The Survivor (33 page)

“Stay here, both of you,” the lieutenant told Abrams and Hammond. The two men glanced at each other, ill-met jailers. “Have yourself a rest, sir.”

“Listen,” Ramsey insisted and closed his eyes. Four strangers, he thought, three of them foreign sailors, the fourth with nothing to recommend him. Not the audience he had dreaded in dreams in which he had made ultimate confessions. “We ate Leeming, Lloyd and I. You can't dig him up. For that reason.”

Ramsey shut his eyes and listened to their four long silences, the judgment of foreigners. He let tears squeeze out through tight lids. He heard the lieutenant say, “I want to speak to Mr Ramsey. This is not to get round. If I hear any talk of this.…”

Ramsey did not open his eyes. “You stay, Hammond. Scoop.…”

“We'll see about that, Mr Hammond,” said the officer. “We have a public-relations man in Christchurch.”

As always, Hammond rushed to prove himself a man governed by ethics, no intransigent newshound. “I assure you, Lieutenant, it isn't the sort of news I revel in writing.”

“Mr Ramsey, does the widow know?”

“You tell her if you like. But now you can't haul the poor bastard up, can you?”

Without warning he opened his eyes in order to catch them abhorring him discreetly. They seemed to stand relaxedly as he sat. They could not know his sense of release at having spoken most truthfully.

“Are you telling me you actually … you were forced to eat Leeming?”

“I've already said it. We ate of Leeming.” But he had not meant to intrude that
of
, an echo of the drunken poet and of communion services.

“
Of
Leeming? What in the name of suffering Christ is the difference?”

“I'm sorry. We ate him.” How hollow it sounded to repeat. “I won't ruin the simplicity by restating or giving details.”

“Pshew!” the lieutenant softly emitted. He thought talk of ruining the simplicity of a statement quaint beside what had been done to Leeming.

“Now you'd better fill in the pit, confess Leeming unfound. You'd better.”

“To save your embarrassment?”

Ramsey was delighted; the lieutenant was gloriously unsympathetic towards cannibals.

“To save yours. I've got this instinct that your people will want to be discreet. Think of the danger for Mrs Leeming, who's seventy-nine.”

“And who is actually waiting out there,” the lieutenant reminded himself.

“This holds things up, doesn't it?” Ramsey wanted to verify.

“Come now,” said Hammond.

“Hammond, stay with Mr Ramsey. I'll leave Abrams outside.”

Almost gone, the officer poked his head back round the jamb of the inner door. “But they've found something there. You didn't eat all of him?”

“I won't descend to details,” said Ramsey.

The lieutenant's revulsed brown face vanished.

For a start, Hammond sat opposite Ramsey and avoided his eyes. His responses to the confession were far more ambiguous than the lieutenant's.

Ramsey spoke first. “Thank God,” he said, “that when I came to say what had to be said I wasn't among friends.”

“We're your friends, Alec,” Hammond muttered, to humour the patient.

“My point is that friends are mentally lazy. They're used to considering you the way they're used to considering you. They fight news such as this. They'd rather risk being robbed—or eaten—by you than make the mental adjustment necessary to believe you were a thief or … the other.”

Again Hammond rushed to assent. Friends
were
often mentally lazy.

Then there was silence, succeeded by Hammond humming a few bars of grand opera.

“They won't bring him up now,” Ramsey interjected. “I can tell by instinct. I can tell they don't want any dubious relics of the classic era.” He added with irony, “To which Leeming and Lloyd and I belong.”

“You'd be in a better position than I am,” Hammond conceded, “to decide what they'll do.”

“You're welcome to print that, incidentally. Print what I told you. Once the news is out, the width of circulation won't particularly worry me.”

Puzzling it out, Hammond shook his head.

“I don't understand that. You've told the lieutenant this dreadful thing to ensure he'll fill the pit in, so that no one will know how Leeming has been … treated. Yet you tell me to feel free to print the facts.”

“It
would
be hard for an outsider to understand,” Ramsey agreed. “You see, I don't want him brought up, exposed. To those silly cameras, for example.”

“But what you tell me to print exposes him.”

“Does it? I don't know. I don't want him dragged up, that's all. I don't want him vulgarly displayed.”

“Are you sure you're right, that they won't
vulgarly display
him in any case. They don't have to tell anyone about the actual state of what they find.”

“Except it would get out. Via Sailmaker's Mate Class III Kaminsky. Or me. I'd tell even your friends outside. Didn't I make that clear to the lieutenant?”

“So if they do as you say, the safe thing, to avoid a scandal and to save the widow pain—”

“The widow feels as much pain as a gasometer.”

“—you still want
me
to cause pain and scandal?”

“Who do you feel responsible to? The U.S. press officer in Christchurch or your vast, warm-hearted public? All I said was, you're free to.” But, in exaltation, he felt how his well-being would be increased beyond measure by hearing a clinical edge of judgment in the voices of broadcasters he had never met.

Meanwhile, Hammond still seemed bent on catering to Ramsey's madness with debate.

“Alec, I consider that sort of thing professionally very odious.”

“You must do what you think is right.”

“I don't think it's right to say that sort of thing. Not after all this time.”

Ramsey laughed. He could tease without bitterness now. He said, “I was raised on cautionary tales about the way journalists welcomed reports of depravity. Are all of them soulful like you? Or am I simply unlucky?”

“Unlucky?”

“Yes. To be landed with a rare moral newshound.”

Hammond blinked and said with a disturbing dignity, “I know as well as you do how little good is served by telling news like this to a world already glutted with the morbid and the grotesque.”

“You think I told you out of philanthropy? It belongs to the class of things that have to be said.”

“To us, perhaps. But not the whole damned world.”

“To anyone who'll listen.”

Ramsey continued placid and alleviated by means of this triumphant transference of truth from his guts to the public media. A quiet need of Ella's presence rose in him.

Telepathically, Hammond asked, “Does your wife know? She'd be badly affected if this got out.”

“Not much. She's a kind of primitive. An absolutist, I'm always calling her. She'll say something like, ‘So that's what's been fretting you?' You see, she thinks it's herself that has been the source of my angst. She'll be relieved, and she's built for loyalty. She'll no more question or judge me than the womb questions whether it's carrying a thief or a rapist, a monster or gallows-fruit.”

He saw Hammond blink in a way that hinted how the confession had begun to spur his imagination. A wary excitement had arisen.

“Have you said this to make fools of us?”

There was suddenly toughness behind the man's finicking lack of humour. The potential newsworthiness of Ramsey's confession had made him advert to the hard facts of his trade. “It isn't my sort of material. Oh, I could get away with printing it. Even if you were certified a week later, I could still plead the public interest. But to what extent are you what is called a reliable source?” Hammond raised and laid down a hand, as if passing the hideous scoop back to Ramsey. “I've told you the sort of work I specialize in. I don't need this to make me feel professional.”

Alec mauled his jaw, the tip of which still felt like a tiny capsule of polar cold. “Too many Adelaide Festivals have made a humanist out of you. NPA would give you a good swift kick for thinking the way you do.”

Above clasped hands, his eyes lowered, Hammond undertook to order their intentions. “Think very seriously about this, Alec. If what you say is true, and if you still want what you say you do, write out a statement, sign and date it.”

“What date would you like? Today's?”

“Any, any,” Hammond told him. He seemed to feel a shamed urgency to quit the subject.

There was a long silence. Hammond read the label on a bottle of sauce. The exercise seemed to take a long time.

“I'm going back to the pit,” said Ramsey in the end.

“They won't let you.”

“But we're not subject to
them
,” He began to pull his mitts on, and his hood about his ears.

“Alec, for God's sake …!”

Ramsey walked out, Hammond trailing him uncertainly along the far side of the table. Abrams had vanished from the glare outside. Perhaps his large tender hands were needed at the pit. But then, Ramsey thought, why should that be so? Unless that fool of an officer had a lifting job on hand.

He walked across the uneven ice. He could see four red pennants, apparently disembodied, flapping on a white ground. As he hurried, brown figures shook off the ice-dazzle and were visible. The winch pulsed. From the ice it drew a burden strapped to a stretcher. When clear of the pit, the load began to spin crazily, four or five turns one way, three or four the other, and then lay still, though twisting in a slow arc.

Ramsey shaded his eyes, saying, “There it is. There it actually is. On the end of a hook.”

It was not a large bundle, and swung absolutely passive on a hook, a concrete, a veritable hook. Ramsey's head hissed like a hive. But all he could think of was the passivity of the corpse, the tawdry quality of its resurrection. “What did you expect, after all?” he asked himself. His mind had expected nothing more than the sad resurgence he now saw. His belly had always expected grandeur and an active rising. And with this verification of mind over belly, he received further insights. He remembered what the poet had said, some days before: that he had needed a wronged and majestic god and had made one, to his soul's balance, out of Leeming.

As the bundle eked a slow semi-circle above the heads of the people Ramsey saw how he had based his world on guilt for the quite transcendent wrongs done against Leeming. But now the ordinariness of the bundle spurred him to acknowledge the ordinariness of Leeming and the pedestrian nature of his sins against Leeming. Ramsey was so angered at the years he had wasted on shame that a demand rose in him to tear his own flesh. Because of this compulsion, he turned to Hammond.

“Help me,” he said. “I think I'm going mad.”

Yet he did not wait for help, but ran to the pit. He wished to be sure, at close range, of the pitiable nature of that brown burden. In its harrowed brown texture and its utter passivity lay an absolution for Ramsey.

Without warning, Abrams stepped out from behind the winch.

“Sorry Mr Ramsey, the lieutenant told me to stop you.”

His fist struck Ramsey's cheek with an amazing impact. There was a roar as when a train enters a tunnel. On his back, Alec fought to keep the view he had of the stretcher clear of the blues and yellows of the blow. Before sleeping, he tried to explain how he had merely been trying to prove his mind's word to his guts, that there was nothing wrong with his mind.

He slept. Somewhere warm, he opened his eyes to a fearful noise and shut them again. His head throbbed, and he felt an instant's acute unhappiness, as if he wondered how he would fill in the years remaining, now that he had lost his reasons for expiation.

It was such a conventional hospital he woke to that he believed himself to be back in Christchurch or perhaps never to have left it. By the door, though, sat Hammond in layered trousers and coats and stockinged feet. Ramsey winced without sound or movement, lying doggo. Waking to Hammond, he thought. Mrs Hammond did it daily, except during cultural events.

As it was, Hammond had seen the twitch of eyebrows, and moved to the bed.

“How are you, Alec?”

I am different, Ramsey told himself. The mad dynamo of his belly was still. There was nothing to worry about, and nothing to threaten. He was a bemused vacancy, as if he had existed only in relation to the
ice-bound
Leeming.

He raised his head. His skull ballooned with pain; bile rushed into his mouth. The fierce effects of Abrams' strong arm. Ramsey subsided and asked at last, “Is it night yet?”

Hammond smiled, sly in his knowledge of time gone. “Daytime-nighttime.” He implied a vigil of supreme length.

“The same day, is it?”

“Oh yes, the same day. Some day you must tell me what it was all about.”

“What what was all about?”

“Your claims about Leeming.”

“Oh Christ! Must I? Why must I?”

“They have Leeming in a room here.”

Ramsey was merely angry with Hammond for being so blunt with a sick person. Perhaps he was under orders to be blunt, a sort of home-psychiatry suggested by the McMurdo surgeon.

Ramsey kept cool. He dryly thought how immune to the impact of past resurrections the bulk of humanity seemed.

“Leeming's been thawed out of his bag. He's entire. Absolutely entire. What were you trying to do?”

“Don't be such a nagging bastard,” Ramsey advised the newsman.

“I have the doctor's word for it. And they're letting Belle identify him.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“She insists. A mighty old woman, that one! They can't very well stop her. She's his wife.”

Ramsey muttered, “People should have more consistently realized that. She should have herself.”