The Surfacing (41 page)

After lunch, he had them unload another case of ammunition, the second conjuror,
the common sleeping bag.

What do you want us to do with them? Banes said.

Pack it all up properly, he said. Rainproof it as best you can.

I had them hack out a place for it in the side of a broken berg, he wrote, as though
we might collect it on our return.

Afterwards, the load felt no lighter, and throughout the afternoon every few minutes
he was obliged to call a pause. Perhaps it is pretending we might go on as long as
we like, he wrote. I do not know. Even Daly, our hardiest man, today touched his
knee to the ground. He did not complain, but it is plain to see that even he is almost
useless by now. The other men appeared shrunken and wild-eyed. In the evening they
swallowed their meat lump by lump. The useless food. The useless sleep. The relentless
work. Every one of them was under the spell. Morgan could think of no way to rally
them. I can think of no way to rally them, he wrote. They are failing every one.
Today, for the first time, I begin to suspect my own determination, that it is compulsion
more than resolve.

Is anyone out? Cabot said. He was scanning again with the glass, and it had snagged
on something odd. Unseen, Morgan shook his head. In any case, Cabot answered himself,
it is much too little. It is more like a little bear, or even a . . . dwarf. It's
starting to crawl!

Morgan took his turn to look. It was not a young bear, he said. Nor a fox. Nor a
tiny man. He set no store by the sudden shifting. In the end, if studied long enough,
at any
distance everything out here came to life. It was nothing. It was the skewed
optics, and the lack of a frame. Likely just a little bird, he told Cabot. It's gone.
Flown off. Just a trick of the light, he said, and crammed down the glass.

No, Cabot said. It was not nothing. Give it. I know what I saw.

Morgan watched him scouting again. Look long enough, you'll find it, he thought.
It was the distance in-between that was alive.

It's up on its legs! Cabot shouted. It is no furred animal – it walks!

Morgan watched the man rushing and tumbling across the snow. He would have preferred
an easy scorn, at Cabot's easy elation. But it warmed him, to think of the man's
heart – however briefly – flooded with hope, pumping it joyfully through every vessel
and vein. Even to think of it now had his own heart awake. He was jealous, he realized.

He found Cabot's track, and started to follow, but made sure not to run. It was a
lone nomad, perhaps, from some unknown tribe. It was the survivor of a wreck, that
had spotted their boat, their smoke, received one of the many messages sent out from
the ship, and was heading north to find it. It was Franklin himself, or one of Franklin's
men. Come staggering across the ice, sure he was saved.

Halfway out, Morgan stood to lift the glass again. He found Cabot far ahead, queerly
stretched and suspended, then suddenly found the thing that was drawing them on.
It was an elbow-length mitten, perhaps a fur hat, apparently abandoned in the course
of a march. It was warmer now, of course. The man who'd dropped it thought perhaps
he would never need it again. Morgan walked on, calmer. Soon he spotted a square
blue bottle lying on the snow, that Cabot must have rushed past. Then what looked
very like a leather face-guard. It looked like the trail of another party, as worsened
as their own. All at once Morgan felt a rush of pity for those men, for the futility
of their task. For what they must have endured to get here, for all that lay ahead,
and for the
state in which they must face into it. It was as though he were hovering
overhead, immune and uninvolved, looking down. He wanted to admire the hardship,
but merely felt baffled by it.

That evening, back at the boat, Morgan mimicked the version of Cabot he'd seen in
the glass. He made himself taller, and stretched out his arms. He flapped his arms
elegantly, and tried to fly away. Now giant, he said. Now very small.

21st June

The better to husband our strength, he wrote, but did not finish it. He wondered
what decision it was he was trying to obtain, by what roundabout route. Except the
pretence of irritation, he knew no other way to decide. We have now been a full month
in the traces, he wrote, and have used up half of our supplies, the better part of
our patience, and the better part of our strength. Today is Midsummer's Day. It is
a milestone I wish were ahead of me yet. Millstone, he almost wrote. From now on
the sun will every day be a little lower in the sky.

The sail, he wrote. 6 light oars + 1 steering. The mast. He was making a list. It
told him where he still wanted to go. He was no longer reckoning what weight they
could haul, but what weight they could float.

Sledge & Boat & Tackle, he wrote. Guns & Axes. Kettles & Pans. He
totted it all up. TOTAL DEAD WEIGHT. The figure meant nothing. It would have been
too heavy at half as much.

It is impossible to know what to jettison and what to keep,
he wrote. Every object
and instrument seems vital in one or other scenario. Without it, I imagine, we will
be lost.

Again he went through his own affairs, discovered that she'd put her lambswool shawl
in the bottom of his bag – the shawl she'd often used to wrap up the boy, and worn
herself all through the spring. Unfolding it, he woke the smell of her soap, her
hair, and the smell of something else. He lifted it to his face. Deeper down, stale
and sure, was a darker tone – a hint of sweat, perhaps. Perhaps a hint of baby's
shit. He folded the thing over and set it back in his bag. He was not done with those
memories, that calling. They were not done with him.

24th June

Finally, the boat stood at the water's edge. Somehow they managed to slide it in.
They drew it back and held it tight against the ice. DeHaven crawled out and slid
in. He staggered onto a bench, pulled on one of the oars, and pulled the boat out
into the middle of the lead. From the floe, they watched him take hold of his own
hand, flop it up and down as he had so often done with the boy's.

Bye-bye, he sang prettily. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Morgan watched another sack handed across, watched the boat sink another eighth of
an inch. The gunwale was too low. Two more bodies would have put them under, he told
himself. They'd brought too much. Apparently he'd expected them to have consumed
more by now, or to weigh less. Apparently he'd been planning for worse.

They drove themselves forward with the oars and poles, in
the manner of gondoliers.
The lead was filled with rubbish. Then the floes were suddenly closer again. The
sides of the boat began to bump and drag. The faces turned to him. They wanted to
know what to do, where to go.

By morning the lead had closed over completely. The banks were slowly sliding past,
wearing each other smooth, as though to make a better fit. After breakfast, Morgan
went to the edge to judge their prospects. What he saw was a chastening. Had they
not drawn up onto the floe the night before, the boat would have been crushed like
an egg.

They hauled the boat to the floe's southern edge, where they completely unloaded
it. They then lowered the boat into the lead as best they knew how. Then they loaded
it up again. Twenty yards farther, they passed every one of the packages up onto
the ice once more, and crawled up out of the boat, and drew up the ropes, and hauled
the boat up after them onto the neighbouring floe. Gain: one eighth of an English
mile.

The first flakes of snow trickled idly through the air. In the southeast was a bruise-blue
sky. They sat in the boat, under the cover, all the rest of the day. They played
whist. They read
The Vicar of Wakefield
, again. They asked Cabot to tell them about
France, the French. He told them of his days as a furniture-maker, as a
compagnon
.
They listed the names of the prophets, the names of their children, the cities of
India. They recited lavish menus. With great solemnity and ornament, like
seanchaidhthe
,
they described the women they'd known. Like men turning puppets, they mocked their
own efforts with their hands. After dinner, as much for distraction as anything else,
Morgan asked Cabot to cut his hair.

30th June

The weather was clear. He felt it an omen. It was noon. He took his latitude, got
78°02', and did not double-check his calculations for fear it might be worse. He
wrote the figure down. It was nothing but the scratch of a pen, and official confirmation
that all the heartbreak of the past fortnight had been for nought. That even as they
advanced, the very ground they were hauling over was moving under them, invisibly
and silently, carrying them backward, north.

That afternoon: four hours, one crack. Not a man refused to participate in the farce.
They were beyond that now. Outlook unimproved, he wrote. There is not the slightest
prospect of navigation without the proper wind to clear us a way.

They drifted uselessly in the trash. Not enough like water to let them row. Not enough
like a floe to sledge the boat. They sat in total silence for hours at a time. All
around, the ceaseless rattle of thaw-water feeding the sea. Occasionally someone
gave another useless pull on the oars. It was not the days lost per se which vexed
him. It was the provisions swallowed without return. It was the counting down. It
was the earth's orbit about the sun.

On the 1st they had a good day, with several wide floes and long leads, and covered
almost two miles, he judged. Then all night and all the next morning, it blew hard
and steady from the south. To the naked eye the world held its ground, with the wind
as mere dressing, but his noon observations put them markedly closer to the ship
than before.

With what must have looked from any distance like unshakeable purpose, they hauled
their whaleboat to the edge, unloaded it, roped it up coffin-like, carefully let
it down, clambered in as best they could, loaded it up again, rowed the few yards
to the edge opposite.

They waded through the sweet-water lakes now with little complaint. It was July.
I now make my observations with fear
in my heart, he wrote. It is reading a judgement.
I have said nothing yet to the men of our Sisyphean task. He was afraid even to write
the figure alongside yesterday's, to compare. For the moment he preferred to keep
it inside his head, where nothing was ever quite as definite as it would be elsewhere.

They lay in the boat, talking about nothing and everything. They watched DeHaven
tamp a sprig into the bowl of his pipe. Soon he was smoking happily. His rivals watched
and breathed in silence, craving those sly delights. They had long since smoked all
of their own. He made no effort to hide his pleasure, and afterwards they seemed
to show him a greater deference, in almost everything.

Today the shadows were sheet metal. The sky was definitely blue. The ice lay flat
to the horizon, sparkling, like a vast salt lake. In the cracks, the water was molten
lead. In the distance, the leads looked wide enough to navigate.

What we need is a steamer, DeHaven said.

Cabot! Morgan shouted. Did you pack the steamer like I told you to?

After what passed for breakfast, they lifted the oars. They rolled and pulled, one
single stroke. They rolled and pulled, once more. Outside it was floating ice and
freezing water. It was a forgotten kingdom, a watercolour sky over thickened scraps
of ocean, and at the back of the boat a sad Frenchman bailing, bailing, bailing incessantly.
They were under siege. Everything was dwindling. Their stunted imaginations, their
natural strength, their patience. Ambition and anxiety had given way to bored misery.

He listened to them bickering again. As usual, it was someone else's turn to bury
the slops, to lard the tarp, to pick lice. Every day without fail, someone was conned
out of an ounce of bread. Today, Banes had cut Cabot's string instead of unravelling
it. That was the grief. His excuse, that the thing was not possible – what he'd done
fifty times before. His fingers were numb, he said, lying there in his shirtsleeves.
The knot was too tight.

There was a time, Morgan wrote, when I obliged myself always to make the peace. Now
I let them concoct their grudges and flourish them. Previously, I feared they might
come to blows, and that nothing could be worse. Now, between Cabot and Banes, I am
merely curious to see how they go about the thing. They can kill each other for all
I care.

6th July

They parked up a whole day to parch their bread. The daily traffic had by now fairly
ground it down. They scattered the crumbs over the sail, and stood guard, in case
the wind rose or the gulls got bold.

Baa, baa, baa, Tommy had taught them. It was his latest, favourite bird-call. He
opened his mouth as wide as he possibly could. He was as proud as a young drunkard.
Baa, baa, baa, he said grandly. Baa, baa, baa, echoed all the ventriloquists now,
as the gulls came down. The memory was sickening. All in a rush, Morgan felt tears
welling in the pipes.

Do you feel that? DeHaven asked.

What? Morgan said.

The wind. The air.

What about it?

It's definitely warmer. That's air has passed over open water.

Morgan insisted he felt nothing, no difference, but it did not matter what he felt.
His instruments did not lie, and his instruments that day put them back at 78°03'.
The plot had been perfectly devised. They could not win.

By the boat, Cabot was shaving the last of the meat from their last bear hock. Beside
him, the men had piked oars askew in the fleshy ice, to rig clothes-lines for damp
smalls and socks. One by one, Cabot draped his long wafer-thin strips amongst them,
in full face of the sun. The men sat underneath, propped against the bales in their
shirtsleeves, to themselves soak up a little heat.