Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  I wish I could describe this place to you as well as I should like. A haze hides the mountains to our west, so that we might as well be back on the plateau. Before us there is nothing but a level plain of sastrugi covering the Ice Barrier, some of them like ripples on the sea, others bent back on themselves like four-foot waves that froze while breaking. The sun never sets but only circles us constantly, staring at us through the canvas when we try to sleep at night. I should not say ‘night’, for it only makes me long for one. Even the blizzards don’t relieve us from the glare.

  Tell old Jane Atkinson I send him my love, and Cherry of course. I hope that Birdie will make it back to join you all in the Tenements, though if he does it will be a fine-run thing. He and Wilson and Scott aren’t much stronger than I am, though at least they can still walk.

  Please consider my revolver a permanent gift. I can’t think why you wanted to borrow it for your homeward journey: what anyone would want with your rocks and maps and chronometer I cannot imagine. Working for Room 38 must be very romantic. I should have enjoyed the fur trade, I think – all those wonderful secrets to keep.

  Tomorrow is Saint Patrick’s day, and also my birthday. I recollect that you yourself were born in Kilkenny. When Saint Patrick’s day next comes around again, pour a whisky for him and another for me, and remember our toast in the Tenements: Down with science, sentiment, and the fair sex!

  L.E.G. Oates

  Part Five

  Meares Island

  49º10’N 125º50’W

  Inuvik, North West Territories

  The curtains were closed and the light that oozed through them, the sodium glare from the parking-lot floodlights, leached all the colour from the ceiling and walls. It fell across the carpet, turning scattered clothing into islands of a sea. The ribbed back of a chair threw a grid-shaped shadow. To Fay, lying on her side, the room looked cold and distant, but the air was warm against her bare shoulder.

  By day Bert’s carpet was beige, she remembered. Or rather, it was beige in the light of the bulb in the ceiling. She had never seen the apartment in daylight, and there wouldn’t be any daylight today. But she couldn’t sleep, and she had a bad headache and the rasp of cigarettes in her throat. She was still a little drunk, she knew; her headache would get worse.

  She felt his breathing change. He turned on his side, put an arm around her and pulled her back against him.

  I should have sneaked away earlier.

  She cleared her throat painfully. She needed to speak before he did, to set a hard, jolly tone before he could embarrass them.

  ‘Do you think Mike got off with that girl Rose?’

  His voice was muffled by her shoulder. ‘I doubt it. She’s his niece.’

  Fay listened to the sounds of a new day outside the apartment. Engines coughed in the parking lot. Footsteps crunched in new snow. A door crashed open in the corridor, in the limbo outside the apartment, and a man and woman came through it, muttering together in slow tired voices, feet dragging on the carpet. They passed through the swing doors and ceased to exist. The light in the window didn’t change.

  ‘We should get up,’ she said finally. ‘I have to check out of my room today. It’s booked for someone else.’

  ‘Oh . . . Where will you go?’

  She didn’t answer him. Lying as they did she couldn’t see his face. And she thought: What else is there outside this room? But she had called him a loser, called him a liar, and then she got drunk and danced with him, and after that, this. It made it hard for her to look at herself, much less at him, and in fact she hadn’t turned to face him in all the time she had lain there since she’d woken.

  I really ought to look at him, to give the poor bastard his due.

  She eased herself onto her back. The bed was so small that her left buttock lay half over his right hip. His right arm was still underneath her. It was uncomfortable for both of them but she had no right to expect him to move. She turned her head and looked at him. His face was only inches from hers. They had kissed in the taxi. She remembered the taste.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I made a mistake.’ She saw the hurt on his face and added quickly: ‘I mean, about your brother, and all the rest of it.’

  His face relaxed, and she hardened her heart again. You don’t understand, she wanted to tell him. We really shouldn’t have done this. I really do have to go.

  ‘No one could blame you,’ he said. ‘You found your grandfather’s name on my brother’s desk. That’s a long-shot coincidence.’

  You don’t know the half of it, mate. You don’t know the part about my grandfather’s clock. You don’t even know that I’m dead.

  Maybe I should trust him. Maybe I should tell him everything. God knows he has things of his own to be scared of: including me, if he has any sense.

  The door into the sitting room was open. Without moving her head she could see the dark shapes of the books and folders piled on the desk, the rectangular screen of the laptop. What else was lying in wait for her there?

  You’re almost broke. He has an apartment. He has a desk full of questions and answers. He has the internet and central heating. But if you tell him any more of your secrets he’ll probably get scared and kick you right out of here.

  ‘It’s probably just chance.’ She was glad she didn’t have to look at him. ‘Like Mike said: your brother and my grandfather both worked in the Arctic. They were both Canadians. They both had something to do with map-making . . . And if you look at the maps of the Arctic, and Antarctic too, you’ll see the same people’s names repeated over and over again. And most of those people were connected to each other. Maybe stories converge at the poles. Like the lines on the map.’ He said nothing. If I don’t know what I’m bullshitting about, how should he? ‘What I’m saying is it doesn’t matter. Stranger things happen . . . Anyway, I have to leave town now. I don’t have anywhere to stay.’

  She waited. He retrieved his right arm from beneath her and turned on his back, shielding his eyes with the back of his hand. Now that both his shoulders were on the mattress she was pushed half over the edge of the bed. She ought to turn onto her side, either facing him or facing away. Instead, she drew the comforter up to her chin. The cold air welled up under it where she overhung the bed.

  ‘You know,’ he said, still shielding his eyes, ‘you could always stay here. Until you fly out.’

  She became so still that it hurt. She shouldn’t do this to him. But she had no money and nowhere to go.

  There was a little strand of cobweb on the ceiling, near the cord of the unlit bulb. She could only see it when it moved in the current from the heating vent. She fixed her eyes on it, as if it could anchor her.

  ‘No obligations,’ he said. ‘It’s just somewhere to stay if you need it.’

  Does he really mean that? ‘I thought you had to tell the police about your brother.’

  ‘I can wait until you’re gone. Another day won’t make any difference.’

  ‘What will you do after that?’

  ‘I have that job interview down in Whitehorse.’

  She was grateful for his lie. It was something she could forgive him for, and she needed the trade: she’d be needing some forgiveness for herself.

  ‘You could look through some more of Bert’s stuff.’

  ‘Yeah?’ She was careful not to sound too interested.

  ‘Only if you want to . . . I guess you’re probably right about him. It’s probably just a coincidence. And Bert was crazy anyway.’

  ‘He could still turn up here.’

  ‘He’d have some explaining to do.’

  She yawned quite deliberately, to give herself a cue. ‘That book,’ she said casually, ‘the one that girl gave you last night. Was that Bert’s?’

  He had to think about that. ‘Book? . . . He left it at her place last time he stayed there. It was about two old expl
orer guys. Apparently Bert said it was very important to whatever he was doing.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll take a look at it. While we have time . . . You still want to know what your brother was doing, right?’

  ‘I guess. Why not . . . Though what does it matter now?’

  I could tell him, she thought. I could tell him how much it matters to me, Hugh Morgan’s granddaughter. But she’d had that chance already, and she’d already let it pass.

  Victoria, British Columbia, 1919

  When Hughie Morgan turned twelve his foster-parents gave him a bicycle. It was a full-frame black CCM touring bike, one of the last to be built in the Vancouver workshop. Although bought second-hand it was as good as new; the first owner, a soldier returned from the North Russia Intervention, had brought the ‘Spanish Lady’ back from Murmansk: overcome by the ’flu, he fainted right outside the bicycle store and never rode it once.

  Hughie’s birthday fell on a Sunday that year so he had to wait another day for his first proper go on the bicycle. The saddle was set much too high for him; even after Jim Morgan took a wrench to it Hughie could barely reach the pedals with his toes. He was still a small boy, slow to grow, a little stout maybe, and prone to asthma in the mild Vancouver Island winters. But Annie and Jim hoped he would grow into his gift.

  The next day – it being the school holidays – Annie Morgan made him sandwiches and a flask of tea and sent him off on his first lonely cycle trip. Jim and Annie stood together in the door of their little clapboard house in Fairfield and waved to him gamely as he wobbled off down the road. When he was gone they turned to each other and tried to smile. Their claim to the child had always felt tenuous, and as Hugh vanished round the corner they understood that they were teaching themselves to say goodbye. They didn’t see him crash into a brewer’s dray, remount and cycle off again, while the driver waved his whip and yelled curse words at his back. The scrapes and bruises didn’t bother him. The bicycle was made of strong steel tubes with heavy chrome wheel rims: it could also take a bashing. He was gliding alone through the air.

  His road took him south and west out of town to the naval port at Esquimalt. There he halted by the harbour and searched for the vessels of the Royal Navy’s Pacific Squadron. There was only one, an elderly destroyer alongside the coaling quay. A keen reader of boys’ newspapers, Hughie could see at a glance that this wasn’t much of a warship: unfashionably spindly, almost Gothic in its lines, it had only two funnels – not enough for it to be a modern steam-turbine job – and its puny forward deck gun had no turret to encase it. Good enough for the eastern Pacific, Hughie thought scornfully. Real adventures happened elsewhere, far beyond the sheltered waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

  A team of sailors worked with shovels on the quay beside the old destroyer, their denims black with dust. A crane rose and dipped from a stokehold amidships. Hughie had been standing there for a minute or two, maybe more, staring at the sea beyond the Royal Roads, when he noticed that the sailors were going the wrong way about their work. They were moving the coal from the ship to the quay. And then he understood: it’s all up with that old tub over there. She’s being decommissioned. She’ll be broken up for scrap, or towed out to sea and used for target practice. And with that his mood reversed, and he felt an aching need to say goodbye to the rusty old destroyer. He didn’t know her name, and he would never see her again. The naval docks were closed to civilians (quite properly, he thought: there might still be Hun fifth columnists bent on rekindling the war) so had to say goodbye to her from here. If he could only know and say her name. But the ship was too far away for him to read the letters on her rail. He watched for a little while longer, then remounted his bike and rode on.

  For the rest of his life Hughie Morgan would believe that this unremarkable little day trip had been his great turning point, his first leap into the unknown. He was only half right about this: his first great journey had in fact been made several years earlier, just after he’d learned to walk, when the incarnation of all warmth and love in the universe, sad grey eyes and a shabby red coat, had sent him toddling down the path of the Methodist mission in Victoria. Having achieved his task, he had proudly turned around to look for her approval, only to find she was gone. But he had long since lost hold of that memory: that doomed old destroyer was only the first in a series of messengers which came in disguise and never quite got through to him.

  The bicycle was second-hand but it wasn’t free. After the war came the slump, when Jim Morgan could no longer count on full-time work in the gardens of Vancouver Island. Nothing was said, but young Hugh understood and he needed no encouragement. The Canadian Pacific Telegraph office was looking for part-time messenger boys, own bicycle required. Hughie was still a bit young for the job but Jim knew the chief clerk from chapel. With Hughie’s agreement he had a word.

  Hughie’s new uniform consisted of a peaked officer’s cap with a Canadian Pacific hat band, twill trousers, and a blue brass-buttoned jacket with pockets for notebooks and pencils and change. Leather gaiters sat over the tops of his boots, protecting his trousers from the bicycle chain. The trousers themselves were cut wide at the thigh and narrow below the knee, cavalry-fashion, and during his first weeks on the job he would often manage to catch sight of himself in the plate-glass front of the telegraph office. It might have been the cut of the uniform, or maybe some distortion in the set of the glass, but in that window he looked fitter and thinner. And very soon he really did: the war was over but the Great Influenza had taken up the slack, and for his first few months on the job there was plenty of sombre telegram traffic, both civilian and military, to keep him in the saddle for most of each shift.

  Eventually the last men straggled home from the loose ends of war in Russia and Mesopotamia. The influenza burned itself out. Money was still short, and businesses were folding. But the office still had to keep several boys on standby in their bare wooden cubby at the back of the counter. At first, Hughie tried to pass the time with his reading – true adventures, mostly, and popular science magazines and tales of exploration – but the other boys were rowdy and refused to let him be. They were older than him, and most of them bigger, and he had to put up with their teasing and pranks. And by the time he was sixteen, and too senior to mess with, he had found something better to do at work than read books: his boss Sandy Rees, who had taken a liking to him, was teaching him Morse.

  Hugh’s sessions at the key came in the slack times, when the telegraph clerks went outside to smoke. At first Hughie was confined to the bush wires, the lines to sub-offices on Vancouver Island. Slowly at first, and then with increasing fluency, he learned to pound the brass, sending and receiving between Victoria and its outstations at Esquimalt and Nanaimo and points further north. Soon, he could easily do thirty-five words per minute, racing against his rivals in the bush offices. Each sender had their own accent or ‘fist’, and he learned them all by ear.

  Officially, Hughie was still a mere messenger, though he spent less and less time on his bike. One day the provincial manager came on the line from Vancouver to ask the name of the clerk in Victoria with the beautiful clear fist. Two days later Hughie was offered a full-time job as a telegraph clerk first-class, skipping the training grade. He went home and told Jim and Annie Morgan, knowing that they could use the extra cash. But they asked him to say no: he was, they pointed out, doing very well at school, and might even win the scholarship that would get him into college. And besides – though they didn’t say it, though they all understood – if Hughie signed up full-time the company would send him away from them, to one of the tiny two-person bush stations that were spreading across the forests and the prairies. He himself wouldn’t have minded: Victoria felt small. But he was a dutiful son, and he obeyed his parents.

  Rees said he understood and congratulated him on his ambition. But Hughie thought he detected disappointment, maybe even resentment, in his boss. And his suspicions increased the next day when –
on a raw mid-February afternoon – Rees yanked him off the Morse key and – despite the presence in the office of two other idle messengers – sent him on his bike to the Angela Hotel.

  Old Captain Rant, who owned and ran the Angela Hotel, was a fanatical gardener who would allow nothing to spoil the perfection of his grounds – not even the temporary intrusion of a delivery bike. Hugh propped a pedal on the kerb outside the gate then looked around for suspicious characters: thefts were not unknown, even here on wealthy Burdett Avenue. But there was no one on the street, just a distant automobile hissing through puddles. A cold wind from the mainland tossed the crowns of the trees, showering him with drops.

  The Angela was one of the oldest and largest buildings in this old and wealthy neighbourhood, solid red brick with tall Gothic windows and a spike-roofed tower in the front. The main door was in the base of the tower, under a new porte cochère with brick and steel pillars, a nod to the rise of the automobile. Hugh paused in its shelter to shake the rain from his cape. Then – as telegraph boys were privileged to enter by the front, so that guests could observe their arrival – he pushed the door and went inside.

  The lobby was warm and brightly lit. There was a fire in the hearth, and winter flowers stood in jars around the walls. A man and a woman, evidently guests, sat behind newspapers in cane chairs by the fire. Hugh smelled pipe-smoke and pine.

  He waited dutifully in the doorway, stamping his wet boots. When neither guest reacted he started towards the office – the Angela was a residential hotel, catering to long-term guests and the more sedate class of tourist, and Captain Rant saw no need for a vulgar desk out front. Hugh heard the rustle of a newspaper.