He kept samples of his snot, testing (he said) whether his nasal mucus was affected by the south polar conditions. Once he inserted a radio gnomon relay spike (looked a little like a knitting needle) into the corner of his eye, and squeezed the ball to see what effects it had in his vision “because Newton did it.” He learnt a new line of the Aeneid every evening – in Latin, mark you – by reciting it over and over. Amazingly annoying, this last weird hobby, because it was so particularly and obviously pointless. I daresay that’s why he did it.
I read regular things: SF novels, magazines, even four day old newspapers (if the drop parcel happened to contain any), checking the football scores and doing the crosswords. And weekly I would pull out my fistful of letters, and settle down on the common room sofa to read them and write my replies, while Roy pursed his brow and worked laboriously through another paragraph of his Kant.
One week he said. “I’d like a letter.”
“Get yourself a pen pal,” I suggested.
We had just been outside, where the swarming snow was as thick as a huge shower of wood chips and the wind bit through the three layers I wore. We were both back inside, pulling off icicle-bearded gloves and scarfs and stamping our boots. The drop-package was on the floor between us, dripping. We had yet to open it.
“Can I have one of yours?” he asked.
“Tell you what,” I said. I was in a good mood, for some reason. “I’ll sell you one. Sell you one of my letters.”
“How much?” he asked.
“Tenner,” I said. Ten pounds was (I hate to sound like an old codger, but it’s the truth) a lot of money back then.
“Deal,” he said, without hesitation. He untied his boots, hopped out of them like Puck and sprinted away. When he came back he was holding a genuine ten pound note. “I choose, though,” he said, snatching the money away as I reached for it.
“Whatever, man,” I laughed. “Be my guest.”
He gave me the money. Then, he dragged the parcel, now dripping melted snow, through to the common room and opened it. He rummaged around and brought out the rubberbanded letters: five of them.
“Are you sure none of them aren’t addressed to you?” I said, settling myself on the sofa and examining my banknote with pride. “Maybe you don’t need to buy one of my letters – maybe you got one of your own?”
He shook his head, looked quickly through the five envelopes on offer, selected one and handed me the remainder of the parcel. “No.”
“Pleasure doing business with you,” I told him. Off he went to his bedroom to read the letter he had bought.
I thought nothing more about it. The four letters were from: my Mum, my brother, a guy in Leicester with whom I was playing a tediously drawn-out game of postal chess, and the manager of my local branch of Lloyd’s Bank in Reading, writing to inform me that my account was in credit. Since being in Antarctica meant I could never spend anything, and since my researcher’s stipend was still going-in monthly, this was unnecessary. I’m guessing it was by way of a publicity exercise. It’s not that I was famous, of course; even famous-for-Reading. But it doubtless looked good on some report somewhere: we look after our customers, even when they’re at the bottom of the world! I made myself a coffee. Then I spent an hour at a computer terminal, checking data. When Roy came back through he looked smug, but I didn’t begrudge him that. After all, I had made ten pounds – and ten pounds is ten pounds.
For the rest of the day we worked, and then I fixed up some pasta and Bolognese sauce in the little kitchen. As we ate I asked him: “So who was the letter from?”
“What do you mean?” Suspicious voice.
“The letter you bought from me. Who was it from? Was it Lezlie?”
A self-satisfied grin. “No comment,” he smirked.
“Say what?”
“It’s my letter. I
bought it. And I’m entitled to privacy.”
“Suit yourself,” I said. “I was only asking.” He was right, I suppose; he bought the letter, it was his. Still, his manner rubbed me up the wrong way. We ate in silence for a bit, but I’m afraid I couldn’t let it go. “I was only asking: who was it from? Is it Lezlie? I won’t pry into what she actually wrote.” Even as I said this, I thought to myself: pry? How could I pry – the words were written to be read by me! “You know,” I added, thinking to add pressure. “I could just write to her, ask her what she wrote. I could find out that way.”
“No comment,” he repeated, pulling his shoulders round as he sat. I took my bowl to the sink and washed it up, properly annoyed, but there was no point in saying anything else. Instead I went through and put Romancing the Stone on the telly, because I knew it was the VHS Roy hated the most. He smiled, and retreated to his room with his philosophy book.
The next morning I discovered to my annoyance that the business with the letter was still preying on my mind. I told myself: get over it. What’s done is done. But some part of me refused to let go. At breakfast Roy read another page of his Kant, and I saw that he was using the letter as a bookmark. At one point he put the book down and stood up to go to the loo, but then a sly expression crept over his usually ingenuous face, and he picked the book up and took it with him.
It had been a blizzardy few days and the dish needed checking over. Roy tried to wriggle out of this chore: “you’re more the hardware guy,” he said, in a wheedling tone. “I’m more conceptual – the ideas and the phil-os-o-phay.”
“Don’t give me that crap. We’re both hands-on – the folk in Adelaide, and back in Britain, are the actual ideas people.” I was cross. “Philosophy my arse.” At any rate, he suited-up, rolled his scarf around his lower face and snapped on his goggles, zipped up his overcoat. We both pulled out brooms and stumped through light snowfall to the dish. It took us half an hour to clear the structure of snow, and check the motors hadn’t frozen solid, and that its bearings were ice free. Our shadows flickered across the landscape like pennants in the wind.
The sun loitered near the horizon, a cricket-ball frozen in flight.
That afternoon I did a stint testing the terminals. With the sun still up, it was a noisy picture; although it was possible to pick up this and that. At first I thought there was something, but when I looked closer I discovered it was radio chatter from a Spanish expedition on its way to the Vinson Massif. I found my mind wandering. Who was the letter from?
The following day I eased my irritation by writing to Lezlie. Hey, you know Roy? He’s a sad bastard, a ringer for one of actors in Revenge of the Nerds. Anyway he asked for a letter and I sold him one. Now he won’t tell me whose letter it is. Did you write to me last week? What did you say? Just give me the gist, lover-girl. But as soon as I’d written this I scrunched the paper up and threw it in the bin. Lez would surely not respond well to such a message. In effect I was saying: “hey you know that love-letter you poured your heart and soul into? I sold it to a nerd without even reading it! That’s how much I value your emotions!”
Chewed the soft-blue plastic insert at the end of my Bic for a while.
I tried again: Hi lover! Did you write last week? There was a snafu with the package and some stuff got lost. I looked over the lie. It didn’t ring true. I scrunched this one up too. Then I sat in the chair trying, and failing, to think of how to put things. The two balls of scrunched paper in the waste-bin began, creakingly, to unscrunch.
Dear Lez. Did you write last week? I’m afraid I lost a letter, klutz that I am! That was closer to the truth. But then I thought: what if she had written me a dear-john letter? Or a let’s-get-married? Or a-close-family-member-has-died? How embarrassing to write back a jaunty “please repeat your message!” note. What if she hadn’t written at all? What if it were somebody else?
This latter thought clawed at my mind for a while. What if some important information, perhaps from my academic supervisor at Reading, Prof Addlestone, had been in the letter? Privacy was one thing, but surely Roy didn’t have the right to withhold such info?
I stomped down the corridor and knocked at Roy’s room. He made me wait for a long time before opening the door just enough to reveal his carbuncular face, smirking up at me. “What?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I want my letter back.”
“No dice, doofus,” he replied. “I paid. It’s mine now.”
“Look, I’ll buy it back, all right? I’ll give you your ten pounds. I’ve got it right here.”
When he smiled, he showed the extent to which his upper set of teeth didn’t fit neatly over his lower set. “It’s not for sale,” he said.
“Don’t be a pain, Roy,” I said. “I’m asking nicely.”
“And I’m, nicely, declining.”
“What – you want more than a tenner? You can go fish for that, my friend.”
“It’s not for sale,” he repeated.
“Is this a scam,” I said, my temper wobbling badly. “Is the idea you hold out until I offer – what, twenty quid? Is that it?”
“No. That’s not it. The letter’s mine. I do not choose to sell it.”
“Just tell me what’s in the letter,” I pleaded. “I’ll give your money back and you can keep the damn thing, just tell me who it’s from and what it says.” Even as I made this offer it occurred to me that Roy, with his twisted sense of humour, might simply lie to me. So I added, “Just show me the letter. You don’t have to give it up, keep it for all I care, only –”
“No deal,” said Roy. Then he wrung his speccy face into a parody of a concerned expression. “You’re embarrassing yourself, Anthony.” And he shut his door.
I went through to the common room, fuming. For a while I toyed with the idea of simply grabbing the letter back: I was bigger than Roy, and doubtless had been involved in more actual fist-flying, body-grappling fights than he. It wouldn’t have been hard. But instead of that I had a beer, and lay on the sofa, and tried to get a grip. We had to live together, he and I, in unusually confined circumstances, and for a very lengthy period of time. In less than a week the sun would vanish, and the proper observing would begin. Say we chanced upon alien communication (I told myself) – wouldn’t that be something? Might there be a Nobel Prize in it? I couldn’t put all that at risk, even for the satisfaction of punching him on the nose.
Maybe, I told myself, Roy would thaw out a little in a day or two. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, after all. Maybe I could coax the letter out of him.
The week wore itself out. I went through a phase of intense irritation with Roy for his (what seemed to me) immensely petty and immature attitude with regard to my letter. Then I went through a phase when I told myself it didn’t bother me. I did consider returning his tenner to him, so as to retain the high moral ground. But then I thought: ten pound is ten pound.
The week ended, and Diamondo overflew and tossed the supply package out to bounce along the snow. This annoyed me, because I had finally managed to write a letter to Lezlie that explained the situation without making it sound as if I valued her communiques so little I’d gladly sold it off to weirdo Roy. But I couldn’t “post” the letter unless the plane landed and took stuff on board, so I had to hang onto it. I couldn’t even be sure, I reminded myself, that the letter Roy had bought from me had been from her.
On the fifth of July the sun set for the last time until August. The thing people don’t understand about Antarctic night is that it’s not the same level of ink-black all the way through. For the first couple of weeks, the sky lightens twice a day, pretty much bright enough to walk around without a torch – the same dawn and dusk paling of the sky that precedes sunrise and follows sunset, only without actual dawn and dusk. Still, you can sense the sun is just there, on the other side of the horizon, and it’s not too bad. As the weeks go on this gets briefer and darker, and then you do have a month or so when it’s basically coal-coloured skies and
darkness invisible the whole time.
Diamondo landed his plane and tossed out the supply package, but didn’t linger; and by the time I’d put on the minimum of outdoor clothing and grabbed a torch and got through the door he was taking off again – so, once again, I didn’t get to send my letter to Lez.
That was the last time I saw that aircraft.
There were two letters in this week’s batch: one from my old Grammar School headmaster, saying that the school had hosted a whole assembly on the “exciting and important” work I was doing; and the other from my Professor at Reading. This was nothing but a note, and read in its entirety: “Dear A. I often think of Sartre’s words. Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realises its freedom. Where is freer than the very bottom of the world? Nil desperandum! Yours, A.” This, though slightly gnomic, was not out of character for Prof. Addlestone, who had worked on SETI for so long it had made his brain a little funny. No letter from Lez, which worried me. But, after all, she didn’t write every week. I re-read the Professor’s note several times. Did it read like a PS, a scribbled afterthought? Did it perhaps mean that the letter Roy bought had been from Addlestone? Maybe. Maybe not.
We got on with our work, and I tried to put the whole letter business behind me. Roy did not help, as far as this went. He was acting stranger and stranger; simpering at me, and when I queried his expression (‘what? What is it?’) scurrying away – or scowling and saying, “nothing, nothing, only...” and refusing to elaborate.
The next thing was: he moved one of the computer terminals into his room. These were 1980s terminals; not the modern-day computers the size and weight of a copy of Marie-Claire; so it was no mean feat getting the thing in there. He even cut away a portion from the bottom corner of his door, to enable the main cable to come out into the hall and through into the monitor room.
